From idiez at me.com  Thu Oct  2 04:53:30 2014
From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan)
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2014 23:53:30 -0500
Subject: "ca" and factitives
Message-ID: <WED.1.OCT.2014.235330.0500.IDIEZ@ME.COM>

Notequixpoyohuan,
	There is a note in chapter 14 of Nahuatl as Written, stating that the particle “ca” can introduce dependent cláuses after factitive verbs. Does anyone have any examples of this?
John
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From mmccaffe at indiana.edu  Thu Oct  2 10:36:22 2014
From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty)
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 06:36:22 -0400
Subject: "ca" and factitives
In-Reply-To: <2C30CFFA-7B3C-4714-BF76-8DEC266EC10C@me.com>
Message-ID: <THU.2.OCT.2014.063622.0400.MMCCAFFE@INDIANA.EDU>

Quoting John Sullivan <idiez at me.com>:

> Notequixpoyohuan,
> 	There is a note in chapter 14 of Nahuatl as Written, stating that
> the particle ?ca? can introduce dependent cláuses after factitive
> verbs. Does anyone have any examples of this?
> John
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>

See p. 536 of Andrews II, section 50.11.

Michael

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From keeler.peter at gmail.com  Thu Oct  2 16:02:17 2014
From: keeler.peter at gmail.com (Peter Keeler)
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 11:02:17 -0500
Subject: [Aztlan] A question about Aztecs and armadillos
Message-ID: <THU.2.OCT.2014.110217.0500.KEELER.PETER@GMAIL.COM>

U'uyeh, Listeros, 

       The recent interchange (on Aztlan) about the word for armadillo in nahuatl, 

      eg:

"It is ayotochtli not azotochtli.  Whoever told you azo... Probably was misinformed.

Yes, it means something along the lines of turtle rabbit.


Sent from my iPad
John Schwaller
Professor of History
University at Albany "

......prompted an off-line discussion among some of my Mayanist friends, 

      in which I made the point that armadillos can move fast, when they want to: 

         " Also NB armadillo ears, rather rabbit-like. 

      and they can really moooove. 

      once upon a long long time ago, W. and I out in the [Texas] hill country, we encountered a dillo, by the road. W. began to walk in her direction; she started ambling away. W. walked a little faster, she began to slowly lope away. W. began a slow run, and she took off. Then he ran full speed, and she was moving about twice as fast. And, like a jackrabbit, she was gone. 

    a delightful animal, long the mascot of the counter-culture. Dillos are pretty laid back, unless you are running after them. "

      Which elicited the image below from W (still running, or at least ambling, after all these years), that I suspect most of our Nahuatl listeros already know:    

"Early (? earliest) illustration of an armadillo (Florentine Codex, Book 11; page 61, fig. 201)."


-------------- next part --------------


     I urge interested parties to visit the web to see more accurate photographic depictions of this peaceful critter. 

  http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=armadillo&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=QHQtVN38NZT-yQTMjYHIDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ

 that's all, 

              Peter
-------------- next part --------------
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From idiez at me.com  Thu Oct  2 20:14:15 2014
From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan)
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 15:14:15 -0500
Subject: 2015 Winter Intensive Course in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl
Message-ID: <THU.2.OCT.2014.151415.0500.IDIEZ@ME.COM>

Notequixpoyohuan, 
	Here is the announcement for this winter’s Intensive Course in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl.
It will be held in the city of Zacatecas from January 5-16, 2015. The course will be taught in Nahuatl and Spanish.
John

Te invitamos a participar en esta experiencia académica única
CURSO INTENSIVO DE NÁHUATL MODERNO
del 5 al 16 de enero del 2015 en Zacatecas

El Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. (IDIEZ), te invita a participar en el Curso Intensivo de Náhuatl Moderno que se llevará acabo del 5 al 16 de enero del 2015 en las instalaciones del mismo instituto en la ciudad de Zacatecas. Su curriculum innovador incluye instrucción el náhuatl moderno a los niveles principiante e intermedio/avanzado. Al final del curso se contará con un concierto en lengua náhuatl, con la participación del cantautor Crispín Martínez Rosas y con un recital de poesía en lengua náhuatl interpretado por el escritor, Gustavo Zapoteco Sideño.
Instructores: Ofelia Cruz Morales, Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz y Abelardo de la Cruz de la Cruz. 
Colegiatura e inscripción:  1500 pesos (residentes de México), 350 USD (no-residentes de México). Debe pagarse antes del 30 de noviembre de 2014. Favor de inscribirse lo más pronto posible: hay cupo limitado. Para inscribirse y para realizar el pago de la colegiatura, favor de comunicarse con Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz a xochiayotzin at icloud.com o a +52 1 (492) 127 52 64 (México). 
Hospedaje: Los organizadores ayudarán a los alumnos a encontrar opciones de hospedaje durante el curso. Favor de comunicarse con Eduardo de la Cruz al xochiayotzin at icloud.com
Descripción del curso: Los estudiantes asistirán a clase seis horas diariamente, de lunes a viernes durante dos semanas para un total de sesenta horas de clase). 
La instrucción consistirá en: 
1. Tres horas diarias por la mañana de inmersión en náhuatl moderno de la Huasteca Veracruzana, incluyendo conversación, lectura, escritura y gramática. 
2. Tres horas diarias por la tarde de actividades culturales, incluyendo danza, canto, bordado y teatro.
3. Presentación optativa de temas de docencia, investigación y revitalización realizados por los alumnos e instructores.
 Objetivos del curso: 
1) Desarrollar en el alumno la comprensión oral, el habla, la lectura, la escritura y el conocimiento de la estructura del idioma, así como la erudición y la sensibilidad cultural, con el fin de facilitar su capacidad de comunicarse eficaz, correcta y creativamente en las situaciones cotidianas; 
2) penetrar en los aspectos históricos, económicos, políticos, sociales y culturales de la civilización nahua;
3) preparar a los alumnos a tomar cursos de nivel universitario en las humanidades impartidos en náhuatl junto con nativohablantes;
4) promover la conciencia de los retos metodológicos y las oportunidades que implican el estudio del náhuatl, las amenazas contemporáneas a la sobrevivencia del náhuatl, y las actividades de revitalización que puedan realizar tanto nativo hablantes como no-nativohablantes. 
Horario (de lunes a viernes): 
08:30-11:30. Náhuatl moderno de la Huasteca (principiante e intermedio/avanzado).
11:30-15:00. Descanso y comidas.
15:00-18:00. Actividades culturales.
18:30-19:00. Presentación de proyectos de docencia, investigación y revitalizacion. 
Materiales del curso: Una semana antes de iniciar el curso, se les eviarán a los alumnos, sin costo, copias electrónicas de los manuales de ejercicios, los esquemas gramaticales, las listas de vocabulario. 
Actividad optativa para el fin de semana del 10-11 de enero: Visita a la zona arqueológica y al museo de Chicomoztoc. 

Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C.
Tacuba 152, int. 43, Colonia Centro, Zacatecas, Zac. 98000
+52 (492) 892-3610	   idiez at me.com	www.macehualli.org

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From micc2 at cox.net  Fri Oct  3 02:59:42 2014
From: micc2 at cox.net (mario)
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 19:59:42 -0700
Subject: [Aztlan] A question about Aztecs and armadillos
In-Reply-To: <yG731o00M3Wj1Vk01G74j6>
Message-ID: <THU.2.OCT.2014.195942.0700.MICC2@COX.NET>

It is said in the Danza Chichimeca/Conchera/Azteca that when the Spanish 
prohibited the Otomi and other indigenous people from getting wood 
materials to make their guitars and mandolins, they began to use the 
shells of the Armadillo. Thus we are called "concheros".....

Today, certain revisionist new age "Mexi'ca dancers" use the word 
Conchero as a disparaging term for "Hispanicized Ladino" dancers.

But those of us that follow the Indocristiano traditions of La Danza, we 
dance with our "dillos" with pride!!!!!

On another note, when My son found out that armadillos can carry 
Leprosy, he went around spraying all our Conchas with Lysol!!!

-- 
I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:

"Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz


Mario E. Aguilar, PhD

619.948.8861

www.mexicayotl.net
www.mexicayotl.org
www.mexicayotl.com
www.aguila-blanca.com

On 10/2/2014 9:02 AM, Peter Keeler wrote:
> U'uyeh, Listeros,
>
>         The recent interchange (on Aztlan) about the word for armadillo in nahuatl,
>
>        eg:
>
> "It is ayotochtli not azotochtli.  Whoever told you azo... Probably was misinformed.
>
> Yes, it means something along the lines of turtle rabbit.
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
> John Schwaller
> Professor of History
> University at Albany "
>
> ......prompted an off-line discussion among some of my Mayanist friends,
>
>        in which I made the point that armadillos can move fast, when they want to:
>
>           " Also NB armadillo ears, rather rabbit-like.
>
>        and they can really moooove.
>
>        once upon a long long time ago, W. and I out in the [Texas] hill country, we encountered a dillo, by the road. W. began to walk in her direction; she started ambling away. W. walked a little faster, she began to slowly lope away. W. began a slow run, and she took off. Then he ran full speed, and she was moving about twice as fast. And, like a jackrabbit, she was gone.
>
>      a delightful animal, long the mascot of the counter-culture. Dillos are pretty laid back, unless you are running after them. "
>
>        Which elicited the image below from W (still running, or at least ambling, after all these years), that I suspect most of our Nahuatl listeros already know:
>
> "Early (? earliest) illustration of an armadillo (Florentine Codex, Book 11; page 61, fig. 201)."
>
>
>
>
>
>       I urge interested parties to visit the web to see more accurate photographic depictions of this peaceful critter.
>
>    http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=armadillo&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=QHQtVN38NZT-yQTMjYHIDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ
>
>   that's all,
>
>                Peter
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl

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From keeler.peter at gmail.com  Fri Oct  3 15:21:37 2014
From: keeler.peter at gmail.com (Peter Keeler)
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2014 10:21:37 -0500
Subject: [Aztlan] A question about Aztecs and armadillos
Message-ID: <FRI.3.OCT.2014.102137.0500.KEELER.PETER@GMAIL.COM>

U'uyeh, Listeros, 

      The recent interchange (on Aztlan) about the word for armadillo in nahuatl, 

     eg:

"It is ayotochtli not azotochtli.  Whoever told you azo... Probably was misinformed.

Yes, it means something along the lines of turtle rabbit.


Sent from my iPad
John Schwaller
Professor of History
University at Albany "

......prompted an off-line discussion among some of my Mayanist friends, 

     in which I made the point that armadillos can move fast, when they want to: 

        " Also NB armadillo ears, rather rabbit-like. 

     and they can really moooove. 

     once upon a long long time ago, W. and I out in the [Texas] hill country, we encountered a dillo, by the road. W. began to walk in her direction; she started ambling away. W. walked a little faster, she began to slowly lope away. W. began a slow run, and she took off. Then he ran full speed, and she was moving about twice as fast. And, like a jackrabbit, she was gone. 

   a delightful animal, long the mascot of the counter-culture. Dillos are pretty laid back, unless you are running after them. "

     Which comment elicited an armadillo image from the Florentine Codex from W (still running, or at least ambling, after all these years), that I suspect most of our Nahuatl listeros already know:    

"Early (? earliest) illustration of an armadillo (Florentine Codex, Book 11; page 61, fig. 201)."

     the image he sent can be seen on the Aztecs section of the Mexicolore site, picture 4:

http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/ask-experts/what-did-they-do-with-the-shells-of-armadillos-after-eating-the-meat

 Those who are unfamiliar with 'dillos can compare the codex image with more accurate photographic depictions of this peaceful critter, in many sites on the web, including this:  

 http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=armadillo&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=QHQtVN38NZT-yQTMjYHIDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ

that's all, 

             Peter
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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Fri Oct  3 16:31:51 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2014 18:31:51 +0200
Subject: -ti verber (again-1)
In-Reply-To: <20140925150656.0o7mu2q9kwkwcsgg@webmail.iu.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.3.OCT.2014.183151.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear listeros.

Sorry for coming back to a cold case, but I had promised to do so.

