From idiez at mac.com Mon Jun 16 16:34:00 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 11:34:00 -0500 Subject: tetzcohco Message-ID: Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody know what this means? John Sullivan, Ph.D. Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. Francisco García Salinas 604 Colonia CNOP Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 México +52 (492) 768-6048 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx From notoca at hotmail.com Tue Jun 17 14:32:03 2003 From: notoca at hotmail.com (Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 22:32:03 +0800 Subject: tetzcohco Message-ID: Hi Would large stones (rocks) or stony ground (tescal, texcal) be a contender? CC -------Original Message------- From: idiez at mac.com Date: Tuesday, 17 June 2003 12:37:42 AM To: nahuat-l Subject: tetzcohco Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody know what this means? John Sullivan, Ph.D. Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci�n Etnol�gica de Zacatecas, A.C. Francisco Garc�a Salinas 604 Colonia CNOP Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 M�xico +52 (492) 768-6048 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Jun 17 15:21:54 2003 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 10:21:54 -0500 Subject: tetzcohco In-Reply-To: <3EEF2663.000001.07521@pentium> Message-ID: I don't have an answer for this. Sorta reminds of tetzahuiya and related forms that have to do with shamanizing. There is co:cohtli a tube and also a turtledove. But that's not much help. An inhabitant of the place was known as a tetzcohcatl. Miquel On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl wrote: > Hi > > Would large stones (rocks) or stony ground (tescal, texcal) be a contender? > > CC > > -------Original Message------- > > From: idiez at mac.com > Date: Tuesday, 17 June 2003 12:37:42 AM > To: nahuat-l > Subject: tetzcohco > > Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root > would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody > know what this means? > > John Sullivan, Ph.D. > Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci�n Etnol�gica de Zacatecas, A.C. > Francisco Garc�a Salinas 604 > Colonia CNOP > Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > M�xico > +52 (492) 768-6048 > idiez at mac.com > www.idiez.org.mx > > > > From schwallr at mrs.umn.edu Tue Jun 17 16:46:30 2003 From: schwallr at mrs.umn.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 11:46:30 -0500 Subject: Law in Mexico Before the Conquest Message-ID: Replicas con: Mike Widener mwidener at mail.law.utexas.edu Estimados colegas, Una nueva exhibición en linea, "Law in Mexico Before the Conquest" ("El derecho en México antes de la Conquista") describa las sistemas jurídicas de los Aztecas y Mayas. Proporcionada por la Biblioteca de Derecho Tarlton de la Universidad de Texas en Austin, la exhibición está disponible en http://www.law.utexas.edu/rare/aztec/Home.htm La exhibición toma textos e imágenes de crónicas como el Codice Florentino y Codice Mendoza para ilustrar temas como las cortes aztecas, normas de evidencia, la conducta de los jueces, y el derecho penal. También hay una bibliografía anotada sobre el derecho azteca y maya, en http://www.law.utexas.edu/rare/aztec.htm Esta bibliografía ha sido una de las páginas más visitadas del sitio de la Biblioteca Tarlton, y ha sido actualizado con 45 nuevas citas bibliografícas. La exhibición y la bibliografía fueron escritas por Mike Widener, Director de Colecciones Especiales en la Biblioteca Tarlton, y diseñadas por Eric Glass. -------------------------------------- A new online exhibit from the Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas at Austin, describes the sophisticated legal systems of the Aztec and Maya civilizations. Entitled "Law in Mexico Before the Conquest", the exhibit may be viewed at at: http://www.law.utexas.edu/rare/aztec/Home.htm The exhibit uses the words and pictures of native chroniclers to illustrate and explain Aztec courts, standards of evidence, judicial conduct, criminal law, and other aspects of Aztec and Maya law. The Spanish conquistadors found not only empires and cities in Mexico to rival those of Europe, but also highly developed legal systems. The penalties exacted by Aztec courts seemed quite severe to the Spaniards, yet their reliance on evidence, the promptness of their rulings, and their high standards of conduct were much admired. The descriptions of good and bad attorneys, told and illustrated in the 16th century by Aztec informants in Fray Bernardino de Sahagun's landmark "History of the Things of New Spain", still sound familiar today: "The good attorney ... is discreet, able, astute, diligent, constant, unflagging, sharp-tongued, contentious, wrangling, ingenious, persevering, audacious, unyielding, persistent, dignified, solicitous, careful of things.... He collects tribute ... He consumes a tenth of it -- he draws recompense. The bad attorney [is] one who takes things from others by fraud. [He is] a persistent beggar, an excessively importunate one ... He is a hypocrite -- lazy, lukewarm, negligent, deceiving, two-faced, inconstant, squandering, dumb, mute." In addition, an annotated bibliography, "Resources on Aztec and Maya Law" is available at . The bibliography, long one of the most visited pages on the Tarlton Law Library's website, is newly updated and more than tripled in size. The exhibit was researched and written by Mike Widener, Head of Special Collections at the Tarlton Law Library. The web design was by Eric Glass, Reserve Room Supervisor, before his departure to become Serials Librarian at the Columbia Law School Library. -- ***** MIKE WIDENER, Head of Special Collections Joseph D. Jamail Fellow in Law Librarianship Tarlton Law Library, School of Law The University of Texas at Austin 727 E. Dean Keeton Street, Austin, TX 78705-3224 Phone: 512/471-7263; fax: 512/471-0243 E-mail: mwidener at mail.law.utexas.edu Visit our Web site... http://www.law.utexas.edu/rare/ John F. Schwaller Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean 315 Behmler Hall University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E 4th Street Morris, MN 56267 320-589-6015 FAX 320-589-6399 schwallr at mrs.umn.edu From brokaw at buffalo.edu Tue Jun 17 22:00:20 2003 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 18:00:20 -0400 Subject: tetzcohco Message-ID: Hi John, I don't think there is a consensus on the morphology of the word for Texcoco or Tetzcoco. I guess some have argued that "tetzcotli" refers to a kind of plant. That would neatly solve the mistery, but it would be nice to know what plant it was. Another possibility that has been suggested is that "texcotli" may refer to a kind of jar or pot. But I think this interpretation is based on pictographic toponyms that include a pot. There are two problems with this theory. First, there is a perfectly good explanation for having a pot in the glyph that doesn't require us to posit a different, unknown word for it: it is functioning as a rebus. Second, the nature of the glyphs themselves don't support this interpretation: the glyph is a pot and a flower on a rocky hill; if "texcotli" meant pot, you wouldn't need to combine the picture of the pot with any other elements to produce the name. Based on glyphs in different codices, Frances Berdan identifies the elements of the pictographic word as follows: tex from texcalli [cliff, crag, precipice, rocky place] or tetz from tetzcaltetl [alabaster?] co from comitl [pot] co (locative) The glyph often contains a pot and a flower on a rocky hill. But, of course, these glyphs are rebuses that are used to represent sound rather than meaning. Grammatically, these words wouldn't combine like this. Hence the suggestion that maybe the pot in the glyph coincides with a word "texcotli" meaning pot. But it doesn't seem likely to me that the pot in the glyph would represent the whole word "texcotli" or "tetzcotli" because then there would be no need for the rocky hill to produce "tex" or "tetz". It seems to me that it is more likely that the pot in the glyph is a rebus used to signify the syllable "co" from "comitl" unrelated to the original meaning of the toponym. So maybe the pot and the hill are rebuses functioning as phonetic signs repersenting the syllables of the word, and the flower is there to symbolize the plant "texcotli", the true meaning of the word? I know that isn't very definitive, especially because as far as I know nobody has identified which plant it might be. Galen idiez at mac.com wrote: > Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root > would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody > know what this means? > > John Sullivan, Ph.D. > Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. > Francisco García Salinas 604 > Colonia CNOP > Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > México > +52 (492) 768-6048 > idiez at mac.com > www.idiez.org.mx From bcoon at montana.edu Tue Jun 17 22:26:10 2003 From: bcoon at montana.edu (Coon, Brad) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 16:26:10 -0600 Subject: tetzcohco Message-ID: Perhaps it represents a Nahuatlized version of a pre-existing (i.e., pre-Nahua speakers in the area) place name. Brad Coon Reference Librarian The Libraries-Montana State University bcoon at montana.edu (406) 994-6026 -----Original Message----- From: Michael Mccafferty [mailto:mmccaffe at indiana.edu] Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 9:22 AM To: Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl Cc: idiez at mac.com; nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu Subject: Re: tetzcohco I don't have an answer for this. Sorta reminds of tetzahuiya and related forms that have to do with shamanizing. There is co:cohtli a tube and also a turtledove. But that's not much help. An inhabitant of the place was known as a tetzcohcatl. Miquel On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl wrote: > Hi > > Would large stones (rocks) or stony ground (tescal, texcal) be a contender? > > CC > > -------Original Message------- > > From: idiez at mac.com > Date: Tuesday, 17 June 2003 12:37:42 AM > To: nahuat-l > Subject: tetzcohco > > Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root > would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody > know what this means? > > John Sullivan, Ph.D. > Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. > Francisco García Salinas 604 > Colonia CNOP > Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > México > +52 (492) 768-6048 > idiez at mac.com > www.idiez.org.mx > > > > From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Jun 17 23:46:45 2003 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 18:46:45 -0500 Subject: tetzcohco In-Reply-To: <95AC7052DE4A78488DCFB615F7A49EA4070C6C91@jewels.msu.montana.edu> Message-ID: Brad's suggestion is interesting, and it does happen for example in North Africa, so I'm told. I've never seen it in midcontinental North America among Algonquian speakers, and I wonder if there is evidence that the Nahua-speaking folks in the valley of Mexico reconstituted earlier place names. Some language groups, such as the Anglo-Saxons, don't have much a proclivity to do this. I enjoyed Galen's explanation of the glyph for the town's name. I have one more idea and I'll get back with it tomorrow. Michael On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Coon, Brad wrote: > Perhaps it represents a Nahuatlized version of a pre-existing (i.e., > pre-Nahua speakers > in the area) place name. > > Brad Coon > Reference Librarian > The Libraries-Montana State University > bcoon at montana.edu (406) 994-6026 > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Michael Mccafferty [mailto:mmccaffe at indiana.edu] > Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 9:22 AM > To: Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl > Cc: idiez at mac.com; nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu > Subject: Re: tetzcohco > > > I don't have an answer for this. Sorta reminds of tetzahuiya and related > forms that have to do with shamanizing. > > There is co:cohtli a tube and also a turtledove. But that's not much > help. > > An inhabitant of the place was known as a tetzcohcatl. > > Miquel > > > On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl wrote: > > > Hi > > > > Would large stones (rocks) or stony ground (tescal, texcal) be a > contender? > > > > CC > > > > -------Original Message------- > > > > From: idiez at mac.com > > Date: Tuesday, 17 June 2003 12:37:42 AM > > To: nahuat-l > > Subject: tetzcohco > > > > Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root > > would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody > > know what this means? > > > > John Sullivan, Ph.D. > > Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci�n Etnol�gica de Zacatecas, A.C. > > Francisco Garc�a Salinas 604 > > Colonia CNOP > > Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > > M�xico > > +52 (492) 768-6048 > > idiez at mac.com > > www.idiez.org.mx > > > > > > > > > > > > > Michael McCafferty Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana 47401 mmccaffe at indiana.edu "...as a dog howls at the moon, I talk." -Rumi From anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk Wed Jun 18 05:00:29 2003 From: anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk (anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 06:00:29 +0100 Subject: tetzcohco In-Reply-To: <3EEF8F74.13FA8E5A@buffalo.edu> Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 764 bytes Desc: not available URL: From brokaw at buffalo.edu Wed Jun 18 16:53:28 2003 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 12:53:28 -0400 Subject: tetzcohco Message-ID: I don't really think that the flower in the glyph has anything to do with the actual meaning of the toponym. I don't think there is that much, if any, analogical stylistic evidence in other toponyms to back up such a theory. But it would account for the hypothesis about the toponym meaning a plant. Anthony's interpretation of the glyph morphology in which the flower (xochitl) is a rebus representing the phonetic sound "x" seems much more plausible than taking the flower as some kind of indication of the actual meaning of the word itself. But it isn't as clear cut as that. Of course, there is a flower in the glyph, so that automatically suggests that the name contain the morpheme for flower or part of another morpheme that sounds like the root of xochitl. I thought about this before, but I didn't want to digress into all of my speculation about the strengths and weaknesses of this hypothesis. I should have figured someone would pick up on that. So here is my wandering theoretical speculation about this glyph, just in case anyone is interested. I should mention that the glyph appears slightly differently in different codices. In the Codex Mendoza, there is no pot. It is a rocky hill with flowers growing out of the crags. [By the way, there is also a bent arm with water coming out of it which indicates Texcoco as the place of the Acolhua: a (from atl) and col (from colli: curved or bent).] The version with the pot appears in the Mapa Quinatzin. I don't recall the nuances of the toponymic conventions used by the scribes in that document, but a pot is sometimes used to represent the locative "co". To check, you'd have to look at the conventions of the toponyms in that document to see if that is what the scribe usually does. If the pot is used as a locative in the Mapa Quinatzin, then we would still have to correlate some how the rest of the glyph to the whole segment "texco" or "tetzco". The Codex Mendoza doesn't usually include a rebus to represent the locative, but there are at least a few toponyms that I know of that use rebuses to indicate the locatives "pan" and "tlan". If the flowers are used to represent the "x", it is curious that the pictographic name would not use the conventional stone glyph but rather a rocky or craggy hill for the "te" (and this is both in the Codex Mendoza and the Mapa Quinatztin). In the Codex Mendoza, as far as I can tell, when the scribe/s want to represent "te" they use the conventional "tetl" glpyh. On the other hand, although a hill is generally used when "tepetl" is part of the name of the town, it can symbolize a town even when the term "tepetl" is not part of the name. This serves to identify the glyph as the name of a place; a strictly pictographic locative that does not necessarily correspond to the morphology of the word itself. This seems more common in Mixtec conventions, but a few of the toponyms in the Codex Mendoza seem to do the same thing. But in most cases these are not rebuses in the sense of a pictographic representation used to represent a sound not linked to the meaning of that which is represented; they represent hills and coincide with the actually morphology of the place name. I think this is why the pictographic morphology of the "tex" or perhaps even "texc" in Texcoco has been interpreted as coming from "texcalli". If the rocky hill is meant the represent "texc" then the "u" or the "o" may be ignored by the pictographic symbols. This is often the way rebuses work: they get as close as they can; that is to say that the pictographic morphology doesn't have to be ponetically precise, and it doesn't have to account for every single sound in the actual linguistic morphology. But as Anthony points out, that doesn't explain the presence of the flowers in the glyph. Anthony's explanation would work for the glyph in the Codex Mendoza if we take the hill to merely idicate that it is a town, and its rockiness to represent the "te". The objection to this hypothesis would be that based on the other glyphs in the Codex it seems more likely that the combination of stone and flower would have been represented simply by a flower and a stone. There are many examples of similar toponyms that do precisely this. And the craggy hill seems to clearly suggest "texcalli" without the need for flowers to produce the "x". So that would mean that there was a redundancy in the pictogram in that the "x" would correlate to both "texcalli" and "xochitl". I had another possible explanation for the "x" as related to the flowers but not "xochitl", but it was pretty far fetched, so I won't bore you with it. In any case, for me the presence of the flowers in the glyph raises some interesting questions that may be related to the pronunciation of the toponym. Does anyone know (Fran perhaps?) the distribution of Texcoco versus Tetzcoco? Is this a synchronic dialectical difference? Or is it a diachronic development--recognizing that there may also be synchronic differences--in which the alveolar africate became a palatal fricative? Or the othe way around? Or is it merely a synchronic variation within a dialect? I somehow got deleted from the list about a year and a half ago, so I've missed all of the discussions between then and now. But I was reading through the archive and there was a discussion a while back about the pronunciation of "Xochitl" as a personal name. I think somebody said that they hear people pronounce the "x" as a palatal fricative producing "shochi". I have friends who named their daughter Xochitl. They and others I know all pronounce it as an alveolar fricative/sibilant producing "sochi". I don't know to what extent these differences reflect dialectical variation, general changes in phonemes, or specific changes in the pronunciation of this word. And of course, the status of Nahuatl as a kind of substrate in Mexican Spanish makes it even more complicated. My question--and I realize that there are many reasons why this may not be so--is whether or not it is possible that the "written" pictographic word influenced its phonetic articulation. The idea would be that a tlacuilo is trying to create a rebus to represent the name for Tetzcoco. And he is having a lot of trouble with the "tetz", because he just can't find any easily representable object linked to a morpheme similar to "tetz" (although I suppose they could have used a mirror (tezcatl) to approximate the sound; and this is a common pictograph in place names). But of course, "te" is ubiquitously represented by stone. And maybe the toponym has alternate pronunciations in speech as both "tetzcoco" and "texcoco" which would explain the use of a flower to represent the "x". So, as with many other rebuses, the tlacuilo settles upon objects that invoke sounds that are close to the word he wishes to represent, which then influence the direction of phonetic development or stabilization. If this were the case, an explanation for the redundancy ing the glyph including the flower and the rocky hill may be that it is a composite of what originally were alternate glyphs developed to represent the same town by scribes or schools of scribes who pronounced it differently. That is to say that maybe there was a glyph comprised of a flower and a stone and another one comprised of a craggy hill. And later they got combined somehow and the redundancy got conventionalized. After the glyph is developed and passed on and becomes a convention, the scribes may not have been consciously thinking about the phonetics or morphology of the pictograph (which doesn't necessarily mean they were ignorant of it). And the difference bewteen the Mendoza Codex and the Mapa Quinatzin would be that the scribe decided not to use the locative in the glyph. Of course, none of this tells us anything definitive about the meaning of the word itself. Sorry John. In this case, especially, it is hard to determine the difference between a rebus disconnected from its original meaning and pictograms that coincide with the actual morphology of the word. If pot is used for the first "co" and not as a locative, for example, I would tend to doubt that it coincides with a morpheme in the word. But craggy hill, on the other hand, would make more sense as a place name. I'm just throwing all this out as speculation. So don't take this as any kind of informed analysis. