nahuatl color terms

[Magnus Pharao Hansen]

Dear Dr. McCafferty and listeros

I see several problems with the hills articles and I don' think it makes for
a very reliable reconstruction.

Why is teskatik glossed as blue and taken for cognate with texohtli? As far
as I know teskatl (obsidian mirror) are black. Why is matlaltik glossed as
green? As far as I know it refers to the blueish purple color of a bruise
and came to taken on the meaning of green in some dialects through the
common mesoamerican metaphor of crude/bruised > crude/green. They don't
justify the notion that ne:xtik is a basic colorterm in Nahuatl - they don't
even mention Berlin & kays distinction between basic and non basic terms or
the problems that pose for the study of colorterms in any language. Also
reconstructing *po as grey based on nahuatl pochektik which is clearly
derived from poktli "smoke" and is not justified as being cognate with the
other UA terms seems highly questionable.

I noticed one clear cognate though: "pa" the nahuatl root for "color" seems
to have originally meant "red" vis a vis the cognates in Cora and Hopi. The
relation of red as the prototypical "color" is well known throughout the
worlds languages e.g. in spanish "colorado". If someone wnts to read the
best analysis of colors in Nahuatl, and UA and mesoamerica go for McLaurys
Mesoamerican Color Terms.


Magnus


> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Michael McCafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>
> To: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:33:29 -0500
> Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] nahuatl colors
> Here are the coordinates for the Hill's paper on PUA colors:
>
> http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029256?cookieSet=1
>
>
> Michael
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/nahuat-l/attachments/20091112/000aae03/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl