Inic Ome netlanliztli

[Michael Mccafferty]

On Sat, 3 Jul 1999, Frances Karttunen wrote:

> >It's quiet, too quiet for some, so what is this yuhquimma I see in Juan
> >Bautista's Huehuetlahtolli?  Sounds a bit like what we call Yupper speak, as
> >in instead of Sorry, ma forgot to take out the trash, it's yohkey ma, I'll
> >take out the trash.  Inquiring, scholarly minds want to. . .  Mark
>
>
> Yuhqui is a common orthograohic variant of the word that appears elsewhere
> as iuhqui and means 'thus, so'.  The longer form yuhquimma/iuhquimma means
> 'more or less.'  It's to be found in Molina's dictionary with the iuh
> spelling.
>
> The "yuh" represents phonetic [iw], not [yu].
>

Yes, [-iw] is definitely the phonetics of the end of this syllable.  What
was happening at the beginning was probably [y-] > [yiw].  At the same
time, orthographic y was a standard way of expressing phonetic [i].
But we can't drag a sixteenth century Aztec back from Mictlan very
easily to find out what exactly was happening at the very beginning of the
syllable.

Michael