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I'm not that informed. Galen anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk wrote: > On 17 Jun 2003, at 18:00, Galen Brokaw wrote: > > ... the glyph is a pot and a flower on a rocky hill ... > > This likely merely represents "te[tl]-xo:[chitl]-co[mitl]" or similar as an approximate phonetic rendering of the name. > > On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Coon, Brad wrote: > > > Perhaps it represents a Nahuatlized version of a pre-existing (i.e., > > pre-Nahua speakers in the area) place name. > > English examples are :- > (1) Catterick in Yorkshire, which came not from Anglo-Saxon but from Celtic Katuraktonion = "(place of) battle ramparts" > (2) York, which comes from Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic = "wild-boar diary-farm", adapted from Celtic Eborakon = "place of yew trees". From RCRAPO at hass.usu.edu Wed Jun 18 17:46:14 2003 From: RCRAPO at hass.usu.edu (Richley Crapo) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 11:46:14 -0600 Subject: Re John Schwaller Message-ID: Does anyone have John Schwaller's current snail mail address. If so, please send it to me at my personal addrress: rcrapo at hass.usu.edu From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Thu Jun 19 13:15:13 2003 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 08:15:13 -0500 Subject: tetzcohco In-Reply-To: <3EEFFFFD.6250.109688@localhost> Message-ID: There is no indication that this place name is analyzable. The Texcoco (including other variant spelling with x) is new, a Spanish neologism. The original name of this place is . Andrews parses this as tetz-coh-co. -co is transparent, of course, but he does not offer an analysis for the other two stems, and there is none in terms of the morphology, grammar, and phonology of Nahuatl. A greatly admired historical linguist recently told me that it's important to understand that there are always going to be loose ends in this business. appears to be a loose end. This is not to say that anyone with the gumption to pursue this should not keep following the bunny paths through the tangle of thorns, but, as it stands, there seems to be no tochtli after all. Michael McCafferty On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk wrote: > 0000,0000,0000On 17 Jun 2003, at 18:00, Galen Brokaw wrote: > > > ... the glyph is a pot and a flower on a rocky hill ... > > > This likely merely represents "te[tl]-xo:[chitl]-co[mitl]" or similar as > an 0000,0000,0000approximate phonetic rendering of the name. > > > On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Coon, Brad wrote: > > > > Perhaps it represents a Nahuatlized version of a pre-existing (i.e., > > > pre-Nahua speakers in the area) place name. > > > English examples are :- > > (1) Catterick in Yorkshire, which came not from Anglo-Saxon but > from Celtic Katuraktonion = "(place of) battle ramparts" > > (2) York, which comes from Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic = "wild-boar > diary-farm", adapted from Celtic Eborakon = "place of yew trees". > > > > > > From schwallr at mrs.umn.edu Thu Jun 19 14:46:09 2003 From: schwallr at mrs.umn.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 09:46:09 -0500 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: From: Carlos Santamarina To: nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu Subject: ?Etimologia_de_Texcoco? En la página siguiente se ofrece otra etimología (y una versión del glifo toponímico)... http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Texcoco.html In 1885 Don Antonio Peñafiel published his "Nombres Geográficos de México," an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino... <> Carlos Santamarina From brokaw at buffalo.edu Thu Jun 19 17:21:12 2003 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 13:21:12 -0400 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: The glyph on the webpage at the url sent out by Carlos comes from the Mendoza Codex. Orozco y Berra's explanation doesn't really solve the problem though either for the glyph or the word. He differentiates, as we have done in this discussion, between the actual meaning of the word and the pictographic morphology of the glyph. So, if I'm understanding him correctly, he says that the word actually means "place of stopping, detaining, or remaining" (I know, not a very elegant translation). I'm a little wary about accepting this interpretation just because Ixtlilxochitl says so with no morphological or etymological corroboration. Ixtlilxochitl's interpretation could very easily be a folk etymology. Then Orozco y Berra goes on to say that the glyph is essentially a rebus (although he doesn't use this term) not related to the actual meaning of the toponym and that it refers to "jarilla de risco" which in English I think would be "rock rose". And this rebus is arrived at by identifying the flower in the glyph as "tlacotl," which according to him means "jarilla" (rock rose)--although this word often means "stick"--, and "texcalli" which corresponds to the rocky hill. This interpretation of the phonetics of the glyph is more problematic than the others I mentioned before. I give him the benefit of the doubt that term "tlacotl" can mean rock-rose. But even if that is true, it seems unlikely to me that a tlacuilo would resort to "tlacotl" to produce the syllable "co" when it would be much easier to use a more transparent image, especially since a pot (comitl) is so commonly used to represent this syllable. And in any case, pictographic glyphs images like this tend to be stylized. That is to say that a flower is a flower, not any particular species of flower, just a flower. So, having a flower growing out of a rocky hill might invoke the idea of "rock rose" and hence its phonetic articulation, but then to get "texcalli", the rocky mountain would have to serve the double function of specifying the type of flower and signifying its own phonetic articulation. I would be interested to know if there any other examples of glyphs serving double functions like this. This leads back to one of the interpretations to which I referrred originally: that there is a word texcotli or tezcotli or something similar that refers to some kind of plant (maybe it is jarilla). The more I look at it, the more I think maybe this maybe the best hypothesis, given the limited evidence available. If this were the case, then we wouldn't need "texcalli" or "xochitl" to explain the glyph. In this case, the glyph wouldn't be a rebus at all. The flower growing out of the rocky hill would signify "rock rose", the rocky hill would be there not as a phonetic element but merely to identify what kind of flower it was. Finding a word like texcotli used to refer to a plant would really help out a lot. Aside from modern Nahuatl speakers--which should never be discounted--there are three places that I can think of to look. 1) the Florentine Codex, which doesn't seem to contain any such word; 2) the Badianus Manuscript, which is an indigenous herbal; I've seen a facsimile of this document in the past, but my library doesn't have a copy; the writer uses Latin, but the names of the plants are all in Nahuatl; and 3) that 16th-century text by the proto-medico Hernandez who compiled volumes of encyclopedic information on plants from Mexico and their medicinal uses. I was under the impression that the original multi-volume work was destroyed when the Escorial burned, but somebody recently told me that part of it or a copy of it or something had survived and was in some archive in Madrid. I don't know if this is true and if so if it has been published. Galen "John F. Schwaller" wrote: > From: Carlos Santamarina > To: nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu > Subject: ?Etimologia_de_Texcoco? > > En la página siguiente se ofrece otra etimología (y una versión del > glifo toponímico)... > > http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Texcoco.html > > In 1885 Don Antonio Peñafiel published his "Nombres Geográficos de > México," an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in > the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino... > > < > Diptongo jeroglífico, cuya interpretacion pertenece al Sr. Orozco y Berra. > > "Una montaña riscosa, sobre la cual florece la jarilla, y junto un brazo > extendido con el símbolo atl." La ciudad de Tezcuco, dice Ixtlilxochitl, > fué fundada en tiempo de los toltecas con el nombre de Catenichco; > destruida al tiempo que aquella nacion, la embelleció mucho, puso en > ella su residencia y la hizo la capital del imperio. A su llegada los > chichimecas la llamaron Tezcuco, es decir, lugar de detencion, porque > allí pararon todas las naciones que entónces habia en la Nueva España." > No dudamos que sea esta la verdadera interpretacion, y entónces será un > carácter ideográfico con el valor fónico, Tezcoco; la escritura no > obstante, suministra gráficamente otra etimología: Tlacotl, jarilla, > vardasca, se retiere á la que brota en los terrenos llanos; Texcotli, es > la jarilla de los riscos, tomando la radical de texcalli, peñasco ó > risco; de aquí la verdadera ortografía del nombre de Texco-co, la > jarilla de los riscos.">> > > Carlos Santamarina From Carlossn at ui.boe.es Thu Jun 19 17:28:21 2003 From: Carlossn at ui.boe.es (Carlos Santamarina) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 19:28:21 +0200 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: From: Carlos Santamarina To: nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu Subject: ?Etimologia_de_Texcoco? En la página siguiente se ofrece otra etimología (y una versión del glifo toponímico)... http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Texcoco.html In 1885 Don Antonio Peñafiel published his "Nombres Geográficos de México," an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino... <> Carlos Santamarina From bcoon at montana.edu Thu Jun 19 19:24:15 2003 From: bcoon at montana.edu (Coon, Brad) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 13:24:15 -0600 Subject: Baidianus Ms. was RE: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: To my utter surprise, my library does have a copy of the facsimile edition of the Badianus Ms. An admittedly very quick perusal turned up only one plant name (in plate 19) with any resemblance to the first segment of Tetzcohco, namely "tetzmitl", identified as Sedum dendroideum, Span. 'siempreviva'. The translater notes that "Dr. Cornyn gives the derivation of the name Tetzmitl as rocky land obsidian (tetl stone, itztli obsidian, mitl arrow)." Brad Coon Reference Librarian The Libraries-Montana State University bcoon at montana.edu (406) 994-6026 -----Original Message----- From: Galen Brokaw [mailto:brokaw at buffalo.edu] Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 11:21 AM Cc: nahuat-l at cda.mrs.umn.edu Subject: Re: Etimologia de Texcoco (snipped most of the post) >the Badianus Manuscript, which is an indigenous herbal; I've seen a facsimile of this >document in the past, but my library doesn't have a copy; the writer uses Latin, but (snip) From arbyrne at uclink4.berkeley.edu Thu Jun 19 22:52:34 2003 From: arbyrne at uclink4.berkeley.edu (Roger Byrne) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 15:52:34 -0700 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco In-Reply-To: <3EF1F108.3A54DA7F@buffalo.edu> Message-ID: >The glyph on the webpage at the url sent out by Carlos comes from >the Mendoza Codex. >Orozco y Berra's explanation doesn't really solve the problem though >either for the >glyph or the word. He differentiates, as we have done in this >discussion, between the >actual meaning of the word and the pictographic morphology of the >glyph. So, if I'm >understanding him correctly, he says that the word actually means >"place of stopping, >detaining, or remaining" (I know, not a very elegant translation). >I'm a little wary >about accepting this interpretation just because Ixtlilxochitl says so with no >morphological or etymological corroboration. Ixtlilxochitl's >interpretation could >very easily be a folk etymology. >Then Orozco y Berra goes on to say that the glyph is essentially a >rebus (although he >doesn't use this term) not related to the actual meaning of the >toponym and that it >refers to "jarilla de risco" which in English I think would be "rock >rose". And this >rebus is arrived at by identifying the flower in the glyph as "tlacotl," which >according to him means "jarilla" (rock rose)--although this word often means >"stick"--, and "texcalli" which corresponds to the rocky hill. This >interpretation of >the phonetics of the glyph is more problematic than the others I >mentioned before. I >give him the benefit of the doubt that term "tlacotl" can mean >rock-rose. But even if >that is true, it seems unlikely to me that a tlacuilo would resort >to "tlacotl" to >produce the syllable "co" when it would be much easier to use a more >transparent >image, especially since a pot (comitl) is so commonly used to represent this >syllable. And in any case, pictographic glyphs images like this tend >to be stylized. >That is to say that a flower is a flower, not any particular species >of flower, just >a flower. So, having a flower growing out of a rocky hill might >invoke the idea of >"rock rose" and hence its phonetic articulation, but then to get >"texcalli", the >rocky mountain would have to serve the double function of specifying >the type of >flower and signifying its own phonetic articulation. I would be >interested to know if >there any other examples of glyphs serving double functions like this. >This leads back to one of the interpretations to which I referrred >originally: that >there is a word texcotli or tezcotli or something similar that >refers to some kind of >plant (maybe it is jarilla). The more I look at it, the more I think >maybe this maybe >the best hypothesis, given the limited evidence available. If this >were the case, >then we wouldn't need "texcalli" or "xochitl" to explain the glyph. >In this case, the >glyph wouldn't be a rebus at all. The flower growing out of the >rocky hill would >signify "rock rose", the rocky hill would be there not as a phonetic >element but >merely to identify what kind of flower it was. Finding a word like >texcotli used to >refer to a plant would really help out a lot. Aside from modern Nahuatl >speakers--which should never be discounted--there are three places >that I can think >of to look. 1) the Florentine Codex, which doesn't seem to contain >any such word; 2) >the Badianus Manuscript, which is an indigenous herbal; I've seen a >facsimile of this >document in the past, but my library doesn't have a copy; the writer >uses Latin, but >the names of the plants are all in Nahuatl; and 3) that 16th-century >text by the >proto-medico Hernandez who compiled volumes of encyclopedic >information on plants >from Mexico and their medicinal uses. I was under the impression >that the original >multi-volume work was destroyed when the Escorial burned, but >somebody recently told >me that part of it or a copy of it or something had survived and was >in some archive >in Madrid. I don't know if this is true and if so if it has been published. > >Galen > > > > > > > > > >"John F. Schwaller" wrote: > >> From: Carlos Santamarina >> To: nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu >> Subject: ?Etimologia_de_Texcoco? >> >> En la página siguiente se ofrece otra etimología (y una versión del > > glifo toponímico)... >> >> >>http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Texcoco.html >> >> In 1885 Don Antonio Peñafiel published his "Nombres Geográficos de >> México," an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in >> the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino... >> >> <> >> Diptongo jeroglífico, cuya interpretacion pertenece al Sr. Orozco y Berra. >> >> "Una montaña riscosa, sobre la cual florece la jarilla, y junto un brazo >> extendido con el símbolo atl." La ciudad de Tezcuco, dice Ixtlilxochitl, >> fué fundada en tiempo de los toltecas con el nombre de Catenichco; >> destruida al tiempo que aquella nacion, la embelleció mucho, puso en >> ella su residencia y la hizo la capital del imperio. A su llegada los >> chichimecas la llamaron Tezcuco, es decir, lugar de detencion, porque >> allí pararon todas las naciones que entónces habia en la Nueva España." >> No dudamos que sea esta la verdadera interpretacion, y entónces será un >> carácter ideográfico con el valor fónico, Tezcoco; la escritura no >> obstante, suministra gráficamente otra etimología: Tlacotl, jarilla, >> vardasca, se retiere á la que brota en los terrenos llanos; Texcotli, es >> la jarilla de los riscos, tomando la radical de texcalli, peñasco ó >> risco; de aquí la verdadera ortografía del nombre de Texco-co, la >> jarilla de los riscos.">> >> >> Carlos Santamarina Now that the Texcoco discussion has turned botanical, I thought I should point out that the flower depicted in the Mendoza glyph for "Tezcuco" (folio 3V) looks very much like Dahlia coccinea, perhaps the most beautiful of all Mesoamerican ornamentals. The artist confused me at first because he shows the ray flowers as yellow and the disk flowers as red. However, a quick check of Dahlia coccinea images via Google did produce a hybrid which has ray flowers that are red and yellow, with the central part of the petal red and the outer part yellow. Dahlia coccinea has a wide distribution in Central Mexico and although Oscar Sanchez doesn't report it specifically for the Texcoco area in his "La Flora del Valle de Mexico", he does note that it grows there between 1,000 and 3000 meters. Possibly also relevant here is that Alexis Wimmer's Classical Nahuatl Dictionary site lists the Nahuatl name for Dahlia coccinea as "acocohxôchitl". I will leave the linguistic analysis to the linguists. Orozco y Berra's "Texcotli, es la jarilla de los riscos" may be a reference to another member of the Asteraceae. Sanchez lists "jarilla" as the common name for 5 different species of Asteraceae in his Flora. Dahlia coccinea is not one of them. Roger Byrne -- Dr. Roger Byrne Associate Professor Geography Department 501 Mc Cone Hall University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 Phones: 510 643 9170 (office) 510 643 1834 (lab) 510 642 3903 (secretary) Fax: 510 642 3370 Email: arbyrne at uclink4.berkeley.