-tla:n and -tlan; high-order chars in email; 1st person honorifi

Anthony Appleyard mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk
Tue May 30 15:00:36 UTC 2000


  Chichiltic Coyotl <notoca at hotmail.com> wrote that:-
1) "An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl - 1983 Edition" and
2) "A Posting By F Karttunen - May 1999"
both say that (a) {-tlan} = "below, next to the base of" prefixes {-ti-}, and
(b) {-tlan} = "place of/at" does not.
(1) says that (a) has long wowel and (b) has short vowel; (2) says vice-versa.

I read that Nahuatl stresses words on the last syllable but one. Sometimes in
history books I have seen the name "Tenochtitla'n" with the last vowel marked
stressed. Spanish does not have vowel length distinction. For a Spaniard to
hear "teno:chTItla(:)n" (uppercase = stress) and pronounce it with the stress
moved to the end, likeliest the last vowel was long.

Re use of high-order characters (accented vowels, etc) in this email group,
the next line should contain accented and circumflexed vowels and n-tilde:-
    áéíóú âêîôû ñ
  Are there any members who see something else there? I am sorry to seem
silly, but I have seen too much down the years of high-order characters
(= with ascii codes more than 127) getting distorted in email transmission.

The books say that using honorifics of oneself in Nahuatl is not done because
it would seem too pompous. But are there any examples of it found in the
literature. perhaps to achieve a special effect? (Chinese has an example: a
pronoun pronounced "ching", written by a special character, which could be
fairly translated as {nehhua:tzin}; only the Emperor was allowed to use it!)



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