cuaxochtli

[Michael McCafferty]

If you come up with a semantic relation of "head-flower" or even "flower-head" 
for "borderline," then I'll love to hear about it. Following Joe's lead, it's 
obvious from experience that, while some people may hope that any noun with 
apparently two or more parts such as cuaxochitl seems like it can be parsed, 
that just ain't the case. For example, in Miami-Illinois, a native North 
American language, there are many nice, really *long* words that just can't be 
chopped up. /kiteehpikwanwa/, the term for the species of carp known in 
English as the buffalo fish comes to mind. Now, while a lot of terms can be 
cut up, such as /myaalameekwa/ 'channel catfish' (/myaal- 'ugly, gaunt' and 
/-(a)meekw-/ 'fish', /kiteepihkwanw-/ is just its own morpheme, semantically 
unanalyzable.

cuaxoch- *could be* homophonous with cua-xoch- 'head-flower', but it may not 
be. Vowel length is always a question, too.

Michael 

Quoting Yukitaka Inoue Okubo <takaio at PO.AIANET.NE.JP>:

> Anthony and Joe:
> 
> Thank you for your comments.
> The problem is that I don't understand exactly what cuaxochtli means. That 
> is, if it is a some kind of clear border"line",or places with certain 
> extention of surface(for example, a hill or mountain). This question made me
> 
> to start thinking of the possibility of a compound.
> Any way, I will check if "head" and "flower" could have semantic relation, 
> or not, with land border (or land itself).
> 
> Yukitaka Inoue O.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > --- Yukitaka Inoue Okubo <takaio at PO.AIANET.NE.JP> wrote:
> >> Hello. Could anyone help me with the etymology of `cuaxochtli'
> >> (land border, lindero)? Does it have something to do
> >> with "cuaitl" and/or "xochitl"? In some colonial documents I'm
> >> reading, I've also seen the form "cuaxochitli" instead ...
> >
> > Uhh. `It-is-a-head-flower'. Was there a custom somewhere, of planting
> > flowering bushes to mark land borders?
> >
> > Citlalyani
> >
> > 
>