The use of XIHUIT

[John Sullivan]

Just for the heck of it, here are colores used by my informants in the
Huasteca:

chipawak, white
yayawik, black
chichiltik, red
chokoxtik, brown
tenextik, grey
kostik, yellow
chilkostik, orange
azultik, blue
xoxowik, green as in a mature green leaf
axoxowik, green as in a deep body of water
selxiwitl, green as in a new/young green leaf

John Sullivan
Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas




on 9/4/00 6:07 AM, Frances Karttunen at karttu at nantucket.net wrote:

> Oh heavens!  I didn't mean that Nahuatl speakers had borrowed this usage
> from English.  I mean that if some people who speak Indo-European languages
> describe things hotter than red-hot as blue-hot, it's likely that
> Mesoamericans would describe really hot things as blue-green hot.  We divide
> up the spectrum as going through the steps yellow-green-blue-violet, but
> Mesoamericans have a single word (xiuh- for Nahuatl speakers) for the
> green-blue continuum of the spectrum.
>
> Chi- may seem like a very short, simple morphological element, but if it's
> cognate with xiuh-, it's a CVC morpheme, and such structures are the
> building blocks of the morphology and lexicon of Nahuatl.
>
> If you want a REALLY short lexical item, consider i:-, which is the stem of
> the transitive verb 'to drink something.'
>
> Fran
>
> ----------
>> From: "Anthony Appleyard" <mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk>
>> To: nahuat-l at server2.umt.edu
>> Subject: Re: The use of XIHUIT
>> Date: Mon, Sep 4, 2000, 6:05 AM
>>
>
>> Frances Karttunen <karttu at nantucket.net> wrote:-
>>> I am pretty confident that the extension of the use of xiuh- as an
>>> intensifier meaning 'hot' has to do with the Mesoamerican way of dealing
>>> with the color spectrum.  If something is quite hot, in English we say it is
>>> red hot.  If it is even hotter, we say it is white hot. But astronomers talk
>>> about blue stars (which are hotter than red stars). ...
>>
>> Erh??? Blue may mean hot to an astronomer, or to nuclear men handling very
>> high-temperature plasma, or to people who use blowtorches, but not to the
>> general population of an area where Nahuatl is likely to be spoken. {chi} is
>> so simple and short a morpheme that most likely we have a stray coincidence.
>>