Malintzin

[Frances Karttunen]

> What if anything, might have been the grammatical distinctions made in
> speaking third-person about Malintzin (him), Malintzin (her), and Malintzin
> (the god??)

No morphological distinctions at all that I can think of.

In Nahuatl there are grammatical distinctions based on human/nonhuman,
animate/inanimate, and specific/nonspecific, but not human/superhuman.

Nahuatl makes no masculine/feminine third-person distinction. There is a
distinction between male vocative and female vocative, but that refers to
the speaker, not to who/what is spoken of.

And the honorific -tzin is there in all three cases.


Can anyone on the list think of any subtle difference between mentioning a
human honorifically and mentioning a deity?

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