etihcihui. ...and the winner is...

[Campbell, R. Joe]

  John Sullivan!!

> Hey Joe,
> 	¿Naman canin ticholoz?
> 	And, even though I've never seen "ihcihui" used as an auxiliary
> verb, we should never say never, right? So, how about a little dose
> of haplology?
> "eti(ya)+t(i)-ihcihui" and then get rid of one of the "ti"s.
> John
>


It has taken Mary and me some time to get around to finishing this 
note. Life can get busy and complicated.

To review the problem: Etl is a noun meaning 'bean', and apparently 
takes part in a verbing to etiya, which means 'to be heavy'. (There is 
always the possibility, of course, that the e- of etiya is just a 
homonym with etl, but I know of no way to determine which is the case, 
and it doesn't matter for the question at hand). Etiya forms an 
obsolete preterit etic (parallel to iztac with loss of the -ya (delya) 
and addition of the number marker -c), which has an adjectival sense. 
All of this is clear.

The problem I posted had to do with my puzzlement over the form 
etihcihui, which I intuited was composed of some form of etiya and 
ihcihui. But both of these are verbs, and the only way to paste them 
together would be with the ligature -ti-, and I only saw one ti, which 
I assumed went with eti(ya), so I discounted this possibility.

The verb-ti-verb construction requires a preterit verb in the first 
position, and for etiya, there are two possibilities:
1)	the obsolete preterite eti(c) with loss of the -ya in e-ti-ya (the 
number marker -c does not show up in this position) and
2)	2) the regular preterit etix-, which occurs in etixtiuh  
etl-v01a-v01b-prt1-ti1-yauh2 'ir muy cargarda la carreta o la barca'. 
Thus, for the form in my original inquiry, one would expect 
eti-t(i)-ihcihui.

But John has the perfect answer: it's my old friend haplology -- the 
loss of a syllable before or after an identical or nearly identical 
syllable (In many cases, there's no way to tell which one is lost, of 
course.) Both ti's are "really there" morphologically, but the identity 
of the two syllables makes one of them invisible through haplology. 
John brings up another interesting point, which is that ihcihui 'to 
hurry' or 'to harrass', is not one of the verbs which commonly occurs 
after the -ti- ligature. Should this invalidate the analysis? In truth, 
I'd feel more comfortable if I could find ihcihui with the -ti- 
connector used with a different verb as embed, but in all of my data, 
there doesn't seem to be such an example.
However, what I *did* find -- I frequently feel like the shoemaker who 
found that some elves had done his work during the night -- is that I 
had coded another -ti- compound as showing haplology!:

        "mihtotinemih": ihtohtinemi, m[o] b4 f8 p.78
        for mihto:tihtinemi         p54-ihto:tia-prt1-ti1-nemi

In this case, it really *does* matter which 'ti' deletes. I strongly 
suspect it is the first one. Below are both possibilities with the 
supposedly deleting 'ti' capitalized, followed by the regularized 
spelling for that possibility.

        ihto:TIhtinemi   > ihtohtinemi
        ihto:tihTInemi   > ihto:tihnemi

See Andrews (p.402) for adjectival obsolete -ti-(ya) preterites, many 
of them denominal.

Joe and Mary

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