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brokaw at buffalo.edu Fri Jun 20 14:48:20 2003 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 10:48:20 -0400 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: By the way, other glyphs from the Mendoza Codex, images of which are included on the same site with the Texcoco glyph sent out by Carlos, undermine the interpetation of the Texcoco glyph as being related in any way to "tlacotl" as suggested by Orozco y Berra. The glyphs for Tlacopan and Tlacotepec depict a plant that evidently is "tlacotl" and it doesn't look anything like the flower in the Texcoco glyhp. See: http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Tlacopan.html So, I think that pretty definitively eliminates that particular rebus interpretation of the glyph. Galen Carlos Santamarina wrote: > From: Carlos Santamarina > To: nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu > Subject: ?Etimologia_de_Texcoco? > > En la página siguiente se ofrece otra etimología (y una versión del > glifo toponímico)... > > http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Texcoco.html > > In 1885 Don Antonio Peñafiel published his "Nombres Geográficos de > México," an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in > the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino... > > < > Diptongo jeroglífico, cuya interpretacion pertenece al Sr. Orozco y Berra. > > "Una montaña riscosa, sobre la cual florece la jarilla, y junto un brazo > extendido con el símbolo atl." La ciudad de Tezcuco, dice Ixtlilxochitl, > fué fundada en tiempo de los toltecas con el nombre de Catenichco; > destruida al tiempo que aquella nacion, la embelleció mucho, puso en > ella su residencia y la hizo la capital del imperio. A su llegada los > chichimecas la llamaron Tezcuco, es decir, lugar de detencion, porque > allí pararon todas las naciones que entónces habia en la Nueva España." > No dudamos que sea esta la verdadera interpretacion, y entónces será un > carácter ideográfico con el valor fónico, Tezcoco; la escritura no > obstante, suministra gráficamente otra etimología: Tlacotl, jarilla, > vardasca, se retiere á la que brota en los terrenos llanos; Texcotli, es > la jarilla de los riscos, tomando la radical de texcalli, peñasco ó > risco; de aquí la verdadera ortografía del nombre de Texco-co, la > jarilla de los riscos.">> > > Carlos Santamarina From brokaw at buffalo.edu Fri Jun 20 15:28:50 2003 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:28:50 -0400 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: I don't know anything about the jarilla, but Roger is right. The descriptions and pictures of this plant that I found online don't sound or look anything like the flower in the glyph. See: http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/pfnm2/fichas/jarilla_caudata.htm and http://www.caletao.com.ar/rve/jarifina.htm And the dahlia coccinea that Roger mentions is much closer. Images of it can be seen here: http://www.thompson-morgan.com/seeds/uk/product_7911_1.html The following page says this plant was used for medical purposes, so maybe it can be found in Hernandez's work. http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/pfnm2/fichas/dahlia_coccinea.htm This is very interesting. I don't know if this is the flower represented by the glyph, but it could be. I definitely think Roger is right in suggesting that it is an attempt to represent a specific kind of flower. I was a too hasty in suggesting that the flower in the glyph was just a conventionalized image of a flower. I don't know what I was thinking. First, even without comparing it to other glyphs it is very obvious that this apparent flower is not like the generic flower used as one of the twenty iconic signs in the calendar. And the Codex Mendoza does use the conventional flower as it appears in calendric dates in other toponyms such as Xochimilco. This would suggest that the image in the Tezcuco (this is how it is spelled alphabetically in the Mendoza Codex) glyph is intended to be a mimetic representation of a specific kind of plant as opposed to an iconic image of a generic flower. This would also imply then that this image does not necessarily invoke the phonetic articulation of the word "xochitl" unless the name of the plant originally had "xochitl" as part of its name, but it is very likely that it did. I think most--maybe all?--flower names used "xochitl" with some kind of qualifier at the beginning as in the name "acocohxochitl" that Roger pointed out. The phonetic coincidence or common denominator in the terms--namely the "x", in texcalli and xochitl, and the "o" or "u" in xochitl and Texcoco-- and the semantic convergence in meaning indicated by the glyph with a flower-like plant that grows in rocky places is very intriguing here. Whatever plant it is, if it characteristically grows in rocky places as implied by the Mendoza version of the glyph, it's name might very well have indicated this quality by qualifying the term "xochitl" with "texcalli", which would produce "texcalxochitl". It kind of makes you want to posit that there was an original word "texcalxochitl" that somehow got transformed into texcotli which produced Texcoco, or that the name of the town was originally Texcalxochco and then it got transformed into Texcoco. That means, though, that the "alx" and the "ch" would have suffered elision. Stranger things have happened, right? As in many languages, Nahuatl place names tend to be metonymic in that they refer to some quality associated with that place. But just like in any language, maybe the name can become so conventional that consciousness of the original meaning can disappear. This can lead to at least two phenomena which make it difficult to establish etymological origins: 1) the name may be more susceptible to idiosynchratic modification independent of other general linguistic transformations of the langauge; and 2) general linguistic developments may not affect the name because it has been disassociated with its morphological origins through conventional use. So basically the word may diverge from the rest of the language, and it is either transformed or not independent of other linguistic phenomena. I'm not sure if this actually happpens; I'm suggesting it as a theoretical possibility. Of course, this phenomenon would be more common and the problem more acute in oral cultures. The point I was trying to make before, was that in this case, the culture isn't strictly oral. So, the question is to what degree do pictographs stabilize words such as toponyms that may be represented through mimetic (or even rebus) morphology in the pictogram. Does this kind of pictography fix language in ways similar to that claimed for alphabetic writing? And in what way? It should be pointed out that the morphology of most (although I don't think all) Nahuatl toponyms is fairly transparent and consistent with the words from which they derive. So why is this one so difficult? I figure there are at least three possibilities: 1) there is the theory about a Nahuatlization of a non-Nahuatl place name; 2) we just might not be familiar with the word/s that make up the toponym either because they dropped out of the language at some point or because we just haven't run across them yet; or 3) some process like the one I described above has transformed (or preserved?) the word beyond definitive morphological interpretation. However, in addition to searching texts for words consistent with the toponym, an exhaustive study and analysis of glyphs might also help here. For instance, if we were able to find another glyph that used this same flower image and/or the rocky hill in a more transparent way, it might corroborate an interpretation of the Texcoco glyph. And if the glyphs are not rebuses, then it would also shed light on the actual morphology of the word. Galen > Now that the Texcoco discussion has turned botanical, I thought I > should point out that the flower depicted in the Mendoza glyph for > "Tezcuco" (folio 3V) looks very much like Dahlia coccinea, perhaps the > most beautiful of all Mesoamerican ornamentals. The artist confused > me at first because he shows the ray flowers as yellow and the disk > flowers as red. However, a quick check of Dahlia coccinea images via > Google did produce a hybrid which has ray flowers that are red and > yellow, with the central part of the petal red and the outer part > yellow. Dahlia coccinea has a wide distribution in Central Mexico and > although Oscar Sanchez doesn't report it specifically for the Texcoco > area in his "La Flora del Valle de Mexico", he does note that it > grows there between 1,000 and 3000 meters. Possibly also relevant > here is that Alexis Wimmer's Classical Nahuatl Dictionary site lists > the Nahuatl name for Dahlia coccinea as "acocohxôchitl". I will leave > the linguistic analysis to the linguists. Orozco y Berra's "Texcotli, > es la jarilla de los riscos" may be a reference to another member of > the Asteraceae. Sanchez lists "jarilla" as the common name for 5 > different species of Asteraceae in his Flora. Dahlia coccinea is not > one of them. Roger Byrne --Dr. Roger Byrne > Associate Professor > Geography Department > 501 Mc Cone Hall > University of California, Berkeley > Berkeley, CA 94720 > > Phones: 510 643 9170 (office) > 510 643 1834 (lab) > 510 642 3903 (secretary) > Fax: 510 642 3370Email: arbyrne at uclink4.berkeley.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From idiez at mac.com Sun Jun 22 04:04:19 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 23:04:19 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n's Message-ID: When my native speaking friends say "ama", "today", and "amantzi", "right now"; or "nica", "here", and "nicantzi", "right here", I can pretty much tell that we are dealing with devoiced "n"s at the end of "ama(n)" and "nica(n)". Perhaps the "-tzi" is also actually "-tzi(n)" with a devoiced "n". My question is this: My friends also say "tohuanti", "we", "inmohuanti", "you all", and "ininhuanti", "they"; as well as "Ximoquetzaca", "Stand up, all of you." Given that both "n" and the saltillo are plural indicators, are we dealing with "tohuanti(n)" or "tohuanti(h)", etc., etc? When my friends get back in town, I plan on having them doing some serious wispering in my ear, and perhaps that will give me an answer. But I would appreciate any comments. Also, if utterance final "n"s have always been devoiced, does that mean that words such as the preterite singular of "cualani", were actually pronounced "cuala"? (In modern huastecan nahuatl the "n" is protected: "cualanqui".) And if this is so, how did the early writers of dictionaries and grammars know if a word ended in "n" or not? Some words, such as the "nica(n)" - "nicantzi(n)" pair have optional suffixes that provide a clue. But how about the nouns that end in "-in", for example? Modern huastecan nahuatl says "quatochi" for "rabbit". I assume "tochi(n)" has always been pronounced with a devoiced "n". How would you know? John Sullivan, Ph.D. Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. Francisco García Salinas 604 Colonia CNOP Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 México +52 (492) 768-6048 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx From davius_sanctex at terra.es Sun Jun 22 17:48:31 2003 From: davius_sanctex at terra.es (Davius Sanctex) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 19:48:31 +0200 Subject: devoiced "n's Message-ID: But, John, the devoicing of sonorants /w, l, y/ in nahuatl occurs in __#, __ [- voiced], if we expect the same patter for /n/ we must devoing of /n/ in /aman/ and in /aman(tzin)/. Therefore the first "n" in "amantzi" sould have the same audibility that the second, is it not the case? From idiez at mac.com Sun Jun 22 18:46:03 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 13:46:03 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n's In-Reply-To: <001d01c338e6$7f475280$28e02550@pc1> Message-ID: Davius, The words are pronounced "ama" and "amantzi", "nica" and "nicantzi" with the only audible "n"s being the one's I have written here. John On Sunday, June 22, 2003, at 12:48 PM, Davius Sanctex wrote: > But, John, the devoicing of sonorants /w, l, y/ in nahuatl occurs in > __#, __ > [- voiced], if we expect the same patter for /n/ we must devoing of > /n/ in > /aman/ and in /aman(tzin)/. Therefore the first "n" in "amantzi" sould > have > the same audibility that the second, is it not the case? > > From idiez at mac.com Sun Jun 22 18:47:52 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 13:47:52 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n" Message-ID: So, leaving orthographic omissions aside, there is a big difference between "n" devoicing (which shouldn't really be called dropping) and "i" dropping (which really drops out or assimilates). John On Sunday, June 22, 2003, at 09:22 AM, Michael Mccafferty wrote: > N-dropping, as you know, John, is a big-time Nahuatl characteristic. It > actually occurs quite rarely in "classical" Nahuatl, i.e., those n's > show > up in the texts. When an n does not appear where it is expected, a > perusal > of the entire text allows one to more or less safely say whether its > absence in the case of this particular word is an aspect of the dialect > that is being recorded or is simply a scribal error, i.e., > orthographic or > aural. > From idiez at mac.com Sun Jun 22 18:55:42 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 13:55:42 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n" Message-ID: What got me thinking about this is the section in Carochi's grammar where he talks about the purposive construction. At the very end of folio 28v (page 116-117 in Lockhart's edition) he gives two variants for the plural of the outgoing imperative: "-tih" and "-tin", and concludes by saying "ambos plurales don seguros". I just wonder how interchangeable these two pluralizers might be from region to region. John Sullivan, Ph.D. Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. Francisco García Salinas 604 Colonia CNOP Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 México +52 (492) 768-6048 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx From campbel at indiana.edu Sun Jun 22 23:00:21 2003 From: campbel at indiana.edu (r. joe campbell) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 18:00:21 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n" In-Reply-To: <076882E7-A4E2-11D7-8769-003065C46A4A@mac.com> Message-ID: John, Last night (before I had seen any replies to you) I started writing you a notita, which became a notota -- and then the line to my server dropped me, losing all the detail in phonetic description, together with my patience. No matter, anything that I write after midnight is filled with confusion. I have admired your energy and activities in Nahuatl for several years now, and I think that the alternations that you're pointing out, as well as the problem of "no possible alternation" (e.g., "ximoquetzaca") is an interesting problem, from both the points of view of the first language learner and of the language analyst. But my main point was a sort of negative remark about discussing "devoiced n's". The label "devoiced n" or "voiceless n" already has a well established meaning in phonetic description -- it refers to a sound segment in which there is oral obstruction (e.g., the tip of the tongue is in contact with the upper front teeth or the alveolar ridge) and the velum is swung down and forward, allowing the air stream to flow through the nasal passages, while there is no vibration of the vocal folds (state of voicelessness). From your earlier statements (and now reinforced by your replies since), as well as familiarity with some dialects of Nahuatl, I realized that what you probably meant was "n deletion", "n dropping", or "get-rid- of-the-nasal-segment-word-final-position". During the summer of my first contact with Nahuatl, I lived in Tepoztlan and spent more than half of my time in a nearby village, Santa Catarina, so I had the opportunity to hear and record a lot of both dialects. Some Tepoztecos (especially a friend that I talked a lot with) ridiculed the speech and the people of Santa Catarina, partly because of their "ignorance" in pronouncing "final n": Tepoztlan Santa Catarina house calli calli houses caltin calti~ (where the ~ indicates that they didn't pronounce a final n (failed to obstruct the oral passage [the essential characteristic of consonants]), but *did* swing the velum down and forward, allowing the air to flow through the nasal passages, resulting in a *nasalized* vowel. This is actually frequently an intermediate step in the loss of n. If it stops there, the language is said to have "nasal vowels" and, just as there are Coke and Pepsi camps, some people would claim that the nasal vowels were phonemes and the others would claim that the nasal vowels were merely the superficial result of dynamic rules that assumed the nasal consonants to still "be there" at some level and to be involved in nasalization of the vowels. But if the process didn't stop there, the next step would be like your dialect: the gesture of the velum which *opens* the nasal passages would be deleted from one's pronunciation habits -- the vowel of the final syllable would remain "oral" and the "dropping" would be historically complete. So the following data is representative: n-dropping dialect n-retaining dialect it flies patlani patlani it flew --> opatla opatlan they flew opatlanqueh opatlanqueh he gets angry cualani cualani she got angry --> ocuala ocuala they got angry ocualanqueh ocualanqueh In describing "what's going on", I subscribe to (and actively use) your "mafia" (as Sancho Panza said, "Please excuse...") terminology: if the /n/ is "protected", it stays. If not, it gets "erased". All the best, Joe p.s. I note that Davius makes a good point with reference to the process of de-voicing and our expectations of regularity (although language comes with no warranty certificate on this issue): 1. we would expect /n/ to behave the same in both environments. Neither your speakers nor those of Santa Catarina change "protected" 'n'. 2. we would expect /n/ and /l/ to behave in a parallel way. Speakers from Santa Catarina de-voice their /l/ both in word-final environment and before voiceless segments. They have no voiceless 'n' in word-final environment nor before voiceless segments. (It is interesting to picture [with our ears] what a voiceless 'n' (sniff) would sound like.) p.p.s. With regard to Miqueltzi's comment on so-called "classical" Nahuatl, here are some examples from Molina (mainly 1555). And Michael's cautionary remark about the correlation between what is written and what is actually pronounced is something to laminate and carry around in one's billfold -- what is written helps us guess better, but it is not a one-to-one map to reality. (I would *guess* that fray Alonso's document involved his observation of: 1) a substantial amount of observation of variation; and 2) an intention to write down the more "explicit" or "careful" form. aoctlei. falta por mengua. . 55m-9 atl molonia. fontanal lugar de fuentes. . 55m-10 atlei. falta por mengua. . 55m-9 axca. agora tiempo presente. . 55m-00 axca =aoc. apenas o con dificultad. . 55m-1 axca =niman. agora luego. . 55m-00 ayaxca. apenas o con dificultad. . 55m-1 ayocaxca. apenas o con dificultad. . 55m-1 cacoya =tla. audiencia de los juezes. . 55m-1 caczohuaya. zapateria. . 55m-4 castilla texocooctli. vino de manzanas. . 55m-20 castilla tonalxihuitl. manzanilla yerua conocida. . 55m-13 cecemaltepepa. a cada ciudad. . 55m-00 cecen tepepa. a cada ciudad. . 55m-00 chichilocuili. ceuo para pescar. . 55m- 4 chihua =ichihualoya nic. a tiempo o coyuntura hazer algo. . 55m-1 cihuatepito. hembra pequen~a. . 55m-11 cochcayotiloya =ne. cenadero o cenador lugar. . 55m-4 cocototzauhya =to. chueca do juegan los huesos. . 55m-4 cualoya =tla. cenadero o cenador lugar. . 55m-4 cuayotl =te. braueza tal. . 55m-2 cuicuicanito. grillo especie de cigarra. . 55m-10 ehuatlepitzalonito. fuelles pequen~as. . 55m-10 iczaya =totla. pata o planta del pie. . 55m-15 ilamato. vejezuela. . 55m-19 ipa =zan. en alguna manera. . 55m-7 ixocuili. ladilla. . 55m-12 ixtechichihuiliztli. enfermedad tal. . 55m-7 ixtechichilihui =n [scribal error: ??same as above item; differentiated by n dropping: 55m]. enfermar delas pestan~as. . 55m-7 manaya =atoyatl imo. remansso de rio. . 55m-17 matepoztlaximalonito. azuela pequen~a. . 55m-00 miecti. muchedumbre. . 55m-14 ocuili. ceuo para pescar. . 55m-4 otlazotic immoyollotzi. hago gracias a vuestra merced. . 71m2-13 pitzahuaya =to. cintura. . 55m-4 popohualonito =tla. escoba pequen~a o escobajo. . 55m-8 tenahueloa =ni. descercar destruir la cerca. . 55m-5 tenahuitoma =ni. descercar destruir la cerca. . 55m-5 tenaxitinia =ni. descercar destruir la cerca. . 55m-5 tepitoyotl. breuedad. . 55m-2 tepozmaccuauhtepito. espada pequen~a. . 55m-9 tepoztlacohualonito. marauedi. . 55m-13 teuctlatoloya. audiencia de los juezes. . 55m-1 teyotia =nitla. apreciar poner o declarar el precio dela cosa. . 55m-1 teyotiani =tla. apreciador tal. . 55m-1 teyotilli =tla. apreciada cosa assi. . 55m-1 tlaliloya =ne. assiento do se sientan. . 55m-1 tlaliloya =tlatla [scribal error: ??third "t" looks a little like an "i", but with the "t", the word matches "tlatlatlaliloya" (except for the dropped "n") in form and meaning: 55m]. armario o almario. . 55m-1 tlatiloya =ne. escondrijo de hombres. . 55m-8 tlatlatiloya =tla. despenssa. . 55m-6 tocoya =te. cimiterio. . 55m-4 tzinnamacoya =ne. mancebia puteria. . 55m-13 tzintla =tla. abaxo. . 55m-00 tzontecoya =tla. audiencia de los juezes. . 55m-1 xalpa. arenal. . 55m-1 yaotlapixque on yeya. estancia de veladores en batallas. . 55m-9 yohuapa. deman~ana. . 55m-5 zazaliuhya =to. chueca do juegan los huesos. . 55m-4 zohuatepito. hembra pequen~a. . 55m-11 zoyatepito. palmito. . 55m-15 From campbel at indiana.edu Mon Jun 23 16:40:22 2003 From: campbel at indiana.edu (r. joe campbell) Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 11:40:22 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have just noticed a typo in the paradigmatic data that I sent yesterday. The careful reader will have already noticed it too. In n-retaining dialects, 'she got angry' is "ocualan", not "ocuala". It must have been a problem in transmission -- because I *know* that my fingers gave the keyboard the right information. >8-) Joe > > So the following data is representative: > > n-dropping dialect n-retaining dialect > it flies patlani patlani > it flew --> opatla opatlan > they flew opatlanqueh opatlanqueh > > > he gets angry cualani cualani > she got angry --> ocuala ocualan (corrected) > they got angry ocualanqueh ocualanqueh > From IXTLIL at aol.com Tue Jun 24 03:44:05 2003 From: IXTLIL at aol.com (IXTLIL at aol.com) Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 23:44:05 EDT Subject: Mojon--a simple question? Message-ID: True students of Nauhuatl--please comment. For many years, people have written about Nahua rights in land and territories, but I can recall nothing about the core term for boundary. Molina--Vocabulario "Mojon o linde de heredad" quaxochtli (Molina shows show more elaborated forms also relating to placing boundaries, etc.). What is the current thinking on the etymology of this common but important item? Simeon, never that shy, does not hazard a guess. Is it or something like it in current use among any groups? Thanks, Jerry Offner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From idiez at mac.com Tue Jun 24 12:34:59 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 07:34:59 -0500 Subject: two more on Huastecan Nahuatl Message-ID: There are two further characteristics of Huastecan Nahuatl that puzzle me: 1. The plural of the future tense has no /k/, while the conditional/unfulfilled action construction does. Here's an example: future singular: "chocaz" future plural: "chocaceh" conditional/ unfulfilled action: "chocazquia" 2. Instead of "nimitzilhuia", "I tell you", we have "nimitzilia" with the apparent loss of the /w/ (And it's the same in all tenses). At least one of my native speaking friends, pronounces a very slight aspiration before the "l". Something like "nimitzihlia". I understand that this is metathesis: a reverse case of what Lockhart comments on as the origin of the "-lhuia" applicative suffix for Class 3 verbs. Would anyone like to comment on what's going on in these two cases? John Sullivan, Ph.D. Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. Francisco García Salinas 604 Colonia CNOP Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 México +52 (492) 768-6048 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Jun 24 13:15:19 2003 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 08:15:19 -0500 Subject: two more on Huastecan Nahuatl In-Reply-To: <44EE5E56-A640-11D7-BAC3-003065C46A4A@mac.com> Message-ID: John, In "nimitzilia" ~ "nimitzihlia" which syllable is the strong one? Or, put another way, how are these pronounced? [ni-mitz-i-lya] where [-i-] is the strong syllable, or [ni-mitz-i-li-a] where [-li-] is the strong syllable? As for the future plural question, this is really interesting. fut. sing. [cokas] fut. pl. [cokaseh] (or is that [cokase?], where [?] = glottal stop?) cond. [cokaskiya] ~ [cokaskia] It looks like future plural is form analogically on future singular, but I don't know. Michael On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 idiez at mac.com wrote: > There are two further characteristics of Huastecan Nahuatl that puzzle > me: > 1. The plural of the future tense has no /k/, while the > conditional/unfulfilled > action construction does. Here's an example: > future singular: "chocaz" > future plural: "chocaceh" > conditional/ unfulfilled action: "chocazquia" > 2. Instead of "nimitzilhuia", "I tell you", we have "nimitzilia" with > the apparent > loss of the /w/ (And it's the same in all tenses). At least one of my > native > speaking friends, pronounces a very slight aspiration before the "l". > Something > like "nimitzihlia". I understand that this is metathesis: a reverse > case of what > Lockhart comments on as the origin of the "-lhuia" applicative suffix > for Class 3 > verbs. > Would anyone like to comment on what's going on in these two cases? > > John Sullivan, Ph.D. > Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci�n Etnol�gica de Zacatecas, A.C. > Francisco Garc�a Salinas 604 > Colonia CNOP > Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > M�xico > +52 (492) 768-6048 > idiez at mac.com > www.idiez.org.mx > > > Michael McCafferty Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana 47401 mmccaffe at indiana.edu "...as a dog howls at the moon, I talk." -Rumi From schwallr at mrs.umn.edu Tue Jun 24 14:10:31 2003 From: schwallr at mrs.umn.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 09:10:31 -0500 Subject: Congrats to Mary Clayton Message-ID: One of our pioneer subscribers, Mary Clayton, is the proud author of a new article on Nahuatl: "Evidence for a Native-Speaking Nahuatl Author in the Ayer Vocabulario Trilingue" International Journal of Lexicography, VOL 16, NO: 2 (2003), PG: 99-120 John F. Schwaller Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean 315 Behmler Hall University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E 4th Street Morris, MN 56267 320-589-6015 FAX 320-589-6399 schwallr at mrs.umn.edu From idiez at mac.com Tue Jun 24 20:16:39 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 15:16:39 -0500 Subject: two more on Huastecan Nahuatl In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIchael, 1. ni-mitz-i-li-a: "li" is the strong syllable. 2. There is an aspiration on the end of "chocaseh". The people I work with don't do any glottal stops. They are all aspirations, both word internally and in the word final position. Although I guess you could sort them by the amount of friction which is heard. The word final aspiration is barely audible. Between two vowels ("ehecatl", "air" and "noha", "still/todavía") it sounds pretty much like an English "h". Preceding a consonant, its like a Mexican "j" (not as strong as in Spain). Could you explain what is meant by "analogical formation"? John On Tuesday, June 24, 2003, at 08:15 AM, Michael Mccafferty wrote: > John, > > In "nimitzilia" ~ "nimitzihlia" which syllable is the strong one? > > Or, put another way, how are these pronounced? > > [ni-mitz-i-lya] where [-i-] is the strong syllable, or > > [ni-mitz-i-li-a] where [-li-] is the strong syllable? > > > > As for the future plural question, this is really interesting. > > fut. sing. [cokas] > fut. pl. [cokaseh] (or is that [cokase?], where [?] = glottal stop?) > cond. [cokaskiya] ~ [cokaskia] > > It looks like future plural is form analogically on future singular, > but I > don't know. > > Michael > > > On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 idiez at mac.com wrote: > >> There are two further characteristics of Huastecan Nahuatl that puzzle >> me: >> 1. The plural of the future tense has no /k/, while the >> conditional/unfulfilled >> action construction does. Here's an example: >> future singular: "chocaz" >> future plural: "chocaceh" >> conditional/ unfulfilled action: "chocazquia" >> 2. Instead of "nimitzilhuia", "I tell you", we have "nimitzilia" with >> the apparent >> loss of the /w/ (And it's the same in all tenses). At least one of my >> native >> speaking friends, pronounces a very slight aspiration before the "l". >> Something >> like "nimitzihlia". I understand that this is metathesis: a reverse >> case of what >> Lockhart comments on as the origin of the "-lhuia" applicative suffix >> for Class 3 >> verbs. >> Would anyone like to comment on what's going on in these two cases? >> >> John Sullivan, Ph.D. >> Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. >> Francisco García Salinas 604 >> Colonia CNOP >> Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 >> México >> +52 (492) 768-6048 >> idiez at mac.com >> www.idiez.org.mx >> >> >> > > > Michael McCafferty > Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies > Indiana University > Bloomington, Indiana > 47401 > mmccaffe at indiana.edu > > "...as a dog howls at the moon, I talk." > > -Rumi > > From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Jun 24 23:02:20 2003 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:02:20 -0500 Subject: two more on Huastecan Nahuatl In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ------------------- >> Could you explain what is meant by "analogical formation"? > John > > Juantzi, Ahmo. I consulted my various selves and I have no idea what one of them was thinking this morning. Please excuse the interference. I attribute the strange comment to werewolves baying outside the window. But it is very odd that the /k/ would maintain in the conditional in Huastecan Nahuatl but "drop" in the future. Very strange. Sometimes, because of frequency of usage, an unexpected form will surface. The future tense, of course, is a mighty popular syntactical form in Nahuatl, very frequently employed. So, maybe this is one of those instances that we can attribute to frequency of usage. It certainly is a lot easier saying "chocazeh" instead of "chocazqueh". Now, I do know that in so-called "classical" Nahuatl /k/ will sometimes apparently drop after /s/. The example I'm thinking of, which I'll write in phonetic characters since it seems more transparent that way, is the word for "here": /iski/ > /isi/. (i.e., in the traditional orthography for Nahuatl: izqui > ici). That certainly is very little help, I admit. Michael On Tuesday, June 24, 2003, at 08:15 AM, Michael Mccafferty wrote: > > > John, > > > > In "nimitzilia" ~ "nimitzihlia" which syllable is the strong one? > > > > Or, put another way, how are these pronounced? > > > > [ni-mitz-i-lya] where [-i-] is the strong syllable, or > > > > [ni-mitz-i-li-a] where [-li-] is the strong syllable? > > > > > > > > As for the future plural question, this is really interesting. > > > > fut. sing. [cokas] > > fut. pl. [cokaseh] (or is that [cokase?], where [?] = glottal stop?) > > cond. [cokaskiya] ~ [cokaskia] > > > > It looks like future plural is form analogically on future singular, > > but I > > don't know. > > > > Michael > > > > > > On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 idiez at mac.com wrote: > > > >> There are two further characteristics of Huastecan Nahuatl that puzzle > >> me: > >> 1. The plural of the future tense has no /k/, while the > >> conditional/unfulfilled > >> action construction does. Here's an example: > >> future singular: "chocaz" > >> future plural: "chocaceh" > >> conditional/ unfulfilled action: "chocazquia" > >> 2. Instead of "nimitzilhuia", "I tell you", we have "nimitzilia" with > >> the apparent > >> loss of the /w/ (And it's the same in all tenses). At least one of my > >> native > >> speaking friends, pronounces a very slight aspiration before the "l". > >> Something > >> like "nimitzihlia". I understand that this is metathesis: a reverse > >> case of what > >> Lockhart comments on as the origin of the "-lhuia" applicative suffix > >> for Class 3 > >> verbs. > >> Would anyone like to comment on what's going on in these two cases? > >> > >> John Sullivan, Ph.D. > >> Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. > >> Francisco García Salinas 604 > >> Colonia CNOP > >> Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > >> México > >> +52 (492) 768-6048 > >> idiez at mac.com > >> www.idiez.org.mx > >> > >> > >> > > > > > > Michael McCafferty > > Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies > > Indiana University > > Bloomington, Indiana > > 47401 > > mmccaffe at indiana.edu > > > > "...as a dog howls at the moon, I talk." > > > > -Rumi > > > > > > > From schwallr at mrs.umn.edu Mon Jun 30 16:11:54 2003 From: schwallr at mrs.umn.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 11:11:54 -0500 Subject: Klor de Alva Message-ID: Every once and so often people write in to inquire what has become of Jorge J. Klor de Alva. He is now the President of Apollo International the holding company that owns the University of Phoenix. Here is a recent bit of an article about distance education and just-in-time education that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education : >Jorge Klor de Alva, the president of Apollo International, says the >company, established in 1999 with $40-million in capital, is braced to >explode. Along with plans to develop campuses in India with a major local >partner there, he says, the company is in serious talks with college >operators in Mexico and is exploring new ventures in Brazil, all of which >could bring as many as 40,000 students into the Apollo International >family. The company expects to go public in three to five years. By then, >Mr. Klor de Alva, who thinks in grand terms, hopes to have 70,000 to >100,000 students. And who says studying Nahuatl won't earn you the big bucks? John F. Schwaller Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean 315 Behmler Hall University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E 4th Street Morris, MN 56267 320-589-6015 FAX 320-589-6399 schwallr at mrs.umn.edu From mmontcha at oregonvos.net Mon Jun 30 23:54:07 2003 From: mmontcha at oregonvos.net (Matthew Montchalin) Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 16:54:07 -0700 Subject: Klor de Alva In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20030630110900.0454fde0@cda.mrs.umn.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, John F. Schwaller wrote: |>Jorge Klor de Alva, the president of Apollo International, says the |>company, established in 1999 with $40-million in capital, is braced to |>explode. Along with plans to develop campuses in India with a major local |>partner there, he says, the company is in serious talks with college |>operators in Mexico and is exploring new ventures in Brazil, all of which |>could bring as many as 40,000 students into the Apollo International |>family. The company expects to go public in three to five years. By then, |>Mr. Klor de Alva, who thinks in grand terms, hopes to have 70,000 to |>100,000 students. | |And who says studying Nahuatl won't earn you the big bucks? Do you know of any animated cartoons on DVD with a soundtrack in Nahuatl, and Nahuatl subtitles? From idiez at mac.com Mon Jun 16 16:34:00 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2003 11:34:00 -0500 Subject: tetzcohco Message-ID: Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody know what this means? John Sullivan, Ph.D. Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 Colonia CNOP Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 M?xico +52 (492) 768-6048 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx From notoca at hotmail.com Tue Jun 17 14:32:03 2003 From: notoca at hotmail.com (Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 22:32:03 +0800 Subject: tetzcohco Message-ID: Hi Would large stones (rocks) or stony ground (tescal, texcal) be a contender? CC -------Original Message------- From: idiez at mac.com Date: Tuesday, 17 June 2003 12:37:42 AM To: nahuat-l Subject: tetzcohco Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody know what this means? John Sullivan, Ph.D. Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 Colonia CNOP Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 M?xico +52 (492) 768-6048 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Jun 17 15:21:54 2003 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 10:21:54 -0500 Subject: tetzcohco In-Reply-To: <3EEF2663.000001.07521@pentium> Message-ID: I don't have an answer for this. Sorta reminds of tetzahuiya and related forms that have to do with shamanizing. There is co:cohtli a tube and also a turtledove. But that's not much help. An inhabitant of the place was known as a tetzcohcatl. Miquel On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl wrote: > Hi > > Would large stones (rocks) or stony ground (tescal, texcal) be a contender? > > CC > > -------Original Message------- > > From: idiez at mac.com > Date: Tuesday, 17 June 2003 12:37:42 AM > To: nahuat-l > Subject: tetzcohco > > Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root > would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody > know what this means? > > John Sullivan, Ph.D. > Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. > Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 > Colonia CNOP > Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > M?xico > +52 (492) 768-6048 > idiez at mac.com > www.idiez.org.mx > > > > From schwallr at mrs.umn.edu Tue Jun 17 16:46:30 2003 From: schwallr at mrs.umn.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 11:46:30 -0500 Subject: Law in Mexico Before the Conquest Message-ID: Replicas con: Mike Widener mwidener at mail.law.utexas.edu Estimados colegas, Una nueva exhibici?n en linea, "Law in Mexico Before the Conquest" ("El derecho en M?xico antes de la Conquista") describa las sistemas jur?dicas de los Aztecas y Mayas. Proporcionada por la Biblioteca de Derecho Tarlton de la Universidad de Texas en Austin, la exhibici?n est? disponible en http://www.law.utexas.edu/rare/aztec/Home.htm La exhibici?n toma textos e im?genes de cr?nicas como el Codice Florentino y Codice Mendoza para ilustrar temas como las cortes aztecas, normas de evidencia, la conducta de los jueces, y el derecho penal. Tambi?n hay una bibliograf?a anotada sobre el derecho azteca y maya, en http://www.law.utexas.edu/rare/aztec.htm Esta bibliograf?a ha sido una de las p?ginas m?s visitadas del sitio de la Biblioteca Tarlton, y ha sido actualizado con 45 nuevas citas bibliograf?cas. La exhibici?n y la bibliograf?a fueron escritas por Mike Widener, Director de Colecciones Especiales en la Biblioteca Tarlton, y dise?adas por Eric Glass. -------------------------------------- A new online exhibit from the Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas at Austin, describes the sophisticated legal systems of the Aztec and Maya civilizations. Entitled "Law in Mexico Before the Conquest", the exhibit may be viewed at at: http://www.law.utexas.edu/rare/aztec/Home.htm The exhibit uses the words and pictures of native chroniclers to illustrate and explain Aztec courts, standards of evidence, judicial conduct, criminal law, and other aspects of Aztec and Maya law. The Spanish conquistadors found not only empires and cities in Mexico to rival those of Europe, but also highly developed legal systems. The penalties exacted by Aztec courts seemed quite severe to the Spaniards, yet their reliance on evidence, the promptness of their rulings, and their high standards of conduct were much admired. The descriptions of good and bad attorneys, told and illustrated in the 16th century by Aztec informants in Fray Bernardino de Sahagun's landmark "History of the Things of New Spain", still sound familiar today: "The good attorney ... is discreet, able, astute, diligent, constant, unflagging, sharp-tongued, contentious, wrangling, ingenious, persevering, audacious, unyielding, persistent, dignified, solicitous, careful of things.... He collects tribute ... He consumes a tenth of it -- he draws recompense. The bad attorney [is] one who takes things from others by fraud. [He is] a persistent beggar, an excessively importunate one ... He is a hypocrite -- lazy, lukewarm, negligent, deceiving, two-faced, inconstant, squandering, dumb, mute." In addition, an annotated bibliography, "Resources on Aztec and Maya Law" is available at . The bibliography, long one of the most visited pages on the Tarlton Law Library's website, is newly updated and more than tripled in size. The exhibit was researched and written by Mike Widener, Head of Special Collections at the Tarlton Law Library. The web design was by Eric Glass, Reserve Room Supervisor, before his departure to become Serials Librarian at the Columbia Law School Library. -- ***** MIKE WIDENER, Head of Special Collections Joseph D. Jamail Fellow in Law Librarianship Tarlton Law Library, School of Law The University of Texas at Austin 727 E. Dean Keeton Street, Austin, TX 78705-3224 Phone: 512/471-7263; fax: 512/471-0243 E-mail: mwidener at mail.law.utexas.edu Visit our Web site... http://www.law.utexas.edu/rare/ John F. Schwaller Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean 315 Behmler Hall University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E 4th Street Morris, MN 56267 320-589-6015 FAX 320-589-6399 schwallr at mrs.umn.edu From brokaw at buffalo.edu Tue Jun 17 22:00:20 2003 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 18:00:20 -0400 Subject: tetzcohco Message-ID: Hi John, I don't think there is a consensus on the morphology of the word for Texcoco or Tetzcoco. I guess some have argued that "tetzcotli" refers to a kind of plant. That would neatly solve the mistery, but it would be nice to know what plant it was. Another possibility that has been suggested is that "texcotli" may refer to a kind of jar or pot. But I think this interpretation is based on pictographic toponyms that include a pot. There are two problems with this theory. First, there is a perfectly good explanation for having a pot in the glyph that doesn't require us to posit a different, unknown word for it: it is functioning as a rebus. Second, the nature of the glyphs themselves don't support this interpretation: the glyph is a pot and a flower on a rocky hill; if "texcotli" meant pot, you wouldn't need to combine the picture of the pot with any other elements to produce the name. Based on glyphs in different codices, Frances Berdan identifies the elements of the pictographic word as follows: tex from texcalli [cliff, crag, precipice, rocky place] or tetz from tetzcaltetl [alabaster?] co from comitl [pot] co (locative) The glyph often contains a pot and a flower on a rocky hill. But, of course, these glyphs are rebuses that are used to represent sound rather than meaning. Grammatically, these words wouldn't combine like this. Hence the suggestion that maybe the pot in the glyph coincides with a word "texcotli" meaning pot. But it doesn't seem likely to me that the pot in the glyph would represent the whole word "texcotli" or "tetzcotli" because then there would be no need for the rocky hill to produce "tex" or "tetz". It seems to me that it is more likely that the pot in the glyph is a rebus used to signify the syllable "co" from "comitl" unrelated to the original meaning of the toponym. So maybe the pot and the hill are rebuses functioning as phonetic signs repersenting the syllables of the word, and the flower is there to symbolize the plant "texcotli", the true meaning of the word? I know that isn't very definitive, especially because as far as I know nobody has identified which plant it might be. Galen idiez at mac.com wrote: > Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root > would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody > know what this means? > > John Sullivan, Ph.D. > Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. > Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 > Colonia CNOP > Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > M?xico > +52 (492) 768-6048 > idiez at mac.com > www.idiez.org.mx From bcoon at montana.edu Tue Jun 17 22:26:10 2003 From: bcoon at montana.edu (Coon, Brad) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 16:26:10 -0600 Subject: tetzcohco Message-ID: Perhaps it represents a Nahuatlized version of a pre-existing (i.e., pre-Nahua speakers in the area) place name. Brad Coon Reference Librarian The Libraries-Montana State University bcoon at montana.edu (406) 994-6026 -----Original Message----- From: Michael Mccafferty [mailto:mmccaffe at indiana.edu] Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 9:22 AM To: Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl Cc: idiez at mac.com; nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu Subject: Re: tetzcohco I don't have an answer for this. Sorta reminds of tetzahuiya and related forms that have to do with shamanizing. There is co:cohtli a tube and also a turtledove. But that's not much help. An inhabitant of the place was known as a tetzcohcatl. Miquel On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl wrote: > Hi > > Would large stones (rocks) or stony ground (tescal, texcal) be a contender? > > CC > > -------Original Message------- > > From: idiez at mac.com > Date: Tuesday, 17 June 2003 12:37:42 AM > To: nahuat-l > Subject: tetzcohco > > Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root > would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody > know what this means? > > John Sullivan, Ph.D. > Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. > Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 > Colonia CNOP > Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > M?xico > +52 (492) 768-6048 > idiez at mac.com > www.idiez.org.mx > > > > From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Jun 17 23:46:45 2003 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty) Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 18:46:45 -0500 Subject: tetzcohco In-Reply-To: <95AC7052DE4A78488DCFB615F7A49EA4070C6C91@jewels.msu.montana.edu> Message-ID: Brad's suggestion is interesting, and it does happen for example in North Africa, so I'm told. I've never seen it in midcontinental North America among Algonquian speakers, and I wonder if there is evidence that the Nahua-speaking folks in the valley of Mexico reconstituted earlier place names. Some language groups, such as the Anglo-Saxons, don't have much a proclivity to do this. I enjoyed Galen's explanation of the glyph for the town's name. I have one more idea and I'll get back with it tomorrow. Michael On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Coon, Brad wrote: > Perhaps it represents a Nahuatlized version of a pre-existing (i.e., > pre-Nahua speakers > in the area) place name. > > Brad Coon > Reference Librarian > The Libraries-Montana State University > bcoon at montana.edu (406) 994-6026 > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Michael Mccafferty [mailto:mmccaffe at indiana.edu] > Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 9:22 AM > To: Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl > Cc: idiez at mac.com; nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu > Subject: Re: tetzcohco > > > I don't have an answer for this. Sorta reminds of tetzahuiya and related > forms that have to do with shamanizing. > > There is co:cohtli a tube and also a turtledove. But that's not much > help. > > An inhabitant of the place was known as a tetzcohcatl. > > Miquel > > > On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Chi:chi:ltic Coyo:tl wrote: > > > Hi > > > > Would large stones (rocks) or stony ground (tescal, texcal) be a > contender? > > > > CC > > > > -------Original Message------- > > > > From: idiez at mac.com > > Date: Tuesday, 17 June 2003 12:37:42 AM > > To: nahuat-l > > Subject: tetzcohco > > > > Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root > > would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody > > know what this means? > > > > John Sullivan, Ph.D. > > Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. > > Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 > > Colonia CNOP > > Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > > M?xico > > +52 (492) 768-6048 > > idiez at mac.com > > www.idiez.org.mx > > > > > > > > > > > > > Michael McCafferty Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana 47401 mmccaffe at indiana.edu "...as a dog howls at the moon, I talk." -Rumi From anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk Wed Jun 18 05:00:29 2003 From: anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk (anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 06:00:29 +0100 Subject: tetzcohco In-Reply-To: <3EEF8F74.13FA8E5A@buffalo.edu> Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 764 bytes Desc: not available URL: From brokaw at buffalo.edu Wed Jun 18 16:53:28 2003 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 12:53:28 -0400 Subject: tetzcohco Message-ID: I don't really think that the flower in the glyph has anything to do with the actual meaning of the toponym. I don't think there is that much, if any, analogical stylistic evidence in other toponyms to back up such a theory. But it would account for the hypothesis about the toponym meaning a plant. Anthony's interpretation of the glyph morphology in which the flower (xochitl) is a rebus representing the phonetic sound "x" seems much more plausible than taking the flower as some kind of indication of the actual meaning of the word itself. But it isn't as clear cut as that. Of course, there is a flower in the glyph, so that automatically suggests that the name contain the morpheme for flower or part of another morpheme that sounds like the root of xochitl. I thought about this before, but I didn't want to digress into all of my speculation about the strengths and weaknesses of this hypothesis. I should have figured someone would pick up on that. So here is my wandering theoretical speculation about this glyph, just in case anyone is interested. I should mention that the glyph appears slightly differently in different codices. In the Codex Mendoza, there is no pot. It is a rocky hill with flowers growing out of the crags. [By the way, there is also a bent arm with water coming out of it which indicates Texcoco as the place of the Acolhua: a (from atl) and col (from colli: curved or bent).] The version with the pot appears in the Mapa Quinatzin. I don't recall the nuances of the toponymic conventions used by the scribes in that document, but a pot is sometimes used to represent the locative "co". To check, you'd have to look at the conventions of the toponyms in that document to see if that is what the scribe usually does. If the pot is used as a locative in the Mapa Quinatzin, then we would still have to correlate some how the rest of the glyph to the whole segment "texco" or "tetzco". The Codex Mendoza doesn't usually include a rebus to represent the locative, but there are at least a few toponyms that I know of that use rebuses to indicate the locatives "pan" and "tlan". If the flowers are used to represent the "x", it is curious that the pictographic name would not use the conventional stone glyph but rather a rocky or craggy hill for the "te" (and this is both in the Codex Mendoza and the Mapa Quinatztin). In the Codex Mendoza, as far as I can tell, when the scribe/s want to represent "te" they use the conventional "tetl" glpyh. On the other hand, although a hill is generally used when "tepetl" is part of the name of the town, it can symbolize a town even when the term "tepetl" is not part of the name. This serves to identify the glyph as the name of a place; a strictly pictographic locative that does not necessarily correspond to the morphology of the word itself. This seems more common in Mixtec conventions, but a few of the toponyms in the Codex Mendoza seem to do the same thing. But in most cases these are not rebuses in the sense of a pictographic representation used to represent a sound not linked to the meaning of that which is represented; they represent hills and coincide with the actually morphology of the place name. I think this is why the pictographic morphology of the "tex" or perhaps even "texc" in Texcoco has been interpreted as coming from "texcalli". If the rocky hill is meant the represent "texc" then the "u" or the "o" may be ignored by the pictographic symbols. This is often the way rebuses work: they get as close as they can; that is to say that the pictographic morphology doesn't have to be ponetically precise, and it doesn't have to account for every single sound in the actual linguistic morphology. But as Anthony points out, that doesn't explain the presence of the flowers in the glyph. Anthony's explanation would work for the glyph in the Codex Mendoza if we take the hill to merely idicate that it is a town, and its rockiness to represent the "te". The objection to this hypothesis would be that based on the other glyphs in the Codex it seems more likely that the combination of stone and flower would have been represented simply by a flower and a stone. There are many examples of similar toponyms that do precisely this. And the craggy hill seems to clearly suggest "texcalli" without the need for flowers to produce the "x". So that would mean that there was a redundancy in the pictogram in that the "x" would correlate to both "texcalli" and "xochitl". I had another possible explanation for the "x" as related to the flowers but not "xochitl", but it was pretty far fetched, so I won't bore you with it. In any case, for me the presence of the flowers in the glyph raises some interesting questions that may be related to the pronunciation of the toponym. Does anyone know (Fran perhaps?) the distribution of Texcoco versus Tetzcoco? Is this a synchronic dialectical difference? Or is it a diachronic development--recognizing that there may also be synchronic differences--in which the alveolar africate became a palatal fricative? Or the othe way around? Or is it merely a synchronic variation within a dialect? I somehow got deleted from the list about a year and a half ago, so I've missed all of the discussions between then and now. But I was reading through the archive and there was a discussion a while back about the pronunciation of "Xochitl" as a personal name. I think somebody said that they hear people pronounce the "x" as a palatal fricative producing "shochi". I have friends who named their daughter Xochitl. They and others I know all pronounce it as an alveolar fricative/sibilant producing "sochi". I don't know to what extent these differences reflect dialectical variation, general changes in phonemes, or specific changes in the pronunciation of this word. And of course, the status of Nahuatl as a kind of substrate in Mexican Spanish makes it even more complicated. My question--and I realize that there are many reasons why this may not be so--is whether or not it is possible that the "written" pictographic word influenced its phonetic articulation. The idea would be that a tlacuilo is trying to create a rebus to represent the name for Tetzcoco. And he is having a lot of trouble with the "tetz", because he just can't find any easily representable object linked to a morpheme similar to "tetz" (although I suppose they could have used a mirror (tezcatl) to approximate the sound; and this is a common pictograph in place names). But of course, "te" is ubiquitously represented by stone. And maybe the toponym has alternate pronunciations in speech as both "tetzcoco" and "texcoco" which would explain the use of a flower to represent the "x". So, as with many other rebuses, the tlacuilo settles upon objects that invoke sounds that are close to the word he wishes to represent, which then influence the direction of phonetic development or stabilization. If this were the case, an explanation for the redundancy ing the glyph including the flower and the rocky hill may be that it is a composite of what originally were alternate glyphs developed to represent the same town by scribes or schools of scribes who pronounced it differently. That is to say that maybe there was a glyph comprised of a flower and a stone and another one comprised of a craggy hill. And later they got combined somehow and the redundancy got conventionalized. After the glyph is developed and passed on and becomes a convention, the scribes may not have been consciously thinking about the phonetics or morphology of the pictograph (which doesn't necessarily mean they were ignorant of it). And the difference bewteen the Mendoza Codex and the Mapa Quinatzin would be that the scribe decided not to use the locative in the glyph. Of course, none of this tells us anything definitive about the meaning of the word itself. Sorry John. In this case, especially, it is hard to determine the difference between a rebus disconnected from its original meaning and pictograms that coincide with the actual morphology of the word. If pot is used for the first "co" and not as a locative, for example, I would tend to doubt that it coincides with a morpheme in the word. But craggy hill, on the other hand, would make more sense as a place name. I'm just throwing all this out as speculation. So don't take this as any kind of informed analysis. