cuatemitoc

[John Sullivan, Ph.D.]

Listeros,
	I came across an interesting word today in Chicontepec Nahuatl.  
"cua:te:mitoc. ni." = "I have bump (chipote) on my head", or more  
literally, "I am head-swollen".  First let's get "cua-" from  
"cua:itl", "head", out of the way.
	OK, the interesting thing is this. We have either the intransive  
"te:mi", "to fill up or swell", which should reduce to "te:n-"; or  
the causitive "te:mia", "to fill something up" or perhaps "to make  
something swell up", which should reduce to "te:mih-".
	On these two reduced forms you could then add the auxiliary "-toc" (- 
ti- ligature, plus the singular preterite-as-present form of the verb  
"o", "to be lying down"), which in the Huasteca means "to have done  
something (present perfect tense), or sometimes, by extension, to be  
in the state resulting from that action.
	Anyway, you would get either "cua:te:ntoc" ("cua:-" as adverb) or  
"cua:te:mihtoc" ("cua:-" as object). The problem is that the native  
speakers here insist that it is "cua:te:mitoc". Given the fact that  
class 2 verb reduction is a relatively recent phenomenon in the  
evolution of Nahuatl, and that peripheral variants, such as the  
Nahuatl of the Huasteca tend to conserve older forms, and that in the  
Huasteca (perhaps in other areas too) many verbs can be conjugated  
either as class 1 or class 2 with no difference in meaning (this is  
not the case with "te:mi" today), could we perhaps be seeing in  
"cua:te:mitoc" an older unreduced form of the verb "te:mi"?
John

John Sullivan, Ph.D.
Profesor de lengua y cultura nahua
Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas
Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C.
Tacuba 152, int. 47
Centro Histórico
Zacatecas, Zac. 98000
México
Oficina: +52 (492) 925-3415
Fax: +52 (492) 925-3416
Domicilio: +52 (492) 768-6048
Celular: +52 (492) 118-0854
idiez at mac.com
www.idiez.org.mx




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