Tloc, nahuac, tech, tlan

[Michael McCafferty]

Jotzin,

Thank you for putting this first "draught" together. This will nicely 
lay the foundation for a good look at these creatures.

What struck me in about my first couple weeks of studying Nahuatl was 
the "nounal" ;-) character of "postpositions," particularly the way 
they could be possessed as well enter into composite terms as the head. 
I felt, "We aren't in Kansas anymore." As examples, here are just a few 
things that occurred to me as I write this message:

tehuan
ihuan
nicnehuanilpia
nohuampoh
teihtic
teixco
tehuic
teca
teicpac
tlapanco

tloqueh
tlancuaitl

even:

ayic

etc...

Tambien:

Y mis listeros, aqui esta lo que me escribi Martin Mangei esta manana. 
Muy interesante.



"To be honest, I think that Andrews' analysis of the relational 
nouns/prepositions/postpositions reveals rather one of his major 
shortcomings: the confusing and consequent intermixture and confusion 
of historical and synchronical facts. Yes, these words have emerged 
from nouns (as many prepositions do), yes they can be inflected in a 
way very similar to nouns (as prepositions can), and yes they seem to 
have emerged from some kind of adverbal use of nouns (as preposition 
often do).

BUT: "preposition" doesn't name a historical development, it's rather a 
morphosyntactic term. Deciding whether a class of words can or should 
be termed "preposition", nothing but their morphological, perhaps their 
meaning/function and primarily their syntactic behaviour should be 
considered - which is quite simply preposition-like :)


But there is another intresting question with regard to these words. 
Some of them can have relatively similar meanings. Do you know whether 
it is possible to tell whether such Rel.Nouns differ with regard to the 
nouns they 'govern'? Such that we could state rules like e.g.: "The 
suffix -c(o) expresses locative meaning with nouns like A, B, C etc., 
whereas the same meaning is expressed by means of the (quasi synonym) 
Rel.Noun -pan with nouns as D, E, F. etc"

mmangei at gmx.de



Michael



Quoting "Campbell,  R. Joe" <campbel at indiana.edu>:

> Nocnihuan,
>
>   The things we call "postpositions" or "relational nouns" obviously
> don't all follow the same distributional map, so I have put a rough
> one together.  "Rough" means that I consider just a draft, so I won't
> mind having mistakes drawn to my attention.
>
>   I include -nahuac in the list in spite of the fact that I know that
> it is really a noun with attached -c(o).
>
>   Category 5 (occurs after a noun) has a neutral label in order to
> avoid calling fish or fowl (i.e., noun compound or noun suffix).
>
>   Obviously, these categories hint strongly at the noun-like behavior
> of these objects of our attention, which goes in the opposite
> direction from their frequent spatial and temporal function in the
> language.
>
> As Arnie said, "I'll be back."
>
> Joe
>
>  "postpositions"
>
> 1   takes a "verber" suffix
> 2   embeds in -yo(tl)
> 3   takes absolutive
> 4   takes a possessive prefix
> 5   occurs after a noun
> 6   embeds in -eh (e.g., tloqueh) [not included yet in the chart]
>
>           x = yes
>
>        1       2       3       4       5
>
> can             x       x       x       x
>
> co              x                       x
>
> huan    x                       x
>
> huic    x                       x       x
>
> ican    x                       x
>
> nahuac  x       x       x       x       x
>
> pa              x                       ?
>
> pan     x       x       x       x       x
>
> pampa   x       x               x
>
> tech    x       x       x       x       x
>
> tlan    x       x       x       x       x
>
> tloc    x                       x
>
> tzalan  x       x       x       x       x
>
>
>
>



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