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I'm not that informed. Galen anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk wrote: > On 17 Jun 2003, at 18:00, Galen Brokaw wrote: > > ... the glyph is a pot and a flower on a rocky hill ... > > This likely merely represents "te[tl]-xo:[chitl]-co[mitl]" or similar as an approximate phonetic rendering of the name. > > On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Coon, Brad wrote: > > > Perhaps it represents a Nahuatlized version of a pre-existing (i.e., > > pre-Nahua speakers in the area) place name. > > English examples are :- > (1) Catterick in Yorkshire, which came not from Anglo-Saxon but from Celtic Katuraktonion = "(place of) battle ramparts" > (2) York, which comes from Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic = "wild-boar diary-farm", adapted from Celtic Eborakon = "place of yew trees". From RCRAPO at hass.usu.edu Wed Jun 18 17:46:14 2003 From: RCRAPO at hass.usu.edu (Richley Crapo) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 11:46:14 -0600 Subject: Re John Schwaller Message-ID: Does anyone have John Schwaller's current snail mail address. If so, please send it to me at my personal addrress: rcrapo at hass.usu.edu From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Thu Jun 19 13:15:13 2003 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 08:15:13 -0500 Subject: tetzcohco In-Reply-To: <3EEFFFFD.6250.109688@localhost> Message-ID: There is no indication that this place name is analyzable. The Texcoco (including other variant spelling with x) is new, a Spanish neologism. The original name of this place is . Andrews parses this as tetz-coh-co. -co is transparent, of course, but he does not offer an analysis for the other two stems, and there is none in terms of the morphology, grammar, and phonology of Nahuatl. A greatly admired historical linguist recently told me that it's important to understand that there are always going to be loose ends in this business. appears to be a loose end. This is not to say that anyone with the gumption to pursue this should not keep following the bunny paths through the tangle of thorns, but, as it stands, there seems to be no tochtli after all. Michael McCafferty On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk wrote: > 0000,0000,0000On 17 Jun 2003, at 18:00, Galen Brokaw wrote: > > > ... the glyph is a pot and a flower on a rocky hill ... > > > This likely merely represents "te[tl]-xo:[chitl]-co[mitl]" or similar as > an 0000,0000,0000approximate phonetic rendering of the name. > > > On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Coon, Brad wrote: > > > > Perhaps it represents a Nahuatlized version of a pre-existing (i.e., > > > pre-Nahua speakers in the area) place name. > > > English examples are :- > > (1) Catterick in Yorkshire, which came not from Anglo-Saxon but > from Celtic Katuraktonion = "(place of) battle ramparts" > > (2) York, which comes from Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic = "wild-boar > diary-farm", adapted from Celtic Eborakon = "place of yew trees". > > > > > > From schwallr at mrs.umn.edu Thu Jun 19 14:46:09 2003 From: schwallr at mrs.umn.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 09:46:09 -0500 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: From: Carlos Santamarina To: nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu Subject: ?Etimologia_de_Texcoco? En la p?gina siguiente se ofrece otra etimolog?a (y una versi?n del glifo topon?mico)... http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Texcoco.html In 1885 Don Antonio Pe?afiel published his "Nombres Geogr?ficos de M?xico," an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino... <> Carlos Santamarina From brokaw at buffalo.edu Thu Jun 19 17:21:12 2003 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 13:21:12 -0400 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: The glyph on the webpage at the url sent out by Carlos comes from the Mendoza Codex. Orozco y Berra's explanation doesn't really solve the problem though either for the glyph or the word. He differentiates, as we have done in this discussion, between the actual meaning of the word and the pictographic morphology of the glyph. So, if I'm understanding him correctly, he says that the word actually means "place of stopping, detaining, or remaining" (I know, not a very elegant translation). I'm a little wary about accepting this interpretation just because Ixtlilxochitl says so with no morphological or etymological corroboration. Ixtlilxochitl's interpretation could very easily be a folk etymology. Then Orozco y Berra goes on to say that the glyph is essentially a rebus (although he doesn't use this term) not related to the actual meaning of the toponym and that it refers to "jarilla de risco" which in English I think would be "rock rose". And this rebus is arrived at by identifying the flower in the glyph as "tlacotl," which according to him means "jarilla" (rock rose)--although this word often means "stick"--, and "texcalli" which corresponds to the rocky hill. This interpretation of the phonetics of the glyph is more problematic than the others I mentioned before. I give him the benefit of the doubt that term "tlacotl" can mean rock-rose. But even if that is true, it seems unlikely to me that a tlacuilo would resort to "tlacotl" to produce the syllable "co" when it would be much easier to use a more transparent image, especially since a pot (comitl) is so commonly used to represent this syllable. And in any case, pictographic glyphs images like this tend to be stylized. That is to say that a flower is a flower, not any particular species of flower, just a flower. So, having a flower growing out of a rocky hill might invoke the idea of "rock rose" and hence its phonetic articulation, but then to get "texcalli", the rocky mountain would have to serve the double function of specifying the type of flower and signifying its own phonetic articulation. I would be interested to know if there any other examples of glyphs serving double functions like this. This leads back to one of the interpretations to which I referrred originally: that there is a word texcotli or tezcotli or something similar that refers to some kind of plant (maybe it is jarilla). The more I look at it, the more I think maybe this maybe the best hypothesis, given the limited evidence available. If this were the case, then we wouldn't need "texcalli" or "xochitl" to explain the glyph. In this case, the glyph wouldn't be a rebus at all. The flower growing out of the rocky hill would signify "rock rose", the rocky hill would be there not as a phonetic element but merely to identify what kind of flower it was. Finding a word like texcotli used to refer to a plant would really help out a lot. Aside from modern Nahuatl speakers--which should never be discounted--there are three places that I can think of to look. 1) the Florentine Codex, which doesn't seem to contain any such word; 2) the Badianus Manuscript, which is an indigenous herbal; I've seen a facsimile of this document in the past, but my library doesn't have a copy; the writer uses Latin, but the names of the plants are all in Nahuatl; and 3) that 16th-century text by the proto-medico Hernandez who compiled volumes of encyclopedic information on plants from Mexico and their medicinal uses. I was under the impression that the original multi-volume work was destroyed when the Escorial burned, but somebody recently told me that part of it or a copy of it or something had survived and was in some archive in Madrid. I don't know if this is true and if so if it has been published. Galen "John F. Schwaller" wrote: > From: Carlos Santamarina > To: nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu > Subject: ?Etimologia_de_Texcoco? > > En la p?gina siguiente se ofrece otra etimolog?a (y una versi?n del > glifo topon?mico)... > > http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Texcoco.html > > In 1885 Don Antonio Pe?afiel published his "Nombres Geogr?ficos de > M?xico," an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in > the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino... > > < > Diptongo jerogl?fico, cuya interpretacion pertenece al Sr. Orozco y Berra. > > "Una monta?a riscosa, sobre la cual florece la jarilla, y junto un brazo > extendido con el s?mbolo atl." La ciudad de Tezcuco, dice Ixtlilxochitl, > fu? fundada en tiempo de los toltecas con el nombre de Catenichco; > destruida al tiempo que aquella nacion, la embelleci? mucho, puso en > ella su residencia y la hizo la capital del imperio. A su llegada los > chichimecas la llamaron Tezcuco, es decir, lugar de detencion, porque > all? pararon todas las naciones que ent?nces habia en la Nueva Espa?a." > No dudamos que sea esta la verdadera interpretacion, y ent?nces ser? un > car?cter ideogr?fico con el valor f?nico, Tezcoco; la escritura no > obstante, suministra gr?ficamente otra etimolog?a: Tlacotl, jarilla, > vardasca, se retiere ? la que brota en los terrenos llanos; Texcotli, es > la jarilla de los riscos, tomando la radical de texcalli, pe?asco ? > risco; de aqu? la verdadera ortograf?a del nombre de Texco-co, la > jarilla de los riscos.">> > > Carlos Santamarina From Carlossn at ui.boe.es Thu Jun 19 17:28:21 2003 From: Carlossn at ui.boe.es (Carlos Santamarina) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 19:28:21 +0200 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: From: Carlos Santamarina To: nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu Subject: ?Etimologia_de_Texcoco? En la p?gina siguiente se ofrece otra etimolog?a (y una versi?n del glifo topon?mico)... http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Texcoco.html In 1885 Don Antonio Pe?afiel published his "Nombres Geogr?ficos de M?xico," an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino... <> Carlos Santamarina From bcoon at montana.edu Thu Jun 19 19:24:15 2003 From: bcoon at montana.edu (Coon, Brad) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 13:24:15 -0600 Subject: Baidianus Ms. was RE: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: To my utter surprise, my library does have a copy of the facsimile edition of the Badianus Ms. An admittedly very quick perusal turned up only one plant name (in plate 19) with any resemblance to the first segment of Tetzcohco, namely "tetzmitl", identified as Sedum dendroideum, Span. 'siempreviva'. The translater notes that "Dr. Cornyn gives the derivation of the name Tetzmitl as rocky land obsidian (tetl stone, itztli obsidian, mitl arrow)." Brad Coon Reference Librarian The Libraries-Montana State University bcoon at montana.edu (406) 994-6026 -----Original Message----- From: Galen Brokaw [mailto:brokaw at buffalo.edu] Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 11:21 AM Cc: nahuat-l at cda.mrs.umn.edu Subject: Re: Etimologia de Texcoco (snipped most of the post) >the Badianus Manuscript, which is an indigenous herbal; I've seen a facsimile of this >document in the past, but my library doesn't have a copy; the writer uses Latin, but (snip) From arbyrne at uclink4.berkeley.edu Thu Jun 19 22:52:34 2003 From: arbyrne at uclink4.berkeley.edu (Roger Byrne) Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 15:52:34 -0700 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco In-Reply-To: <3EF1F108.3A54DA7F@buffalo.edu> Message-ID: >The glyph on the webpage at the url sent out by Carlos comes from >the Mendoza Codex. >Orozco y Berra's explanation doesn't really solve the problem though >either for the >glyph or the word. He differentiates, as we have done in this >discussion, between the >actual meaning of the word and the pictographic morphology of the >glyph. So, if I'm >understanding him correctly, he says that the word actually means >"place of stopping, >detaining, or remaining" (I know, not a very elegant translation). >I'm a little wary >about accepting this interpretation just because Ixtlilxochitl says so with no >morphological or etymological corroboration. Ixtlilxochitl's >interpretation could >very easily be a folk etymology. >Then Orozco y Berra goes on to say that the glyph is essentially a >rebus (although he >doesn't use this term) not related to the actual meaning of the >toponym and that it >refers to "jarilla de risco" which in English I think would be "rock >rose". And this >rebus is arrived at by identifying the flower in the glyph as "tlacotl," which >according to him means "jarilla" (rock rose)--although this word often means >"stick"--, and "texcalli" which corresponds to the rocky hill. This >interpretation of >the phonetics of the glyph is more problematic than the others I >mentioned before. I >give him the benefit of the doubt that term "tlacotl" can mean >rock-rose. But even if >that is true, it seems unlikely to me that a tlacuilo would resort >to "tlacotl" to >produce the syllable "co" when it would be much easier to use a more >transparent >image, especially since a pot (comitl) is so commonly used to represent this >syllable. And in any case, pictographic glyphs images like this tend >to be stylized. >That is to say that a flower is a flower, not any particular species >of flower, just >a flower. So, having a flower growing out of a rocky hill might >invoke the idea of >"rock rose" and hence its phonetic articulation, but then to get >"texcalli", the >rocky mountain would have to serve the double function of specifying >the type of >flower and signifying its own phonetic articulation. I would be >interested to know if >there any other examples of glyphs serving double functions like this. >This leads back to one of the interpretations to which I referrred >originally: that >there is a word texcotli or tezcotli or something similar that >refers to some kind of >plant (maybe it is jarilla). The more I look at it, the more I think >maybe this maybe >the best hypothesis, given the limited evidence available. If this >were the case, >then we wouldn't need "texcalli" or "xochitl" to explain the glyph. >In this case, the >glyph wouldn't be a rebus at all. The flower growing out of the >rocky hill would >signify "rock rose", the rocky hill would be there not as a phonetic >element but >merely to identify what kind of flower it was. Finding a word like >texcotli used to >refer to a plant would really help out a lot. Aside from modern Nahuatl >speakers--which should never be discounted--there are three places >that I can think >of to look. 1) the Florentine Codex, which doesn't seem to contain >any such word; 2) >the Badianus Manuscript, which is an indigenous herbal; I've seen a >facsimile of this >document in the past, but my library doesn't have a copy; the writer >uses Latin, but >the names of the plants are all in Nahuatl; and 3) that 16th-century >text by the >proto-medico Hernandez who compiled volumes of encyclopedic >information on plants >from Mexico and their medicinal uses. I was under the impression >that the original >multi-volume work was destroyed when the Escorial burned, but >somebody recently told >me that part of it or a copy of it or something had survived and was >in some archive >in Madrid. I don't know if this is true and if so if it has been published. > >Galen > > > > > > > > > >"John F. Schwaller" wrote: > >> From: Carlos Santamarina >> To: nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu >> Subject: ?Etimologia_de_Texcoco? >> >> En la p?gina siguiente se ofrece otra etimolog?a (y una versi?n del > > glifo topon?mico)... >> >> >>http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Texcoco.html >> >> In 1885 Don Antonio Pe?afiel published his "Nombres Geogr?ficos de >> M?xico," an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in >> the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino... >> >> <> >> Diptongo jerogl?fico, cuya interpretacion pertenece al Sr. Orozco y Berra. >> >> "Una monta?a riscosa, sobre la cual florece la jarilla, y junto un brazo >> extendido con el s?mbolo atl." La ciudad de Tezcuco, dice Ixtlilxochitl, >> fu? fundada en tiempo de los toltecas con el nombre de Catenichco; >> destruida al tiempo que aquella nacion, la embelleci? mucho, puso en >> ella su residencia y la hizo la capital del imperio. A su llegada los >> chichimecas la llamaron Tezcuco, es decir, lugar de detencion, porque >> all? pararon todas las naciones que ent?nces habia en la Nueva Espa?a." >> No dudamos que sea esta la verdadera interpretacion, y ent?nces ser? un >> car?cter ideogr?fico con el valor f?nico, Tezcoco; la escritura no >> obstante, suministra gr?ficamente otra etimolog?a: Tlacotl, jarilla, >> vardasca, se retiere ? la que brota en los terrenos llanos; Texcotli, es >> la jarilla de los riscos, tomando la radical de texcalli, pe?asco ? >> risco; de aqu? la verdadera ortograf?a del nombre de Texco-co, la >> jarilla de los riscos.">> >> >> Carlos Santamarina Now that the Texcoco discussion has turned botanical, I thought I should point out that the flower depicted in the Mendoza glyph for "Tezcuco" (folio 3V) looks very much like Dahlia coccinea, perhaps the most beautiful of all Mesoamerican ornamentals. The artist confused me at first because he shows the ray flowers as yellow and the disk flowers as red. However, a quick check of Dahlia coccinea images via Google did produce a hybrid which has ray flowers that are red and yellow, with the central part of the petal red and the outer part yellow. Dahlia coccinea has a wide distribution in Central Mexico and although Oscar Sanchez doesn't report it specifically for the Texcoco area in his "La Flora del Valle de Mexico", he does note that it grows there between 1,000 and 3000 meters. Possibly also relevant here is that Alexis Wimmer's Classical Nahuatl Dictionary site lists the Nahuatl name for Dahlia coccinea as "acocohx?chitl". I will leave the linguistic analysis to the linguists. Orozco y Berra's "Texcotli, es la jarilla de los riscos" may be a reference to another member of the Asteraceae. Sanchez lists "jarilla" as the common name for 5 different species of Asteraceae in his Flora. Dahlia coccinea is not one of them. Roger Byrne -- Dr. Roger Byrne Associate Professor Geography Department 501 Mc Cone Hall University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 Phones: 510 643 9170 (office) 510 643 1834 (lab) 510 642 3903 (secretary) Fax: 510 642 3370 Email: arbyrne at uclink4.berkeley.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brokaw at buffalo.edu Fri Jun 20 14:48:20 2003 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 10:48:20 -0400 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: By the way, other glyphs from the Mendoza Codex, images of which are included on the same site with the Texcoco glyph sent out by Carlos, undermine the interpetation of the Texcoco glyph as being related in any way to "tlacotl" as suggested by Orozco y Berra. The glyphs for Tlacopan and Tlacotepec depict a plant that evidently is "tlacotl" and it doesn't look anything like the flower in the Texcoco glyhp. See: http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Tlacopan.html So, I think that pretty definitively eliminates that particular rebus interpretation of the glyph. Galen Carlos Santamarina wrote: > From: Carlos Santamarina > To: nahuat-l at mrs.umn.edu > Subject: ?Etimologia_de_Texcoco? > > En la p?gina siguiente se ofrece otra etimolog?a (y una versi?n del > glifo topon?mico)... > > http://geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProjectsResources/Glyphs/Plate29/Texcoco.html > > In 1885 Don Antonio Pe?afiel published his "Nombres Geogr?ficos de > M?xico," an annotated listing of all the place name glyphs included in > the Matricula de Tributos and the Codex Mendocino... > > < > Diptongo jerogl?fico, cuya interpretacion pertenece al Sr. Orozco y Berra. > > "Una monta?a riscosa, sobre la cual florece la jarilla, y junto un brazo > extendido con el s?mbolo atl." La ciudad de Tezcuco, dice Ixtlilxochitl, > fu? fundada en tiempo de los toltecas con el nombre de Catenichco; > destruida al tiempo que aquella nacion, la embelleci? mucho, puso en > ella su residencia y la hizo la capital del imperio. A su llegada los > chichimecas la llamaron Tezcuco, es decir, lugar de detencion, porque > all? pararon todas las naciones que ent?nces habia en la Nueva Espa?a." > No dudamos que sea esta la verdadera interpretacion, y ent?nces ser? un > car?cter ideogr?fico con el valor f?nico, Tezcoco; la escritura no > obstante, suministra gr?ficamente otra etimolog?a: Tlacotl, jarilla, > vardasca, se retiere ? la que brota en los terrenos llanos; Texcotli, es > la jarilla de los riscos, tomando la radical de texcalli, pe?asco ? > risco; de aqu? la verdadera ortograf?a del nombre de Texco-co, la > jarilla de los riscos.">> > > Carlos Santamarina From brokaw at buffalo.edu Fri Jun 20 15:28:50 2003 From: brokaw at buffalo.edu (Galen Brokaw) Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 11:28:50 -0400 Subject: Etimologia de Texcoco Message-ID: I don't know anything about the jarilla, but Roger is right. The descriptions and pictures of this plant that I found online don't sound or look anything like the flower in the glyph. See: http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/pfnm2/fichas/jarilla_caudata.htm and http://www.caletao.com.ar/rve/jarifina.htm And the dahlia coccinea that Roger mentions is much closer. Images of it can be seen here: http://www.thompson-morgan.com/seeds/uk/product_7911_1.html The following page says this plant was used for medical purposes, so maybe it can be found in Hernandez's work. http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/pfnm2/fichas/dahlia_coccinea.htm This is very interesting. I don't know if this is the flower represented by the glyph, but it could be. I definitely think Roger is right in suggesting that it is an attempt to represent a specific kind of flower. I was a too hasty in suggesting that the flower in the glyph was just a conventionalized image of a flower. I don't know what I was thinking. First, even without comparing it to other glyphs it is very obvious that this apparent flower is not like the generic flower used as one of the twenty iconic signs in the calendar. And the Codex Mendoza does use the conventional flower as it appears in calendric dates in other toponyms such as Xochimilco. This would suggest that the image in the Tezcuco (this is how it is spelled alphabetically in the Mendoza Codex) glyph is intended to be a mimetic representation of a specific kind of plant as opposed to an iconic image of a generic flower. This would also imply then that this image does not necessarily invoke the phonetic articulation of the word "xochitl" unless the name of the plant originally had "xochitl" as part of its name, but it is very likely that it did. I think most--maybe all?--flower names used "xochitl" with some kind of qualifier at the beginning as in the name "acocohxochitl" that Roger pointed out. The phonetic coincidence or common denominator in the terms--namely the "x", in texcalli and xochitl, and the "o" or "u" in xochitl and Texcoco-- and the semantic convergence in meaning indicated by the glyph with a flower-like plant that grows in rocky places is very intriguing here. Whatever plant it is, if it characteristically grows in rocky places as implied by the Mendoza version of the glyph, it's name might very well have indicated this quality by qualifying the term "xochitl" with "texcalli", which would produce "texcalxochitl". It kind of makes you want to posit that there was an original word "texcalxochitl" that somehow got transformed into texcotli which produced Texcoco, or that the name of the town was originally Texcalxochco and then it got transformed into Texcoco. That means, though, that the "alx" and the "ch" would have suffered elision. Stranger things have happened, right? As in many languages, Nahuatl place names tend to be metonymic in that they refer to some quality associated with that place. But just like in any language, maybe the name can become so conventional that consciousness of the original meaning can disappear. This can lead to at least two phenomena which make it difficult to establish etymological origins: 1) the name may be more susceptible to idiosynchratic modification independent of other general linguistic transformations of the langauge; and 2) general linguistic developments may not affect the name because it has been disassociated with its morphological origins through conventional use. So basically the word may diverge from the rest of the language, and it is either transformed or not independent of other linguistic phenomena. I'm not sure if this actually happpens; I'm suggesting it as a theoretical possibility. Of course, this phenomenon would be more common and the problem more acute in oral cultures. The point I was trying to make before, was that in this case, the culture isn't strictly oral. So, the question is to what degree do pictographs stabilize words such as toponyms that may be represented through mimetic (or even rebus) morphology in the pictogram. Does this kind of pictography fix language in ways similar to that claimed for alphabetic writing? And in what way? It should be pointed out that the morphology of most (although I don't think all) Nahuatl toponyms is fairly transparent and consistent with the words from which they derive. So why is this one so difficult? I figure there are at least three possibilities: 1) there is the theory about a Nahuatlization of a non-Nahuatl place name; 2) we just might not be familiar with the word/s that make up the toponym either because they dropped out of the language at some point or because we just haven't run across them yet; or 3) some process like the one I described above has transformed (or preserved?) the word beyond definitive morphological interpretation. However, in addition to searching texts for words consistent with the toponym, an exhaustive study and analysis of glyphs might also help here. For instance, if we were able to find another glyph that used this same flower image and/or the rocky hill in a more transparent way, it might corroborate an interpretation of the Texcoco glyph. And if the glyphs are not rebuses, then it would also shed light on the actual morphology of the word. Galen > Now that the Texcoco discussion has turned botanical, I thought I > should point out that the flower depicted in the Mendoza glyph for > "Tezcuco" (folio 3V) looks very much like Dahlia coccinea, perhaps the > most beautiful of all Mesoamerican ornamentals. The artist confused > me at first because he shows the ray flowers as yellow and the disk > flowers as red. However, a quick check of Dahlia coccinea images via > Google did produce a hybrid which has ray flowers that are red and > yellow, with the central part of the petal red and the outer part > yellow. Dahlia coccinea has a wide distribution in Central Mexico and > although Oscar Sanchez doesn't report it specifically for the Texcoco > area in his "La Flora del Valle de Mexico", he does note that it > grows there between 1,000 and 3000 meters. Possibly also relevant > here is that Alexis Wimmer's Classical Nahuatl Dictionary site lists > the Nahuatl name for Dahlia coccinea as "acocohx?chitl". I will leave > the linguistic analysis to the linguists. Orozco y Berra's "Texcotli, > es la jarilla de los riscos" may be a reference to another member of > the Asteraceae. Sanchez lists "jarilla" as the common name for 5 > different species of Asteraceae in his Flora. Dahlia coccinea is not > one of them. Roger Byrne --Dr. Roger Byrne > Associate Professor > Geography Department > 501 Mc Cone Hall > University of California, Berkeley > Berkeley, CA 94720 > > Phones: 510 643 9170 (office) > 510 643 1834 (lab) > 510 642 3903 (secretary) > Fax: 510 642 3370Email: arbyrne at uclink4.berkeley.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From idiez at mac.com Sun Jun 22 04:04:19 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2003 23:04:19 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n's Message-ID: When my native speaking friends say "ama", "today", and "amantzi", "right now"; or "nica", "here", and "nicantzi", "right here", I can pretty much tell that we are dealing with devoiced "n"s at the end of "ama(n)" and "nica(n)". Perhaps the "-tzi" is also actually "-tzi(n)" with a devoiced "n". My question is this: My friends also say "tohuanti", "we", "inmohuanti", "you all", and "ininhuanti", "they"; as well as "Ximoquetzaca", "Stand up, all of you." Given that both "n" and the saltillo are plural indicators, are we dealing with "tohuanti(n)" or "tohuanti(h)", etc., etc? When my friends get back in town, I plan on having them doing some serious wispering in my ear, and perhaps that will give me an answer. But I would appreciate any comments. Also, if utterance final "n"s have always been devoiced, does that mean that words such as the preterite singular of "cualani", were actually pronounced "cuala"? (In modern huastecan nahuatl the "n" is protected: "cualanqui".) And if this is so, how did the early writers of dictionaries and grammars know if a word ended in "n" or not? Some words, such as the "nica(n)" - "nicantzi(n)" pair have optional suffixes that provide a clue. But how about the nouns that end in "-in", for example? Modern huastecan nahuatl says "quatochi" for "rabbit". I assume "tochi(n)" has always been pronounced with a devoiced "n". How would you know? John Sullivan, Ph.D. Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 Colonia CNOP Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 M?xico +52 (492) 768-6048 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx From davius_sanctex at terra.es Sun Jun 22 17:48:31 2003 From: davius_sanctex at terra.es (Davius Sanctex) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 19:48:31 +0200 Subject: devoiced "n's Message-ID: But, John, the devoicing of sonorants /w, l, y/ in nahuatl occurs in __#, __ [- voiced], if we expect the same patter for /n/ we must devoing of /n/ in /aman/ and in /aman(tzin)/. Therefore the first "n" in "amantzi" sould have the same audibility that the second, is it not the case? From idiez at mac.com Sun Jun 22 18:46:03 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 13:46:03 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n's In-Reply-To: <001d01c338e6$7f475280$28e02550@pc1> Message-ID: Davius, The words are pronounced "ama" and "amantzi", "nica" and "nicantzi" with the only audible "n"s being the one's I have written here. John On Sunday, June 22, 2003, at 12:48 PM, Davius Sanctex wrote: > But, John, the devoicing of sonorants /w, l, y/ in nahuatl occurs in > __#, __ > [- voiced], if we expect the same patter for /n/ we must devoing of > /n/ in > /aman/ and in /aman(tzin)/. Therefore the first "n" in "amantzi" sould > have > the same audibility that the second, is it not the case? > > From idiez at mac.com Sun Jun 22 18:47:52 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 13:47:52 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n" Message-ID: So, leaving orthographic omissions aside, there is a big difference between "n" devoicing (which shouldn't really be called dropping) and "i" dropping (which really drops out or assimilates). John On Sunday, June 22, 2003, at 09:22 AM, Michael Mccafferty wrote: > N-dropping, as you know, John, is a big-time Nahuatl characteristic. It > actually occurs quite rarely in "classical" Nahuatl, i.e., those n's > show > up in the texts. When an n does not appear where it is expected, a > perusal > of the entire text allows one to more or less safely say whether its > absence in the case of this particular word is an aspect of the dialect > that is being recorded or is simply a scribal error, i.e., > orthographic or > aural. > From idiez at mac.com Sun Jun 22 18:55:42 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 13:55:42 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n" Message-ID: What got me thinking about this is the section in Carochi's grammar where he talks about the purposive construction. At the very end of folio 28v (page 116-117 in Lockhart's edition) he gives two variants for the plural of the outgoing imperative: "-tih" and "-tin", and concludes by saying "ambos plurales don seguros". I just wonder how interchangeable these two pluralizers might be from region to region. John Sullivan, Ph.D. Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 Colonia CNOP Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 M?xico +52 (492) 768-6048 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx From campbel at indiana.edu Sun Jun 22 23:00:21 2003 From: campbel at indiana.edu (r. joe campbell) Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2003 18:00:21 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n" In-Reply-To: <076882E7-A4E2-11D7-8769-003065C46A4A@mac.com> Message-ID: John, Last night (before I had seen any replies to you) I started writing you a notita, which became a notota -- and then the line to my server dropped me, losing all the detail in phonetic description, together with my patience. No matter, anything that I write after midnight is filled with confusion. I have admired your energy and activities in Nahuatl for several years now, and I think that the alternations that you're pointing out, as well as the problem of "no possible alternation" (e.g., "ximoquetzaca") is an interesting problem, from both the points of view of the first language learner and of the language analyst. But my main point was a sort of negative remark about discussing "devoiced n's". The label "devoiced n" or "voiceless n" already has a well established meaning in phonetic description -- it refers to a sound segment in which there is oral obstruction (e.g., the tip of the tongue is in contact with the upper front teeth or the alveolar ridge) and the velum is swung down and forward, allowing the air stream to flow through the nasal passages, while there is no vibration of the vocal folds (state of voicelessness). From your earlier statements (and now reinforced by your replies since), as well as familiarity with some dialects of Nahuatl, I realized that what you probably meant was "n deletion", "n dropping", or "get-rid- of-the-nasal-segment-word-final-position". During the summer of my first contact with Nahuatl, I lived in Tepoztlan and spent more than half of my time in a nearby village, Santa Catarina, so I had the opportunity to hear and record a lot of both dialects. Some Tepoztecos (especially a friend that I talked a lot with) ridiculed the speech and the people of Santa Catarina, partly because of their "ignorance" in pronouncing "final n": Tepoztlan Santa Catarina house calli calli houses caltin calti~ (where the ~ indicates that they didn't pronounce a final n (failed to obstruct the oral passage [the essential characteristic of consonants]), but *did* swing the velum down and forward, allowing the air to flow through the nasal passages, resulting in a *nasalized* vowel. This is actually frequently an intermediate step in the loss of n. If it stops there, the language is said to have "nasal vowels" and, just as there are Coke and Pepsi camps, some people would claim that the nasal vowels were phonemes and the others would claim that the nasal vowels were merely the superficial result of dynamic rules that assumed the nasal consonants to still "be there" at some level and to be involved in nasalization of the vowels. But if the process didn't stop there, the next step would be like your dialect: the gesture of the velum which *opens* the nasal passages would be deleted from one's pronunciation habits -- the vowel of the final syllable would remain "oral" and the "dropping" would be historically complete. So the following data is representative: n-dropping dialect n-retaining dialect it flies patlani patlani it flew --> opatla opatlan they flew opatlanqueh opatlanqueh he gets angry cualani cualani she got angry --> ocuala ocuala they got angry ocualanqueh ocualanqueh In describing "what's going on", I subscribe to (and actively use) your "mafia" (as Sancho Panza said, "Please excuse...") terminology: if the /n/ is "protected", it stays. If not, it gets "erased". All the best, Joe p.s. I note that Davius makes a good point with reference to the process of de-voicing and our expectations of regularity (although language comes with no warranty certificate on this issue): 1. we would expect /n/ to behave the same in both environments. Neither your speakers nor those of Santa Catarina change "protected" 'n'. 