[Aztlan] Calcos? Calque?

[Galen Brokaw]

Hi Nick,
First, let me just say that I will be the first to admit that I never 
really know what I am doing. :-)
But in any case, I was not advocating the use of Nahuatl neologisms. I 
was merely responding to David Becraft's query; and in fact, I was 
expressing my reservations about the formulation of such terms for his 
project. I agree that if you are going to try to introduce the use of 
Nahuatl neologisms for actual use (as opposed to merely a linguistic 
exercise), you should probably consult native Nahuatl speakers, if for 
no other reason because they will have a much better intuitive sense of 
what makes a good word.
The point that I would make with regard to David's project is that the 
only reason for coming up with such neologisms is if you were going to 
be using these terms in Nahuatl discourse, as is the case with John 
Sullivan's project which Michael mentioned.
David, if I understand you correctly, it seems that you merely want to 
substitute Greek-derived English terms such as logography with Nahuatl 
neologisms while conserving the meaning of the original terms. I'm not 
sure how "logography" or any of the other terms in your list are any 
different than "glyph," "pictograph", or "ideograph," which you reject 
for being ethnocentric. And creating a Nahuatl term for the concepts 
conveyed by these words does not automatically alter their ethnocentric 
nature.
Furthermore, if your goal is, as I think you were saying, to understand 
Mesoamerican writing as Mesoamericans understood it, then you shouldn't 
need any neologisms at all. As far as I know, the closest thing to Nahua 
linguistic theory focuses on the level of discourses such as 
"huehuetlahtolli." With regard to writing, you have to suspect that 
there was a discourse involved in the training of tlacuilos and the 
creation of painted books, but I don't know of any colonial texts that 
report on that kind of thing in any detail (which doesn't necessarily 
mean there aren't any). Whatever terms were used in that context, I 
doubt they involved concepts such as semasiography, logography, 
phonography, etc. The theory in which these modern semiotic concepts 
emerge is derivative of the particular relationship between language and 
alphabetic writing, which is another way of saying that they are 
ethnocentric. So if you are going to talk about indigenous writing using 
those concepts, regardless of whether or not you translate them into 
Nahuatl neologisms, you are going to be susceptible to accusations of 
ethnocentrism. This doesn't mean that such concepts do not illuminate 
the nature of Mesoamerican writing systems from the particular 
theoretical perspective to which they belong. They just don't 
necessarily help in understanding the way in which Mesoamericans 
themselves actually conceived of their writing systems. In other words, 
the criticism against using foreign concepts in the analysis of another 
culture is more an issue of ethical appropriateness than of analytical 
validity.

Galen





Nick Hopkins wrote:
> Galen-- Maybe you know what you are doing, but having worked in Nahuatl 
> communities doing research on language, I know they can be extremely 
> sensitive about issues of what amounts to intellectual property, and I 
> suggest you elicit the neologisms from speakers rather than making them 
> up yourself.
> 
> Nick Hopkins
> 
> 
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