Nahuatl Language Documentation Project: Sierra Norte de Puebla [ISO 639 azz]

Gettysburg College, Gettysburg PA

Investigators

Abstract

Documenting a language occurs at many levels, and the most detailed is often the most useful. Specialized knowledge about the plants and animals in the ecosystem the language has evolved in is a particularly useful segment of the language both for native speakers and for science at large. In partnership with an indigenous cooperative, a filmmaking collective, academic scholars, and computational linguists, Dr. Jonathan D. Amith will lead a three-year Nahuatl language documentation effort in the Sierra Norte de Puebla. One goal is to develop an extensive set of materials: a detailed dictionary; a basic descriptive grammar; and a 75-hour corpus of time-coded transcriptions of digital audio and video covering endangered genres of discourse and vanishing cultural knowledge, including ethnobiology, dance, stories, personal testimonials, and village histories. A professional film-making collective will produce three or four 27-minute educational documentaries. A second goal is to develop a set of software tools for processing and presentation of the materials. Some of the tools will be language specific; a morphological parser to analyze Nahuatl words, separating the affixes from the stem and thus facilitating dictionary lookup as well as permanent archiving of parsed and glossed time-coded transcriptions. Most of the tools, however, will have general applications in documentary endeavors and will be made freely available. One, WebScriber, converts a time-coded transcription into a Web page with line-by-line playback. Another, Prompter/Segmenter, prompts speakers from a list of lexical items and then segments the resulting sound file in such a way as to facilitate linking to an online dictionary. Finally, Cobbler is a utilities program for data management of files written in Shoebox, the most commonly-used program for field linguists. Results of this project will greatly expand our knowledge of the descendant languages of the Aztec empire, with a special emphasis on the ecosystem. To date the Nahuatl project has collected 1,151 botanical specimens (all professionally mounted), about 300 entomological specimens, 19 fish, 24 arachnids, and 22 reptiles, and some 50 objects of material culture (nets, baskets, arrows, rope, etc.). Most are linked to relevant recorded and transcribed texts, such as the folklore associated with different types of grasshoppers, or how to make and use arrows. With the internet interface that allows the exploration of digitized versions of all of these items, both indigenous researchers and those from outside have an unusually large collection of materials to draw from.