"e" termination

Frances Karttunen karttu at nantucket.net
Tue Oct 24 14:20:34 UTC 2000


Looks like the worst sort of folk etymology to me.  The "e" in these words
belongs to the Spanish grammatical particle/enclitic le.

The Nahuatl (male) vocative form used in addressing people (not in making
exclamations) ends in the stressed suffix -e.

These things have neither similar meaning nor similar grammatical function.

Fran

----------
>From: Francisco Valdes <fvaldes at omega.itlaguna.edu.mx>
>To: nahuat-l at server2.umt.edu
>Subject: "e" termination
>Date: Tue, Oct 24, 2000, 10:13 AM
>

> Last Sunday I watched a badly edited TV program in Canal Once on Nahuatl.
> A historian, whose name I did not catch said, that many features of Nahuatl
> are present in Mexican Castellano. He offered as an example the
> interjections ending in an "e", for example: "orale!", "andale!", "dale!",
> "pegale!", etc.
> If there was an explanation for this assertion it was edited out.
> Can any of you offer a theory on how the "e" ending comes from Nahuatl?
> Saludos,
> Francisco Valdes
>



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