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Una Canger is a Danish linguist specializing in languages of Mesoamerica. She has published mostly about the Nahuatl language with a particular focus on the dialectology of Modern Nahuatl, and is considered among the world's leading specialists in this area. She held tenure at the University of Copenhagen, leading the department for Native American Languages and Cultures until she reached the age of 70 in 2008 and was forced into retirement. In 2012 she was awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for her contributions to the study of Mexican culture. In 2005 she received the teaching prize of Copenhagen University, the Harald.
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Proto-Uto-Aztecan is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Uto-Aztecan languages. Authorities on the history of the language group have usually placed the Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland in the border region between the United States and Mexico, namely the upland regions of Arizona and New Mexico and the adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, roughly corresponding to the Sonoran Desert and the western part of the Chihuahuan Desert. It would have been spoken by Mesolithic foragers in Aridoamerica, about 5,000 years ago.
The Guerrero Nahuatl language is a Nahuan language spoken by 150,000 people in Mexico.
Whorf's law is a sound law in Uto-Aztecan linguistics proposed by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. It explains the origin in the Nahuan languages of the phoneme which is not found in any of the other languages of the Uto-Aztecan family. The existence of in Nahuatl had puzzled previous linguists and caused Edward Sapir to reconstruct a phoneme for Proto-Uto-Aztecan based only on evidence from Aztecan. In a 1937 paper published in the journal American Anthropologist, Whorf argued that phoneme was a result of some of the Nahuan or Aztecan languages having undergone a sound change changing the original */t/ to in the position before */a/. The sound law has come to be known as "Whorf's law" and is still considered valid, although a more detailed understanding of the precise conditions under which it took place has been developed.
References
- ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Pochutec". Glottolog 3.0 . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
- ↑ Boas 1917
- ↑ Knab 1980
- ↑ Campbell and Langacker 1978
- ↑ Canger 2000:385
- ↑ Canger 1988:42-44
- ↑ Lastra 1992:37
- ↑ Peralta Ramírez 2005:4
- ↑ INALI (National Institute of Indigenous Languages, Mexico), 2008:63
- ↑ Canger 1980: 117.
- ↑ 1985