Mary and Joe’s rationale consists of two points : (1) there are two different verbers –ti, one meaning « be » and one meaning « have » ; (2) the proof of this difference lies in the causative, which is in –ti-lia in the first case, e.g. tlāca-ti-lia lit. « cause to become a human being », i.e. « give birth to »), in –tia in the second case, e.g. cac-tia « cause to have shoes », i.e. « shoe » (the verb, as in « Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little foot »). Let me suggest another approach and try to convince you that it is more satisfactory.

Objection (1) I still challenge anyone to find a single example of ni-cac-ti / ni-cal-ti / ni-nān-ti etc. meaning « I have shoes / a house / a mother » etc. In this meaning, you find ni-caqu-ê / ni-cal-ê / ni-nān-ê etc., or oncâ no-cac / no-cal / no-nān etc. ; or in some dialects ni-c-piya no-cac etc. I’ll return later to some possible examples adduced by Mary Clayton and Tomas Amaya. But you could say : OK, you never find that, but there is an underlying structure with that meaning, so let’s pass to another objection

Objection (2) There is nothing like a clear translinguistic meaning of « be » and « have » : there are specific uses of these specific verbs in English, which only partly correspond to the uses of partly similar verbs in other languages, e.g. French « être » and « avoir », not to speak of Spanish which has « ser » + « estar » (would one of them, or both, be the « real » « be » ?), and still less of languages that have no verb « have », or neither « have » nor « be ». Actually, « be » and « have » typically belong to grammar, not to lexicon. This means that, like grammatical categories (say, number, aspect…) or syntactic rules and constraints, they mark abstract structures and relations, which are organized by each language in its own specific way, and which cannot be captured by a single word belonging to a specific language. [In this particular case, it is something like « X is spotted (I find it hard to find a good translation of French repérer) with relation to Y, located near Y », or « Y is the localisator (again, French « repère » is better) of X ». But this is not the main point here.]

Objection (3) I have challenged the translation (again, I say translation, not meaning) « have » for –ti. But translating –ti by « be » may be still worse. « I’m a lord » (if I dare say) is ni-tēuc-tli, not ni-tēuc-ti, which has more into it. Whatever the translation of –ti, one thing is sure : it forms verbs from noun (sometimes adverb) stems. That is, it confers verbal categories (tense, aspect, mood) to a notion that by itself lacks such categories. Moreover, -ti verbs are clearly dynamic, i.e. verbs of action. So if you translate them by the most prototypically stative English verbs, which are most particular (and defective) in relation to aspect, you miss the most interesting and explanatory point.

[Before coming to a suggestion : note that English « be » and « have » are more easily used in some typical verbal (i.e., aspectual or modal) contexts that in other languages. For instance, they may be used in imperative, e.g. « Be brave », but this means « behave bravely », and could perfectly be translated by a –ti verb in Nahuatl (xicuāuhti, xocēlōti lit. « behave like an eagle and a jaguar) ; or « have a drink », but it means « take a drink », not « be the owner of a drink ». I said in a preceding message that this English idiosyncrasy could be part of the misunderstanding, for instance in French « be brave » has a plausible exact translation (« sois brave »), but if you translate « have a drink » by « aie un verre », it sounds silly (except in some contexts, but this would lead us astray)]

So, my suggestion : a verb which has the structure N-ti is used to mark a behavior of some sort which has as an effect the realization of N : not as a stable property, but as an action. And here we come to what is admittedly an idiosyncrasy of Nahuatl grammar, because there are two different cases, which can mislead us into the « be » vs. « have » theory. The real difference is that this behavior can apply (a) to oneself, or (b) to an external object.

Case (a) (to oneself) : the person who can say ni-tēuc-ti can also say ni-tēuc-tli (I’m a lord, and so ni-tēuc-ti : I behave / act like a lord), or at least shares some properties (e.g. while the lord is away, I take on his charge and responsibilities), or accedes to the status of lord (inceptive aspect : I become a lord, or in the same way ni-tlācati « I become a human being – by birth »). In many cases, translation by « be » is possible, but impoverishing because it blurs the dynamic nature of the verb.

