Nahuatl

This workshop will present the Florentine Codex Initiative at the Getty Research Institute and examine specific work issues related to it. With the goal of increasing global access to the Florentine Codex, the Initiative will provide full digital access to the folios of the illuminated manuscript as well as transcriptions and translations of its texts. The indigenous-focused, language-centered design of the website component of the project, titled the Digital Florentine Codex, will include a dynamic interface allowing users to seamlessly view folios alongside transcriptions and translations in with fully searchable data including keyword tagged images. In order to achieve this, three members of the team are dedicated to composing 4,000 trilingual (English, Spanish, Nahuatl) entries to the Getty vocabularies drawn from the codex’s encyclopedic visual and linguistic content. In addition to the website, the Initiative will produce a scholarly digital publication on Book 12 accompanied by educational programming and lesson plans for K-12 educators and their students. The presenters will report on the current state of the initiative, explore some of the challenges the Getty team has encountered and seek feedback on best practices and research utility of the initiative’s outcomes from the attendees.
Presenters: Rebecca Dufendach, Kim Richter, Alanna Radlo-Dzur, Bérénice Gaillemin, Josh Fitzgerald

Resumen La desventaja social, cultural y educativa sufrida por la población indígena en México ha sido extensamente documentada. El país carece de una política educativa clara en materia de educación indígena, lo cual se evidencia en un vacío metodológico e instrumental dentro de las aulas. Por ello, en el programa de Maestría de Literacidades Académicas y Estudios del Discurso de la Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, se han favorecido intervenciones que aborden esta problemática y contribuyan a cambiar este adverso panorama. Una de estas intervenciones es la que aquí se presenta. Esta tuvo como objetivo la enseñanza del náhuatl como segunda lengua, utilizando los principios y la metodología del programa Leer para Aprender de la lingüística sistémico-funcional, a través de textos poéticos contemporáneos escritos en náhuatl. Los resultados de la aplicación de esta unidad didáctica indican que los participantes se confrontaron con una nueva manera de entender las acciones pedagógicas de las lenguas, que los llevó a ser más participativos y experimentar un aprendizaje más significativo en el aula. Asimismo, el ejercicio resaltó la importancia de los procesos de andamiaje explícito y situado en la construcción de ambientes de aprendizaje interculturales más auténticos, eficientes y de revaloración para la lengua indígena, tal como lo promueve esta metodología. Palabras clave: enseñanza de náhuatl; lingüística sistémico-funcional; pedagogía de género; poesía contemporánea; Leer para Aprender. Abstract The social, cultural and educational disadvantage suffered by the indigenous population in Mexico has been extensively documented. The country lacks a clear educational policy on indigenous education, which is evident in a methodological and instrumental gap within the classrooms. For this reason, the Master's program in Academic Literacies and Discourse Studies at Universidad Autónoma de Tlaxcala, favors interventions that address this problem and contribute to change this

Maya Blue is a colour that is more than a pigment; it had roles in status, ritual and performance, being daubed onto pots and people before sacrifice. Here researchers use experimental and historical evidence to discover how it was made, including direct scientific analysis of Maya Blue on a pot thrown into the sacred well at Chichén Itzá. The results indicate that the formation of the color was actually part of the ritual.

Abstract
Introduction
For a long time indigenous languages, in general, and Mexican, in particular, have been a niche research area. Different disciplines, from Linguistics, anthropology, and sociology, to —in a lesser fashion— Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, are traditional stakeholders on the topic. Still, the cost-benefit ratio is not favorable in the realm of computer sciences because of the scarcity of sources, divergence in variants of the same languages, lack of standard orthographies, and low topic awareness, as well as the perception of narrowness in the realm of applications, and lack of impact for these. Thus, NLP/CL researchers have remained on the fringes.

Development.
We believe that shining a different light on these apparent obstacles and dissuasion elements can help to improve the perception of their relevance and interest as research objects. On the one hand, speakers of these languages amount to approximately seven million in Mexico, and self-identified descendants of the Mexican indigenous cultures to almost four times as many, not a negligible number. On the other hand, the study of low-resource NLP is interesting in itself as a research problem, but it also can help develop tools for the social sciences and receive valuable insights from them, fostering an environment of multidisciplinary studies that, in turn, lead to the preservation, inclusion, cultural identity exaltation, and enhanced visibility of Mexican indigenous cultures. As we perceive sparks of renewed interest in low-resource languages amongst the researchers of the NLP/CL community assessing the current state we believe that an assessment of the present challenges for the area of study is pertinent. With this, we move on to develop a systemic analysis of the field and proceed to outline a technical roadmap proposal towards the inclusion of Mexican indigenous languages in NLP/CL mainstream research. Briefly, this roadmap has two main areas that eventually converge: technical and linguistic which coalesce through the multidisciplinary paradigm. Within these areas, several tasks are proposed both in parallel and in succession, amongst the most notorious are the formation of teams of linguists, social anthropologists, and computer scientists to create tools for the collection of languages that are socially acceptable within the culture and standards of the communities. Technically, the development of algorithms for small corpora and linguistically the development of dictionaries of equivalent orthographies for distinctive variants of these languages.
Conclusion
Even though the current panorama for the indigenous languages in NLP/CL research is bleak, the re-emergence of the focus on the exaltation and preservation of originary cultures and the push for multidisciplinary studies creates a fertile environment for new approaches towards the inclusion of these languages in mainstream NLP/CL research. The implications of the development of applied research in this area can build bridges for the inclusion of the indigenous communities in nation-wide social and political conversations from which they are now excluded via the digital divide. Also, it can have a tremendous impact on the preservation of the past and present versions of originary languages as well as enabling the visibility of these cultures.

Capítulo del libro "Language Documentation and Revitalization: Latin American Contexts", editado por Gabriela Pérez Báez, Chris Rogers, y José Emilio Rosés Labrada (2016).

"This paper reflects on the experiences related to language revitalization, reclamation, and documentation in two Mexican communities where, of the language that was once spoken, only 'rememberers' (Campbell and Muntzel 1989: 181) remain. The discussion of these cases revolves around the question of how these communities have come to the realization that it is important to return to the native language despite the temporal distance (at least three generations) and the difficulties associated with such a process". (Extracto).

El volumen comprende en realidad dos trabajos, diferentes en cuanto a su alcance y objetivos pero  relacionados  por  el  vínculo  común  que  supone  la  lengua  mexicana:  por  un  lado,  el  ensayo  “Proceso  de  nahuatlización  de  Honduras”,  que  analiza  y  explica  detalladamente la presencia histórica de este idioma desde la época precolombina hasta el final del período colonial (pp. 11-40), así como lo resultados que produce en  el  español  la  situación  de  contacto  que  se  desarrolla  entre  ambos  sistemas  lin-güísticos (pp. 40-64); por otro, y como complemento a lo anterior, lo que el autor ha denominado “Nahuatlismos de uso en Honduras” (pp. 65-405), un extensísimo repertorio lexicográfico donde se recopilan, definen y ejemplifican más de un millar de voces de este origen que se utilizan de forma habitual en el país.