tlahtoani

[Michael McCafferty]

Joost:

There are some cases in Algonquian where verbs stand for nouns. The 
Miami-Illinois term for 'watermelon' is actually a participle, not a 
noun. I don't think these cases are very common, however, and I can't 
think of a term for "leader, chief, etc." that is a verb.

At the same time, Algonquian evinces innumerable nouns that at some  
point in the distant past evolved from verbs. For example, the 
Miami-Illinois term
/siipiiwi/ 'river' is structurally a verb, and was surely an inanimate 
third-person verb at some point in the distant past meaning "it is a 
river". In addition, the Miami-Illinois noun for 'turkey', /pileewa/, 
includes within it the morpheme for 'fly' and in fact the word probably 
did mean something like 'he flies' (or 'he flies!' back in the day, but 
no longer.

I'll keep my eyes peeled for anything that pops up in Algonquian that 
might interest you.

Michael




Quoting Joost Kremers <joostkremers at fastmail.fm>:

> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 01:01:40PM -0500, Michael McCafferty wrote:
>> Joost, I don't know if I understand what you are referring to as a
>> "phenomenon". I don't know, therefore, if I understand the question,
>> and I'm not sure how this relates to "Dances with Wolves".
>
> I'm sorry if my question was overly terse... I'll give it another
> try. :-) What
> I'm interested in is the use of fully conjugated verbs (or ever phrases) that
> are functionally equivalent to nouns. The word 'tlahtoani' as a verb
> means "s/he
> habitually speaks", but it's often not used in this sense.
>
> Many languages would require some formal device to turn a verb phrase
> into a the
> equivalent of a noun, something like "he who habitually speaks" (i.e., a
> relative clause), but Nahuatl apparently doesn't require this.
>
> That's the phenomenon I'm interested in and was wondering, whether
> something has
> been written about it.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Joost
>
> --
> Joost Kremers, PhD
> University of Göttingen
> Institute for German Philology
> Käte-Hamburger-Weg 3
> 37073 Göttingen, Germany
> Tel. +49 551 39 4467
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>




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