teotihuacan etymology

[Campbell, R. Joe]

Dear Magnus,

   I thought you scored some well reasoned points!  While I don't 
disagree with anything you said, you reminded me of an academic scene 
that is probably re-played from time to time.  You said that no 
grammarian has made this analysis before and it reminded me of a 
situation that occurred when I was in my third year of graduate school. 
  My phonology professor was explaining the phonetic facts about the 
Portuguese vowel system and then finished up by saying what the 
phonological inferences were.  Since my head was buzzing with 
generative ideas, I volunteered that there was another way to look at 
it.  He looked over his glasses and said, "What might that be?"  When I 
had said my piece, he said, "Joe, that's very imaginative, but I don't 
think you will find any (I think he included the word 
"self-respecting") linguist that will say that.  Quite by accident, two 
days later I read an article by Kenneth Pike (highly respected by most 
linguists) in which he described the Portuguese vowel system and its 
processes in a way that suggested that he had overheard my classroom 
suggestion.

   Which brings me to back to the fact that while I agree with you that 
-ca:n and -ya:n are the preferable analysis for Nahuatl, Richard 
Andrews actually has proposed the other solution.  In Lesson 46 of his 
Revised Edition, he says that the "ca:" and "ya" are elements which 
appear elsewhere in the verb system and that the locative morpheme is 
"n".  I would suggest that while this may possibly (some people would 
say "probably") true historically, when we do our morphological 
analysis judgments, we do include historical development in the court 
record.  It would be interesting to see if someone could make a 
reasoned case for Andrews' point of view.  Actually, I can guess what a 
few of their points might be.

   A minor fussy point that I would bring up: while you make it clear 
that "-ti"  results in the formation of a denominal verb, I wouldn't 
call it a "causative suffix".  There is a set of suffixes that are 
added to verbs that increase their transitivity by "1" and there is 
another suffixes that are added to nouns that result in verbs.  I think 
that it would be better to have separate grammatical labels for those 
suffixes.

Tottazqueh,

Joe

Quoting Magnus Pharao Hansen <magnuspharao at gmail.com>:

> Dear. Dr. Sullivan
>
> The proposed analysis of Teotihuacan seems pretty far stretched. Firstly why
> assume that it is from a t dialect - teotihuacan is well within the central
> dialect area where tl would be expected, (although of course it might not
> always have been) - and use of the name itself is attested only in a -tl
> dialect, classical Nahuatl. Secondly the etymology requires i not just a
> t-dialect but also an i-dialect since central dialects tend to have /tle/ as
> the root for fire.   Thirdly splitting up the locative suffix /ka:n/ into an
> agentive and a -n locative suffix seems completely unwarranted - to my
> knowledge no grammarian has made this analysis before, all seeing -/ka:n/
> and /ya:n/ as single morphemes. I would propose that a much better analysis
> would be:
>
> teo - divine, god, holy, mystic
> ti - causative suffix (the one used on nouns to form a denominal verb
> meaning to become as in /tla:kati/ "be born")
> hua- passive/non-specific agent suffix
> can - locative suffix
>
> "place where someone becomes (a) god"
>
> Magnus Pharao Hansen
>



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