Case (b) (to an external object) This is more unusual (and you can imagine a language which would have a morpheme very similar to Nahuatl –ti, but only of type (a)). Actually, it seems very lexicalized and not as freely productive as case (a). In this case, there is a clear action, which brings something (usually inanimate) to existence. For obvious reasons the « be » interpretation is ruled out : of course, if you say ni-tequi-ti, you can hardly say ni-tequi-tl. But the « have » translation is in most cases awkward and sometimes just impossible : « I have medicine » is not a satisfying gloss for ni-pah-ti, even if you take « have » as a paraphrase of « take » (and still worse if it is a paraphrase of « possess »).

In a nutshell : the best gloss for N–ti is not the opposed pair « be »/ « have », but rather a single one, « make N exist », and if you look for a single, semantically vague and encompassing word, « do » is better than both « be » and « have ».

But I fear to bore you with long messages, so please wait for a following one, dealing with the « causative » issue and Mary’s examples.

Best

Michel L.





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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Sat Oct  4 15:09:18 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2014 17:09:18 +0200
Subject: -ti verber (again-2)
Message-ID: <SAT.4.OCT.2014.170918.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear listeros

Back to the –ti verber and the « causative » issue.

I tried to explain why both « be » and « have » were bad glosses, and that « do » was better, the most satisfying ones being in fact « cause to exist » or « act in such a way that N becomes a reality » where this reality keeps developing in time (and this fact is expressed by the verbal categories of Tense, Aspect and Mood).

Now, for the two « causatives » e.g. tlāca-ti-lia « cause to be a human being », i.e. « give birth to » (related to the alleged « be » meaning) vs. e.g. cac-tia « cause to have shoes », i.e. « give shoes to », or nān-tia « give a mother to » (related to the alleged « have » meaning). If we give up the « have » gloss of the latter, the difference is accounted for by the « type (a) » vs. « type (b) » opposition, namely : we have –ti-lia with type (a) (an action applied to oneself: tlāca-ti is « realize the existence of a human being by becoming a human being ») vs. –tia with type (b)  (it applies to an external object: tequi-ti is « realize the existence of the tequitl without being a tequitl in any way ».)

But if we drop the « have » meaning, are the N–tia verbs causatives after all ?

For the meaning, tlācatilia « cause to be/become a human being » is indeed the causative of tlācati ; but since nānti does not mean « have a mother » (again, in all its occurrences it means « be/behave like/act as a mother » then the meaning of nāntia is not causative, but rather applicative (ni-mitz-nān-tia « I act in such a way that there is a mother for you », « I provide you with a mother ». As you know, there is a ditransitive use of these verbs, mostly (but not always) reflexive, e.g. ni-mitz-no-nān-tia « I act in such a way that you are a mother for me ».

We could then consider that there is a transitivizer –a (or perhaps –ia), which is not per se causative or applicative, but more generally marks valency increasing, the semantic interpretation of this increase being variable. Some data support this idea, though admittedly scarce and sometimes idiosyncratic, so that I admit some nitpicking. But consider the fact that –a or –ia can sometimes be used as an applicative suffix (pepena / pepenia, quetza / quechia, cōhua / cōhuia – and also chīhuia or pōhuia, in the sense of « cast a spell »), but also as a causative one (calaqui / calaquia, tlatla / tlatia, tlami / tlamia, olini /olinia, and the whole series -ni / -nia, and –ihui / -oa). Also consider the fact that cuīcatia is not causative (« make sing ») but applicative (« sing for », « sing in honor of »). I was long embarrassed with this, until I realized that it was the –tia form of cuīca-tl, and that ni-mitz-cuīca-tia was to be interpreted as « I provide you with a song », just like ni-mitz-cal-tia « I provide you with a house ». This opens onto the (not totally loony) idea that causatives are related to object nouns, and, as I said in a preceding message, that ni-mitz-tla-cua-l-tia « I make you eat » was somehow related to tla-cua-l-li « food », and could be glossed « I provide you with food ». Of course, this relation is blurred by the fact that causatives can occur with definite objects (ni-mitz-cua-l-tia tlaxcalli « I give you tortillas to eat » etc.

Again, I was long, and Mary’s and Tomas’ examples deserve consideration. I’ll come to that as soon as I can (tomorrow or the day after ?)

Thanks for your attention

Best
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From obarajas at tulane.edu  Sat Oct  4 22:32:59 2014
From: obarajas at tulane.edu (Barajas, Octavio)
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2014 22:32:59 +0000
Subject: Altepetl: case of assimilation?
Message-ID: <SAT.4.OCT.2014.223259.0000.OBARAJAS@TULANE.EDU>

Notlacuilol Mixpantinzco Estimados Nahuat-listeros:

Can someone please explain the linguistic process that results in Altepetl? Why is it not atepetl* as predicated by early colonial Nahuatl grammar? Why does the letter <L> precede <tepetl>? Is this a case of linguistic assimilation? Or is something else taking place? How or why did this phrase become lexicalized this way?

I apologize if this may have already come up in prior dialogue. My search, suggested by a friend, in the Nahuat-listserv archive didn't turn up an answer.

Tlazohcamati, octavio


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From dcwright at prodigy.net.mx  Sun Oct  5 00:20:34 2014
From: dcwright at prodigy.net.mx (David Wright)
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2014 19:20:34 -0500
Subject: Altepetl: case of assimilation?
In-Reply-To: <1412461987702.97510@tulane.edu>
Message-ID: <SAT.4.OCT.2014.192034.0500.DCWRIGHT@PRODIGY.NET.MX>

Octaviotzin:

I see this as a partial regressive assimilation that occurs when two nouns
are compounded and the first noun, exceptionally, retains the absolutive
suffix -tl, where normally this suffix would be removed to form a regular
compound noun (root + root + absolutive suffix). This is sometimes the case
with lexicalized phrases, in which the second noun begins with a consonant.
The /tl/ of the first noun may become an /l/. To date I have found these
changes:

tl + t > lt
tl + p > lp
tl + m > lm
tl + ch > lch
tl + hu > lhu (/lw/)

Thus, a:ltepe:tl (a:tl + tepe:tl (tl + t > lt)).

The latter "difrasismo" also appears as a nonlexicalized phrase, for example
in the Cantares Mexicanos manuscript: "ynatl, intepetly" (in a:tl in
tepe:tl, with the phoneme /i/ added at the end as a poetic device,
apparently for the sake of rhythm).

We can also find this sort of assimilation in certain anthroponyms:

Xi:huilte:mo:c (xi:huitl + te:mo: (tl + t > lt) + c);
A:lpopo:ca (a:tl + popo:ca (tl + p > lp)).

Here are three cases where the same change occurs in toponyms:

A:lmolo:ya:n (a:tl + (molo:ni - i) (tl + m > lm) + ya:n (n + y > y));
A:lchaya:huaca:n (a:tl + chaya:hua (tl + ch > lch) + ca:n);
A:lhuexo:yohca:n (a:tl + (huexo:tl - tl) (tl + hu > lhu) + yoh + ca:n).

SOURCES OF THE EXAMPLES

A:ltepe:tl may be found in Molina (1571, II, 4r) and of course in many other
sources.  For the non-lexicalized form, see Cantares Mexicanos (1994: 12r).

Xi:huiltemoc appears in texts by Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1975-1977: I, 412; II,
144). (The /i/ could perhaps have been short, changing the meaning of this
name. It is also written "Xihuitltemoc", without the partial assimilation.)

A:lpopo:ca, A:lmolo:ya:n, and A:lchaya:huaca:n may be found in Cantares
Mexicanos (1994: 9r, 33v, 54v, 79v, 84r).

A:lhuexo:yohca:n appears in the Codex Mendoza (Berdan/Anawalt, 1992: 26r).

Some of these examples were suggested by Gordon Whittaker on this list over
five years ago (August 21 and 22, 2009).

REFERENCES

ALVA Ixtlilxóchitl, Fernando de
1975-1977 Obras históricas, incluyen el texto completo de las llamadas
Relaciones e Historia de la nación chichimeca en una nueva versión
establecida con el cotejo de los manuscritos más antiguos que se conocen, 2
vols., Edmundo O’Gorman, editor, Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones
Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. 

BERDAN, Frances F.; ANAWALT, Patricia Rieff (editoras)
1992 The Codex Mendoza, facsimile, vol. 3, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford,
University of California Press.

