[Aztlan] question on Spanish/Nahuatl "language"

[John Pastore]

Sharon Peters posted:

"I am in the midst of a research project on so-called "Spanglish," especially
as spoken here in Texas and the rest of the Southwest and California ...
and, to some extent along both sides of the Frontera...

What a lot of authors are writing about are the lexical borrowings and
hispanicized English words or Spanish borrowrings, and they are not
addressing the code-switching aspect where entire phrases are mixed
together, usually around coordinating conjunctions, subordinations, etc..."

Allow me to relate from personal experience:

Without books or formal study, for years in Mexico I would learn rudimentary Spanish by simply 

having to. It was difficult and not merely for, in Cancun, almost everyone insisting to converse 

with me in English, so as to practice English for the future 'immigration' also being instructed in Cancun, but even more so because their invariably immediate exclamations on just how "awful my 

Spanish was" followed by the inevitable refrain, no matter how juvenile also, "Spanish is more 

beautiful than English."

I was constantly using what Spanish vocabulary I would learn within English constructions and 

even in the present tense; and, for the sheer lack of sufficient adjectives and adverbs in Spanish, I too would depend on the use of not only preposional phrases but also prepostional phrases prepostioning prepositional phrases.

With the limited vocabulary I had, and still, I would also invent word combinations for especially those phrases that, though understood, would incite more of the same criticism. Given that I always strive to improve whatever I encounter, I would even invent adjectives and adverbs, new to Spanish-speakers, but understood, based on latin-rooted English and approriate Spanish prefixes and suffixes.

With verbs, I would simply remain in the present tense and refer to the future using the 

qualifier "ir," to go, and, for the past, tack at the end of the sentance the prepositional 

phrase "en el passado" and, in both cases, along with some unique body language.


Their criticism however contained an ovreall element I found most objectionable: they were 

demanding absolute authority.

Such subservience to authority as that of a mere dictionary and such subservience to the very 

will for the authority by their own Spanish teachers who had as obviously been instructed 

similarly.

Aside from my reaction to the subserviance demanded, I would also object to just how stifling the authority was to Spanish itself---so inflexible to result in a form of a Spanish as long past as Elizabethean English is to modern English (ex: "oye" = "hear ye).

They would also be highly critical for even the non-comformity of my accent. I would, as I still 

do, speak my Spanish as I do English, with a heavy New York brogue---having eventually to take 

the criticisms as an attack on even my very personality and my politely even saying so.

Given that you are writing a "history," you may also wish to know that rather than counter the 

never ending criticsim with "No one helps me practice my Spanish," "Well, that's just me," or 

even "I must just be stupid," I invented a new word.

I started telling everyone that I am not speaking Spanish. They would ask: "Then What are you 

speaking?" "Italian"? "Portugese? 

I would tell them "No. I am speaking Spanglish" and describe the intermix.

All were stunned. Most for my having converted, to them, Spanish to a somehow insulting bastardized Spanish but to particulary the campesinos and original native language-speakers, being instructed English in Cancun's schools, with the most gleeful relief.

They would react saying "Well in class and with the gringos that's what I speak too!" And walk 

off smiling ear-to-ear repeating "Spanglish!" "Spanglish!" "Spanglish!"

The christening caught on faster than a chupacabra being chased by wild-fire.

Later, an Azteca television news crew of Cuban-Americans came to Cancun to cover Hurricane Mitch. 
They came to the internet cafe I was managing to make some communications when they too reacted 

to my Spanish telling me how "awful" it was; and, as I had by then become accustomed, told them 

it wasn't "Spanish" rather than "Spanglish" along with my short explanation.

They too were stunned, though with the usual undisguised and utter disgust.

The next thing I know though, the wildfire of the term had crossed even the border.

I have since developed a notion I call "Linguistic Chauvinsim/Imperialism" that could be a 

subject for a future post.

My own eventual conclusion, confirmed during my teaching English to especially Mayan and 

Nahuatl-speakers, was I was not alone. They too resisted what they too concluded, that the common 

experience resulting in mixed language was not as you seem to indicate having, like spontaneios combustion, emerging as "a life of its own," rather than the on-going result of a language being delibertely imposed by not even one culture over another and instead a very nationhood over another's.

Cancun, founded by the Mexican Government, has since been replicated many times in Mexico where, 

as in the case of the Mayan Caribbean, homesteading incentives by the Mexican government were 

innaugurated to flood the zone with Mexicans to eventually appropriate the zone, via electons, 

from the Maya as a new state of Mexico, and, in other cases such as Hualtulco, to innundate 

otherwise highly recalitrant, even secessionist, states of Mexico.

As you must know, the next Cancun-like project scheduled by the Mexican government is to be 

located within an hours drive of San Diego---primed and poised for the so-called "trans-national 

zone" and, as the original Cancun, beyond.

The intermix is not, as you would also seem to have it, an involunatry blending of natural 

circumstance that would stand on its own and even develop still as a new and separate language, 

rather than an intermediate step in the deliberate imposition just described. 

To conclude, I think your question highly original. So original that you will find no answers to 

it for the sheer reason that such questions have yet to occur to anyone to provide response.

You should consider picking up where I left off in Cancun teaching Nahuatl-speakers, who could 

not read or write either Spanish or Nahuatl, much less English, how to not write rather than 

"draw [the] sounds" of a phoneticized form of Spanish for Nahuatl that we invented so they could 

send postcards to their home-villages, to there have Spanish-speakers who themselves were not 

Nauhautl-speakers recite the texts that would nonetheless be understood by the illiterate 

villagers. 

Only in such a situation, I think, will you find not only your answers but also new questions.

Why the resistance to learning a language via the instruction of its grammar and, along with the, 

nonetheless, grammatical considerations you make, even and as particularly in 

Nahautl,'genderization.'

Saludos,

John Pastore

"It [the Rio Grande] seperates us from our absolute differences." ---Octavio Paz



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