About the Nahuatl Vocabulary
Senior Editor: Stephanie Wood Objectives: As envisioned by the Wired Humanities Project of the University of Oregon, in collaboration with the Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology (IDIEZ), this is a continuously expanding, online, searchable, trilingual dictionary (Nahuatl-Spanish-English) that includes Classical (extinct) and modern Nahuatl (endangered), both members of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Its databases include fields that support a wide range of orthographies and sources, so that users will most easily retrieve a rich array of information, including translations into various languages (all authored by native speakers) and examples of usage in excerpts from historical documents from the central highlands of Mexico. The dictionary incorporates vocabulary from the work of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Catholic priests, harvests terms from the recent translations of colonial manuscripts (originally written by Nahua notaries and scribes, 1540-1800), and elicits language from modern speakers, all under the interdisciplinary guidance of scholars with specializations in linguistics, language teaching, anthropology, and history. It is our policy not to mine more than 10% of any published work of recent times without permission. We include the vocabulary of Fray Alonso de Molina of 1571 as a standard sixteenth-century reference work. IDIEZ students have digitized the manuscript facisimile rather than any published transcriptions, with the aim of reducing errors. We are gradually adding this content. We are also gradually inserting examples from the work of Horacio Carochi because of his valuable indications of vowel length and other diacritics. We have permission from James Lockhart to use his edition and translations of Carochi. This project targets the collaboration of Nahua university students from the Huasteca region of Mexico, already part of a nascent program of language study, dictionary building, and cultural-heritage translation work at the Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology. It builds upon their professional skills while also preparing materials that will benefit native speakers, teachers, and students across Mexico and around the globe interested in studying Nahua language and culture across the centuries. The project also draws upon special language and technological skills at the University of Oregon, where the History department has two faculty with expertise in Classical Nahuatl and where the Wired Humanities Project has a number of related manuscript projects that will benefit from this Nahuatl dictionary. This multipurpose tool is intended to document and preserve language, help re-establish literacy for modern speakers, train them for professional work, and pave the way for the translation of thousands of manuscripts in Classical Nahuatl for the historical and cultural-heritage benefits they will offer the world. For further information, please contact: Stephanie Wood, swood (at) uoregon.edu, tel. (541) 346-5771. |