Understanding of a folk etymology

[Galen Brokaw]

This is a good question. I'd be interested in any responses as well. I 
puzzled over this for quite a while at one time. I seem to remember 
posting this same question to the list a number of years ago, but I 
couldn't find it in the archive. In my possibly false memory of that 
query, I don't think I got any response.
I've seen several different interpretations of the morphology of this 
word, all of which seemed to be based on merely identifying certain 
elements as morphemes without explaining grammatically how they work 
together. And they also often fail to account for all of the morphology. 
I think the rationale behind claiming that it means "what has been 
lived, to complete" is based on the fact that the beginning of the word 
is 'nem' which calls to mind 'nemi' (to live) and the last part is 
'temi' which means 'to fill up.' But the grammatical implication of this 
morphological interpretation is that you have a verb-verb compound 
ostensibly joined by the directional particle 'on.' The problem is that 
I don't think we have any other examples of this kind of structure. 
Having said that, interpreting the 'temi' part as 'to fill up' is 
particularly attractive. As I'm sure you know, the word refers to the 
five day period in the calendar at the end of the solar year between the 
end of the 360-cycle of 20 day signs and 13 numbers and the beginning of 
the new solar year. So 'temi' makes a certain sort of sense in that the 
period to which 'nemontemi' refers could be conceived of as the five-day 
remainder left over from the completion of the calendrical cycle 
involving the combination of the 20 day signs and 13 numbers, which is 
used to "fill up" the difference between that 360-day cycle and the 
365-day solar year. I won't bore you with all of my other speculative 
attempts to make sense of the other elements. They are probably fairly 
obvious anyway. In the end, though, I couldn't figure out a way to 
account for all of the elements of the word in a way that would also be 
grammatically consistent. I may be missing something obvious here, 
though. If I'm not, then we have to keep in mind that the calendar had a 
very long tradition, and the Nahuas inherited it from other groups. So 
the term may even have originally derived from some other language. 
There are a good number of other morphological puzzles sort of like this 
in Nahuatl, but my impression is that relatively speaking they are few. 
This has always been sort of surprising to me. I have a theory about why 
this is the case, but I won't subject you to it at this point.

Galen Brokaw



micc2 wrote:
> In a yahoo group dedicated to Aztec dancers, I saw this:  
> *[ConsejoQuetzalcoat l] NEMONTEMI means "what has been lived, to complete"
>
> *
>
> *can anyone tell me what the generally accepted meaning of this word 
> is, and how a definitition of the end of the yeara could be seen as 
> **"what has been lived, to complete"?
> *
>
> *
> Thanks in advanced!***
>
> -- 
>
> I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:
>
> "Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz
>
>
> Mario E. Aguilar, PhD
> www.mexicayotl.org
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>   

_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl