The Adventures of the Binion Shooks: July 2007

Things in Oapan are grand! We are both feeling better, and David’s birthday is tomorrow! Our host family is so excited about the American cake!

I have discovered that I can no longer read, write or speak Nahuatl, Spanish or English. Nahuatl spelling in generally phonetic and I just tried to write the above “cake” as “kak.”

I have decided that most of the difficulties in learning Nahuatl draw on one language feature, that of agglutination. I think the main difference is that they don’t use prepositions. You have prepositional phrases in English, the romance languages, etc, etc. In Nahuatl, instead of saying, “I am going to the store” you would have to inflect the verb. In other word, you would have to add prefixes of suffixes (or both) to indicate you are going away from where you are to somewhere else and when (like “before leaving”). In addition you also have to mark the verb for person (and if it is transitive or ditransitive for objects, primary and secondary). The line up of these prefixes and suffixes next to one another often cause sound change, so that complicates things as well. Basically, you end up with some fairly massive words that carry a lot of meaning.

There are some things that I do here that make me chuckle to myself. One of these things is feeding eggs to chickens. If I don’t finish my meal, the leftovers go to the pigs or to the chickens. Occasionally, I have leftover eggs, and I toss them to the chickens. They all go crazy fighting over it. It makes me feel a little guilty, then it makes me laugh, and then I think, “How strange.”

David and I are planning to go to Xalita this weekend to look at some amatl (amate), since no one in Oapan paints them anymore. Then we will go to Taxco, known as one of the most romantic cities in Mexico. They are also supposed to have a lot nice silver there. We will head back to the village for one final week. Our final exam is on Thursday and we will have a going away party on Friday. We are so excited to see Okie Doke and sleep in our own bed, but we are going to miss our new friends! I can’t believe we have made it this far!

On an unrelated note, if you liked the book Kite Runner, I recommend A Thousand Splendid Suns. I read it last weekend, and I thought it was fantastic!

Pray for rain and clouds. It has rained the past two nights and been overcast during the day and it is glorious (because the temperature drops about fifteen degrees)! And pray that David and I do well on our final exam and phonetics project that we are working on! I will try to post some pictures this weekend.

I will warn you, this blog post is long, and may contain information that could bore some of you to death. I included some language information for those who are interested (like maybe Sarah Shook :).

First, Here’s a response to Dana’s question about the final sound in “Nahuatl.”: You’re right! The final sound in “Nahuatl” does sound like a “t,” and I will tell you why. Here is the linguistics answer: it is a voiceless lateral affricate. The terminology is really just mumbo jumbo. The break down is this. Voiceless simply means (as you might guess) that the vocal chords are not vibrating when you make the sound. We have many sounds in English like this, such as “p,t,k”, etc. Their voiced counterparts would be “b,d,g”. The “lateralness” of the sound means that the air is flowing around the sides of the tongue. We have a sound in English that is lateral, can you guess what it is? It’s “l” (are you starting to see where is this going? Nahuatl). And affricate just means that the sound is kind of a combination of two sounds, but is actually one phoneme (which another story entirely, but for now, just think of it as one sound that is kind of like two). We have affricates in English. An example of one of them is “ch” as in “church.” Our “ch” noise is really like a “t” and an “sh” put together, but we perceive it as one sound. If you make the “ch” noise really slowly, maybe you can see what I am talking about. Whoever came up with the orthography though that “tl” was the best way to represent the sound in “Nahuatl”, even though it is only one sound, not two (just like “ch”—two symbols, one sound). So, here is my best advice for trying to make the sound if you are interested. First try to get the lateral part down. So, make an “l” noise, then stop and keep your tongue there behind your teeth, then just blow and feel how the air moves around the sides of your tongue (for some people it may only move around one side). Then just make some little “t’ noises. “t” is what is called a stop in linguistics which basically means that the sound is quick, or you cut the airflow off quickly with your articulators. So, if you can (and it takes some practice), use the same quick puff of air like you do for a “t” but let the air go around the sides of your tongue keeping the tip of your tongue there behind your teeth like you would for an “l” or “t” and remember not to use your voice (just like you don’t use your voice with a regular “t”). I probably made it sound harder than it is. Once you think you have it, then don’t think about the specifics, just practice it. It is a really neat noise, and since we don’t have anything comparable in English, it is often perceived as “t” (as you perceived it, and as I would have had I not read up on it ahead of time-haha). So, there’s the long answer!

Some stories/observations from the trip thus far:
1. I wouldn’t do David’s dishes and our family told me they were going to hit me, jokingly of course. Then, they asked me if David would not hit me, to which he replied (though we aren’t supposed to be using Spanish) “No vale la pena” (It’s not worth it). He is probably right!

2.We got home from Iguala last weekend pretty late, and our family was already asleep. We headed up to our room only to find a ko:lo:tl (scorpion), and of course we freaked out! We didn’t know how to kill it so I ran downstairs yelling, “Alacran, alacran!” and woke everyone up. They all start laughing and Ofelia (who is 17 by the way) comes up to our room and swats it with a shoe, and I think , “Oh, that is it?” And David feels silly for making a little girl come kill our scorpion. We have only had two in our room so far, which is a blessing. One of our friends found one next to her bed devouring a roach, which was pleasant. I always thought they had really tough outer bodies and lived on the ground. They are actually more like spiders and climb along our cement walls and squish quite easily. I am convinced one is going to fall off of the ceiling and land on me while I am sleeping on my stick bed in the night.

3. I have made some really good language errors. I was trying to say “my dog” in Nahuat. When they refer to a dog, they just call it a “chichi,” but when they possess one (like “my dog”) they call it “tskwintli.” So, “my dog” is “notskwin.” Before I knew this I was saying my dog as, “nochichi” (which they actually say in other villages), which does not mean “my dog” in Oapan Nahuatl, but rather “my boob.” I have also accidentally said, “I am a pig.”

4. When I got dengue (supposedly), and was running around 103 fever, they were convinced I was unhappy. Apparently, only unhappy people who want to go home get sick. They also have no concept that in illness might last more than one day. Everything they think about sickness is based in what we might consider old wives tales. Our friend Brad was having trouble with his allergies and his family told him, “Oh, a cold wind must have blown through your room last night.”

5. One night we had the Oapan version of tostadas. The way they do this is that first they make corn tortillas as usual (grind the corn, press the dough and put it on the stove). But, the way they get them crunchy for the tostadas is by putting them on the roof for a couple of days. I thought that was interesting.

6. When we arrived, we were actually excited about the prospect of not bathing for weeks at a time (which would have been ludicrous because it is about 110 everyday with no breeze—you don’t stop sweating, day or night). I headed upstairs for bed on the first night and our family looked at me and said, “xmaltis” (bathe). I was worried about wasting water and asked them how often they bathed (I assumed they would say every few days). They said, “Oh, we bathe twice a day.” So, I guess they were thinking that Americans must be pretty dirty, and now I bathe once a day. We are really lucky because our family has a toilet (the kind you dump water into with a bucket) and a bathing room. To bathe, you dip out water from a big trash can and pour it over your head in this little room that has a drain the corner. This is really quite nice all things considered.

7. I watched our little tiny na:nah fight off an angry mother pig with a stick. I think you just had to be there for this one.

8. Everyone laughs at me in the village because I am so tall there. It is so strange. This is the first time in my life I’ve felt awkwardly tall.

9. The mosquitoes bite us like crazy. They think bug spray is a great appetizer for gringo blood. Our family laughs at us and says we are too white and need to get darker because the mosquitoes don’t bite them.

10. We missed the bus to Iguala last weekend and did some Mexican hitchhiking. It was grand.

11. I thought I permanently damaged by esophagus at the festival in Acatlán trying homemade mescal. I don’t do many shots, and this was not a good one to try if you’re not used to much alcohol. They gave me an enormous shot that took me two swallows to get down. It was free, and ladies with bags full of mescal bottles just followed the people in the parade and passed it out to everyone along the way. I found out later that it is tradition to finish all the mescal that was purchased for the fiesta before it concludes, which is why it is free.

12. Our house parents are our grandparent’s age, but I could not discern this for many weeks because they have jet black hair. It seems that only the very, very old have white hair.

Reasons why Nahuatl is very, very hard:

1. There are no Indo-European roots. There are no words like “intelligente” that are very similar to the English words. There’s not even anything like “ventillador” that kind of reminds you of ventilation and thus reminds you of its meaning of “fan” in English. There are a few Spanish words, but that’s it.

2. Verb classes. Before you even think about using a verb, you have to figure out its class. This is not terribly difficult, but there are many exceptions. Take the example of “polowa” (“to lose”) it is a class 2b (of 4). This class takes transitive verbs that end in –owa (with the exception of verbs that end in ‘powa’ or ‘kowa’ because they have a historically long o: which puts them in class 3). Once you have figured out what class the verb is, then you can figure out which stem you need to use. There are 3 stems. Jonathan calls them the lexical, perfective, and future stems, though they contain the stems for many tenses. For instance, if I were to use the optative and say, “let me lose it” or “I hope I lose it” then I would take the future stem of “polowa” which is “polo:” and add “ma” and the first person singular marker “ni” (ni- or just n- if it comes before a vowel). Then I would say “ma nihpolo” (“let me lose it” & and the “o” loses its longness, and the object “ki” goes to “h”). If I wanted to say, “let us lose it,” it would be “ma tihpolo:ka:n.” 3.

3.Making the transitive and intransitive (or ditrasitive) verb distinction is very important, and also very difficult.

4. The phonological rules are crazy. You think you have something right, until you realize that before your suffix w goes to h before a consonant, but that h is then dropped. There are also a lot of rules that are based in archaic forms. The word will basically get tone (an ‘h’ accent) because there was historically an “h” in the word, but there is no way to know this unless you know the historical form by memory.

5. The language is very specific. This is hard to explain, but it makes things difficult. You can’t always just say general things like you do in English. For instance, many things require some sort of orientation (orientation between you and another speaker, or a place, or whatever), and you have to mark this on the verb.

6. There are many different kinds of nouns. There are entirely different rules for possessed and unprocessed nouns, and based on their endings you have to pluralize them all differently. Then within the possessed nouns, you have to decide whether they are alienable (able to be taken away) or inalienable (unable to be taken away) and conjugate them based on this distinction as well.

7. Trying to deconstruct verbs can be really, really hard and practically impossible at times with or without a dictionary. Here’s an example: take the word: “o:timotek.” One thing you know for sure is that the “o:” and final “k” indicate that this in the past, but then you have to figure out what the verb is. It could be “imote” and the “t” could be the subject marker (second person singlular marker, ti- in front of consonants and t- in front of vowels). For the same matter, it could be “mote” with the second person singular marker appearing as “ti-.“ Then it could be “ote” and be reflexive with an abbreviated version of ti-mo (ti-m before vowels) and could also be the verb “te” and have the reflexive prefixes of ti-mo, though, no verb would ever just be “te.” So, then you have to figure out what kind of irregularity is going on. You basically have to try all of these things that you guess could be the verb while not knowing if you have some irregularity. It can be a long a tedious process on paper, and we are supposed to be able to do this while listening to speakers.

8. There some difficult phrase constructions. All languages have different ways of saying things, but I am really not used to this. For instance, to say, “My house burned down” you would say, “I house burned.”

9. This is a dying language. This means that the language is losing some of it “synthetic ness” and uniformity. Oapan is also the most difficult dialect and has many exceptions and tone.

10. There are no infinitives.

11. Though Nahuatl has been studied by linguists over the years, Jonathan is pretty much the expert on Oapan Nahuatl, and you can only do so much in a lifetime. He has written a really great grammar (this is not like a textbook though, I mean linguistic grammar), but there are some things he just doesn’t know about yet. Also, because much of the community is illiterate, many of the people speak differently. In other words, there’s not really a standard, so everything can vary, and does.

Yes, most of these features mentioned here are the differences you might find in any language when you study outside your language family. In other words, though I find the language terribly tricky, it is probably no harder than English (which is a linguistic mess), just very different.

Please pray for our PC! It is functioning less and less each day!

Picture time: