Talk:Nahuan languages

message: I moved stuff around quite a bit and added quite a bit more, mostly along lines discussed (mostly between Maunus and me) on the Nahuatl Language talk page. Feel free to comment/fix up.
It strikes me that a good idea would be identify for the ISO codes, insofar as possible, the place in Lastra’s classification they would fit. I *might* do this *sometime*, but if someone else would like to scoop me on it, I would be most pleased.
--Lavintzin 05:04, 22 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rewrite 21 July 06 

message: For a week now, I have been rewriting this article to bring out the assessment that the classification of "Center" and "Peripherals" is not insightful—and that its two proponents didn't intend it to be taken otherwise. Yes, they are the "most authoritative" schemes—but that's not saying much, no sir. There had been only one rival scheme, Juan Hasler's. In fact, the results arrived at by Canger and then Lastra were both fairly similar to Juan Hasler's, although I do not discuss that in the article, and although his proposal was empirically flimsy and shoddy, according to the dispassionate but severe criticisms by Canger (1988:§2) (stable JSTOR URL "Nahuatl dialectology: a survey and some suggestions"). There's a conclusion I draw from combining this outcome with two other facts, the fact that Canger's and Lastra's respective schemes have only one level (the Center and all the Peripherals are mutually coordinate) and the fact neither Canger nor Lastra claimed genetic validity for any of their groupings. From considering these three points, I conclude that the schemes for the most part constitute only the obvious results of their respective researches (I say "for the most part" because they Canger and Lastra did disagree in at least three cases, cases I mention in the article.) But that's not a bad thing. These researches paved the way toward a historical linguistic account of General Aztec. They produced a lot of data and they were well documented (again, Canger 1988:§2). Dale Chock (talk) 06:23, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: You've done good work here. I think it might be worth mentioning that there is a diachronic element in the center - periphery dichotomy. Namely that the central group corresponds to spreading innovations from the dialects of the Basin of Mexico, specifically that of Tenochtitlan (late arrivers) and the peripheral dialects correspond to early arrivers (e.g. Toltecs). Canger concludes this in the last section of her 1988 article (p. 66). It is also worth mentioning that part of the importance of Cangers study lies exactly in introducing the concept of shallow groupings - and that the reason she introduces them is that the data doesn't seem to support deep isoglosses. ·Maunus·ƛ· 15:56, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Two objections. First, Canger did not make that "conclusion", in the sense of citing evidence and imposing theory and current data on it and logically attaining an affirmative assertion. Her explicit statement was that evidence was lacking to support concluding that Central-Peripheral reflects the internal branching evolution of the Nahuan branch, and that she hoped one day evidence would arise to allow drawing that conclusion. (2) Referring only to Canger's argument, because I haven't read anything about Lastra's argument: the hypothesis is diachronic only in the limited (and to me minor) sense that "Central" is claimed to have arisen by diffusion. Dale Chock (talk) 23:01, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rewrite in order to afford proper perspective on current classifications 

message: The following line:
  nhs – Southeastern Puebla Nahuatl
should be replaced by two lines:
  npl – Southeastern Puebla Nahuatl
  nsu - Sierra Negra Nahuatl
See , the code nhs is retired. -- Andrew Krizhanovsky (talk) 14:43, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language codes