2. we would expect /n/ and /l/ to behave in a parallel way. Speakers from Santa Catarina de-voice their /l/ both in word-final environment and before voiceless segments. They have no voiceless 'n' in word-final environment nor before voiceless segments. (It is interesting to picture [with our ears] what a voiceless 'n' (sniff) would sound like.) p.p.s. With regard to Miqueltzi's comment on so-called "classical" Nahuatl, here are some examples from Molina (mainly 1555). And Michael's cautionary remark about the correlation between what is written and what is actually pronounced is something to laminate and carry around in one's billfold -- what is written helps us guess better, but it is not a one-to-one map to reality. (I would *guess* that fray Alonso's document involved his observation of: 1) a substantial amount of observation of variation; and 2) an intention to write down the more "explicit" or "careful" form. aoctlei. falta por mengua. . 55m-9 atl molonia. fontanal lugar de fuentes. . 55m-10 atlei. falta por mengua. . 55m-9 axca. agora tiempo presente. . 55m-00 axca =aoc. apenas o con dificultad. . 55m-1 axca =niman. agora luego. . 55m-00 ayaxca. apenas o con dificultad. . 55m-1 ayocaxca. apenas o con dificultad. . 55m-1 cacoya =tla. audiencia de los juezes. . 55m-1 caczohuaya. zapateria. . 55m-4 castilla texocooctli. vino de manzanas. . 55m-20 castilla tonalxihuitl. manzanilla yerua conocida. . 55m-13 cecemaltepepa. a cada ciudad. . 55m-00 cecen tepepa. a cada ciudad. . 55m-00 chichilocuili. ceuo para pescar. . 55m- 4 chihua =ichihualoya nic. a tiempo o coyuntura hazer algo. . 55m-1 cihuatepito. hembra pequen~a. . 55m-11 cochcayotiloya =ne. cenadero o cenador lugar. . 55m-4 cocototzauhya =to. chueca do juegan los huesos. . 55m-4 cualoya =tla. cenadero o cenador lugar. . 55m-4 cuayotl =te. braueza tal. . 55m-2 cuicuicanito. grillo especie de cigarra. . 55m-10 ehuatlepitzalonito. fuelles pequen~as. . 55m-10 iczaya =totla. pata o planta del pie. . 55m-15 ilamato. vejezuela. . 55m-19 ipa =zan. en alguna manera. . 55m-7 ixocuili. ladilla. . 55m-12 ixtechichihuiliztli. enfermedad tal. . 55m-7 ixtechichilihui =n [scribal error: ??same as above item; differentiated by n dropping: 55m]. enfermar delas pestan~as. . 55m-7 manaya =atoyatl imo. remansso de rio. . 55m-17 matepoztlaximalonito. azuela pequen~a. . 55m-00 miecti. muchedumbre. . 55m-14 ocuili. ceuo para pescar. . 55m-4 otlazotic immoyollotzi. hago gracias a vuestra merced. . 71m2-13 pitzahuaya =to. cintura. . 55m-4 popohualonito =tla. escoba pequen~a o escobajo. . 55m-8 tenahueloa =ni. descercar destruir la cerca. . 55m-5 tenahuitoma =ni. descercar destruir la cerca. . 55m-5 tenaxitinia =ni. descercar destruir la cerca. . 55m-5 tepitoyotl. breuedad. . 55m-2 tepozmaccuauhtepito. espada pequen~a. . 55m-9 tepoztlacohualonito. marauedi. . 55m-13 teuctlatoloya. audiencia de los juezes. . 55m-1 teyotia =nitla. apreciar poner o declarar el precio dela cosa. . 55m-1 teyotiani =tla. apreciador tal. . 55m-1 teyotilli =tla. apreciada cosa assi. . 55m-1 tlaliloya =ne. assiento do se sientan. . 55m-1 tlaliloya =tlatla [scribal error: ??third "t" looks a little like an "i", but with the "t", the word matches "tlatlatlaliloya" (except for the dropped "n") in form and meaning: 55m]. armario o almario. . 55m-1 tlatiloya =ne. escondrijo de hombres. . 55m-8 tlatlatiloya =tla. despenssa. . 55m-6 tocoya =te. cimiterio. . 55m-4 tzinnamacoya =ne. mancebia puteria. . 55m-13 tzintla =tla. abaxo. . 55m-00 tzontecoya =tla. audiencia de los juezes. . 55m-1 xalpa. arenal. . 55m-1 yaotlapixque on yeya. estancia de veladores en batallas. . 55m-9 yohuapa. deman~ana. . 55m-5 zazaliuhya =to. chueca do juegan los huesos. . 55m-4 zohuatepito. hembra pequen~a. . 55m-11 zoyatepito. palmito. . 55m-15 From campbel at indiana.edu Mon Jun 23 16:40:22 2003 From: campbel at indiana.edu (r. joe campbell) Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 11:40:22 -0500 Subject: devoiced "n" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: I have just noticed a typo in the paradigmatic data that I sent yesterday. The careful reader will have already noticed it too. In n-retaining dialects, 'she got angry' is "ocualan", not "ocuala". It must have been a problem in transmission -- because I *know* that my fingers gave the keyboard the right information. >8-) Joe > > So the following data is representative: > > n-dropping dialect n-retaining dialect > it flies patlani patlani > it flew --> opatla opatlan > they flew opatlanqueh opatlanqueh > > > he gets angry cualani cualani > she got angry --> ocuala ocualan (corrected) > they got angry ocualanqueh ocualanqueh > From IXTLIL at aol.com Tue Jun 24 03:44:05 2003 From: IXTLIL at aol.com (IXTLIL at aol.com) Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2003 23:44:05 EDT Subject: Mojon--a simple question? Message-ID: True students of Nauhuatl--please comment. For many years, people have written about Nahua rights in land and territories, but I can recall nothing about the core term for boundary. Molina--Vocabulario "Mojon o linde de heredad" quaxochtli (Molina shows show more elaborated forms also relating to placing boundaries, etc.). What is the current thinking on the etymology of this common but important item? Simeon, never that shy, does not hazard a guess. Is it or something like it in current use among any groups? Thanks, Jerry Offner -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From idiez at mac.com Tue Jun 24 12:34:59 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 07:34:59 -0500 Subject: two more on Huastecan Nahuatl Message-ID: There are two further characteristics of Huastecan Nahuatl that puzzle me: 1. The plural of the future tense has no /k/, while the conditional/unfulfilled action construction does. Here's an example: future singular: "chocaz" future plural: "chocaceh" conditional/ unfulfilled action: "chocazquia" 2. Instead of "nimitzilhuia", "I tell you", we have "nimitzilia" with the apparent loss of the /w/ (And it's the same in all tenses). At least one of my native speaking friends, pronounces a very slight aspiration before the "l". Something like "nimitzihlia". I understand that this is metathesis: a reverse case of what Lockhart comments on as the origin of the "-lhuia" applicative suffix for Class 3 verbs. Would anyone like to comment on what's going on in these two cases? John Sullivan, Ph.D. Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 Colonia CNOP Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 M?xico +52 (492) 768-6048 idiez at mac.com www.idiez.org.mx From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Jun 24 13:15:19 2003 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael Mccafferty) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 08:15:19 -0500 Subject: two more on Huastecan Nahuatl In-Reply-To: <44EE5E56-A640-11D7-BAC3-003065C46A4A@mac.com> Message-ID: John, In "nimitzilia" ~ "nimitzihlia" which syllable is the strong one? Or, put another way, how are these pronounced? [ni-mitz-i-lya] where [-i-] is the strong syllable, or [ni-mitz-i-li-a] where [-li-] is the strong syllable? As for the future plural question, this is really interesting. fut. sing. [cokas] fut. pl. [cokaseh] (or is that [cokase?], where [?] = glottal stop?) cond. [cokaskiya] ~ [cokaskia] It looks like future plural is form analogically on future singular, but I don't know. Michael On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 idiez at mac.com wrote: > There are two further characteristics of Huastecan Nahuatl that puzzle > me: > 1. The plural of the future tense has no /k/, while the > conditional/unfulfilled > action construction does. Here's an example: > future singular: "chocaz" > future plural: "chocaceh" > conditional/ unfulfilled action: "chocazquia" > 2. Instead of "nimitzilhuia", "I tell you", we have "nimitzilia" with > the apparent > loss of the /w/ (And it's the same in all tenses). At least one of my > native > speaking friends, pronounces a very slight aspiration before the "l". > Something > like "nimitzihlia". I understand that this is metathesis: a reverse > case of what > Lockhart comments on as the origin of the "-lhuia" applicative suffix > for Class 3 > verbs. > Would anyone like to comment on what's going on in these two cases? > > John Sullivan, Ph.D. > Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. > Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 > Colonia CNOP > Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > M?xico > +52 (492) 768-6048 > idiez at mac.com > www.idiez.org.mx > > > Michael McCafferty Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana 47401 mmccaffe at indiana.edu "...as a dog howls at the moon, I talk." -Rumi From schwallr at mrs.umn.edu Tue Jun 24 14:10:31 2003 From: schwallr at mrs.umn.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 09:10:31 -0500 Subject: Congrats to Mary Clayton Message-ID: One of our pioneer subscribers, Mary Clayton, is the proud author of a new article on Nahuatl: "Evidence for a Native-Speaking Nahuatl Author in the Ayer Vocabulario Trilingue" International Journal of Lexicography, VOL 16, NO: 2 (2003), PG: 99-120 John F. Schwaller Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean 315 Behmler Hall University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E 4th Street Morris, MN 56267 320-589-6015 FAX 320-589-6399 schwallr at mrs.umn.edu From idiez at mac.com Tue Jun 24 20:16:39 2003 From: idiez at mac.com (idiez at mac.com) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 15:16:39 -0500 Subject: two more on Huastecan Nahuatl In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIchael, 1. ni-mitz-i-li-a: "li" is the strong syllable. 2. There is an aspiration on the end of "chocaseh". The people I work with don't do any glottal stops. They are all aspirations, both word internally and in the word final position. Although I guess you could sort them by the amount of friction which is heard. The word final aspiration is barely audible. Between two vowels ("ehecatl", "air" and "noha", "still/todav?a") it sounds pretty much like an English "h". Preceding a consonant, its like a Mexican "j" (not as strong as in Spain). Could you explain what is meant by "analogical formation"? John On Tuesday, June 24, 2003, at 08:15 AM, Michael Mccafferty wrote: > John, > > In "nimitzilia" ~ "nimitzihlia" which syllable is the strong one? > > Or, put another way, how are these pronounced? > > [ni-mitz-i-lya] where [-i-] is the strong syllable, or > > [ni-mitz-i-li-a] where [-li-] is the strong syllable? > > > > As for the future plural question, this is really interesting. > > fut. sing. [cokas] > fut. pl. [cokaseh] (or is that [cokase?], where [?] = glottal stop?) > cond. [cokaskiya] ~ [cokaskia] > > It looks like future plural is form analogically on future singular, > but I > don't know. > > Michael > > > On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 idiez at mac.com wrote: > >> There are two further characteristics of Huastecan Nahuatl that puzzle >> me: >> 1. The plural of the future tense has no /k/, while the >> conditional/unfulfilled >> action construction does. Here's an example: >> future singular: "chocaz" >> future plural: "chocaceh" >> conditional/ unfulfilled action: "chocazquia" >> 2. Instead of "nimitzilhuia", "I tell you", we have "nimitzilia" with >> the apparent >> loss of the /w/ (And it's the same in all tenses). At least one of my >> native >> speaking friends, pronounces a very slight aspiration before the "l". >> Something >> like "nimitzihlia". I understand that this is metathesis: a reverse >> case of what >> Lockhart comments on as the origin of the "-lhuia" applicative suffix >> for Class 3 >> verbs. >> Would anyone like to comment on what's going on in these two cases? >> >> John Sullivan, Ph.D. >> Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. >> Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 >> Colonia CNOP >> Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 >> M?xico >> +52 (492) 768-6048 >> idiez at mac.com >> www.idiez.org.mx >> >> >> > > > Michael McCafferty > Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies > Indiana University > Bloomington, Indiana > 47401 > mmccaffe at indiana.edu > > "...as a dog howls at the moon, I talk." > > -Rumi > > From mmccaffe at indiana.edu Tue Jun 24 23:02:20 2003 From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty) Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 18:02:20 -0500 Subject: two more on Huastecan Nahuatl In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ------------------- >> Could you explain what is meant by "analogical formation"? > John > > Juantzi, Ahmo. I consulted my various selves and I have no idea what one of them was thinking this morning. Please excuse the interference. I attribute the strange comment to werewolves baying outside the window. But it is very odd that the /k/ would maintain in the conditional in Huastecan Nahuatl but "drop" in the future. Very strange. Sometimes, because of frequency of usage, an unexpected form will surface. The future tense, of course, is a mighty popular syntactical form in Nahuatl, very frequently employed. So, maybe this is one of those instances that we can attribute to frequency of usage. It certainly is a lot easier saying "chocazeh" instead of "chocazqueh". Now, I do know that in so-called "classical" Nahuatl /k/ will sometimes apparently drop after /s/. The example I'm thinking of, which I'll write in phonetic characters since it seems more transparent that way, is the word for "here": /iski/ > /isi/. (i.e., in the traditional orthography for Nahuatl: izqui > ici). That certainly is very little help, I admit. Michael On Tuesday, June 24, 2003, at 08:15 AM, Michael Mccafferty wrote: > > > John, > > > > In "nimitzilia" ~ "nimitzihlia" which syllable is the strong one? > > > > Or, put another way, how are these pronounced? > > > > [ni-mitz-i-lya] where [-i-] is the strong syllable, or > > > > [ni-mitz-i-li-a] where [-li-] is the strong syllable? > > > > > > > > As for the future plural question, this is really interesting. > > > > fut. sing. [cokas] > > fut. pl. [cokaseh] (or is that [cokase?], where [?] = glottal stop?) > > cond. [cokaskiya] ~ [cokaskia] > > > > It looks like future plural is form analogically on future singular, > > but I > > don't know. > > > > Michael > > > > > > On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 idiez at mac.com wrote: > > > >> There are two further characteristics of Huastecan Nahuatl that puzzle > >> me: > >> 1. The plural of the future tense has no /k/, while the > >> conditional/unfulfilled > >> action construction does. Here's an example: > >> future singular: "chocaz" > >> future plural: "chocaceh" > >> conditional/ unfulfilled action: "chocazquia" > >> 2. Instead of "nimitzilhuia", "I tell you", we have "nimitzilia" with > >> the apparent > >> loss of the /w/ (And it's the same in all tenses). At least one of my > >> native > >> speaking friends, pronounces a very slight aspiration before the "l". > >> Something > >> like "nimitzihlia". I understand that this is metathesis: a reverse > >> case of what > >> Lockhart comments on as the origin of the "-lhuia" applicative suffix > >> for Class 3 > >> verbs. > >> Would anyone like to comment on what's going on in these two cases? > >> > >> John Sullivan, Ph.D. > >> Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. > >> Francisco Garc?a Salinas 604 > >> Colonia CNOP > >> Zacatecas, Zac. 98053 > >> M?xico > >> +52 (492) 768-6048 > >> idiez at mac.com > >> www.idiez.org.mx > >> > >> > >> > > > > > > Michael McCafferty > > Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies > > Indiana University > > Bloomington, Indiana > > 47401 > > mmccaffe at indiana.edu > > > > "...as a dog howls at the moon, I talk." > > > > -Rumi > > > > > > > From schwallr at mrs.umn.edu Mon Jun 30 16:11:54 2003 From: schwallr at mrs.umn.edu (John F. Schwaller) Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 11:11:54 -0500 Subject: Klor de Alva Message-ID: Every once and so often people write in to inquire what has become of Jorge J. Klor de Alva. He is now the President of Apollo International the holding company that owns the University of Phoenix. Here is a recent bit of an article about distance education and just-in-time education that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education : >Jorge Klor de Alva, the president of Apollo International, says the >company, established in 1999 with $40-million in capital, is braced to >explode. Along with plans to develop campuses in India with a major local >partner there, he says, the company is in serious talks with college >operators in Mexico and is exploring new ventures in Brazil, all of which >could bring as many as 40,000 students into the Apollo International >family. The company expects to go public in three to five years. By then, >Mr. Klor de Alva, who thinks in grand terms, hopes to have 70,000 to >100,000 students. And who says studying Nahuatl won't earn you the big bucks? John F. Schwaller Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Dean 315 Behmler Hall University of Minnesota, Morris 600 E 4th Street Morris, MN 56267 320-589-6015 FAX 320-589-6399 schwallr at mrs.umn.edu From mmontcha at oregonvos.net Mon Jun 30 23:54:07 2003 From: mmontcha at oregonvos.net (Matthew Montchalin) Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 16:54:07 -0700 Subject: Klor de Alva In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20030630110900.0454fde0@cda.mrs.umn.edu> Message-ID: On Mon, 30 Jun 2003, John F. Schwaller wrote: |>Jorge Klor de Alva, the president of Apollo International, says the |>company, established in 1999 with $40-million in capital, is braced to |>explode. Along with plans to develop campuses in India with a major local |>partner there, he says, the company is in serious talks with college |>operators in Mexico and is exploring new ventures in Brazil, all of which |>could bring as many as 40,000 students into the Apollo International |>family. The company expects to go public in three to five years. By then, |>Mr. Klor de Alva, who thinks in grand terms, hopes to have 70,000 to |>100,000 students. | |And who says studying Nahuatl won't earn you the big bucks? Do you know of any animated cartoons on DVD with a soundtrack in Nahuatl, and Nahuatl subtitles?