mo:la and mo:lli

[Henry Kammler]

> The way you phrased it, John, seems to be a "which came first the 
> chicken or the egg?" kind of question.
>
In general terms there's a tendency for concentration on word class 
issues in Nahuatl grammar discussions. Wouldn't it be more promising to 
just look at roots as irreducible entities that are neither inherently 
verbal nor nominal but combine with different sets of suffixes according 
to, among others, their syntactic relations? So the root /mo:l/ combines 
either with /-a/ or with /-li/, without one taking precedence over the 
other. Something that e.g. touches on the whole terminology around  the 
different "verb bases" which are didatically useful but analytically not 
very satisfying (for the "bases" are mostly already stems derived from a 
root plus suffixes).

Sâhkôn niknemilia
Henry




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