CANTARES MEXICANOS
1994 Cantares mexicanos, facsimile, Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones
Bibliográficas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

MOLINA, Alonso de
1571 Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana/Vocabulario en lengua
mexicana y castellana, Mexico, Casa de Antonio de Espinosa.

Best regards,

David

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From idiez at me.com  Sun Oct  5 01:15:53 2014
From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan)
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2014 20:15:53 -0500
Subject: Altepetl: case of assimilation?
In-Reply-To: <000c01cfe032$2e3e3890$8abaa9b0$@prodigy.net.mx>
Message-ID: <SAT.4.OCT.2014.201553.0500.IDIEZ@ME.COM>

David huan Octavio, I’m not sure if this is phonetic, given the large number of compounds within the categories you name below, the first element of which indeed does lose the entire absolutive ending. Having said that, here are two more examples of this phenomenon.
1. a:lpichia: “to spray s.t. on s.t. or s.o. (Huastecan Nahuatl)
2. a:ltia: “to bathe s.o. And this is also another example of the noun + ti (to have) + a (causative) that we have been discussing recently on the list.
John

P.S. And I’ll have more to say about pichia later.
> On Oct 4, 2014, at 19:20, David Wright <dcwright at prodigy.net.mx> wrote:
> 
> Octaviotzin:
> 
> I see this as a partial regressive assimilation that occurs when two nouns
> are compounded and the first noun, exceptionally, retains the absolutive
> suffix -tl, where normally this suffix would be removed to form a regular
> compound noun (root + root + absolutive suffix). This is sometimes the case
> with lexicalized phrases, in which the second noun begins with a consonant.
> The /tl/ of the first noun may become an /l/. To date I have found these
> changes:
> 
> tl + t > lt
> tl + p > lp
> tl + m > lm
> tl + ch > lch
> tl + hu > lhu (/lw/)
> 
> 

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From cuecuex at gmail.com  Sun Oct  5 07:04:30 2014
From: cuecuex at gmail.com (Roberto Romero)
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2014 13:04:30 +0600
Subject: [Aztlan] A question about Aztecs and armadillos
In-Reply-To: <542E111E.2010006@cox.net>
Message-ID: <SUN.5.OCT.2014.130430.0600.CUECUEX@GMAIL.COM>

Mario

No tengo noticia alguna de que los españoles hayan prohibido a los
indios otomies y a los demás indígenas el tener guitarras y mandolinas
de madera.

Mas aun hay datos iconográficos y textuales que inidican que los
indios los usaban , y los fabricaban. De hecho la enseñanza de oficios
y de construcción de intrumentos musicales de tipo europeo fue uno de
los medidas que acompañaron a la evangelización católica...

De que fuente histórica , libro, ensayo obtuviste esa información de
la prohibición  de usar instrumentos musicales que me parece
absolutamante falsa y ajena a la verdad histórica.

Mas aun en el siglo XVI no había guitarras creo que ni en España. Fue
el siglo de la vihuela...

Y de hecho en el siglo XVI y buena parte del XVII los otomies fueron
conquistadores, fueron parte del bando ganador no fueron de los
perdedores

Roberto Romero

2014-10-03 8:59 GMT+06:00, mario <micc2 at cox.net>:
> It is said in the Danza Chichimeca/Conchera/Azteca that when the Spanish
> prohibited the Otomi and other indigenous people from getting wood
> materials to make their guitars and mandolins, they began to use the
> shells of the Armadillo. Thus we are called "concheros".....
>
> Today, certain revisionist new age "Mexi'ca dancers" use the word
> Conchero as a disparaging term for "Hispanicized Ladino" dancers.
>
> But those of us that follow the Indocristiano traditions of La Danza, we
> dance with our "dillos" with pride!!!!!
>
> On another note, when My son found out that armadillos can carry
> Leprosy, he went around spraying all our Conchas with Lysol!!!
>
> --
> I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:
>
> "Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz
>
>
> Mario E. Aguilar, PhD
>
> 619.948.8861
>
> www.mexicayotl.net
> www.mexicayotl.org
> www.mexicayotl.com
> www.aguila-blanca.com
>
> On 10/2/2014 9:02 AM, Peter Keeler wrote:
>> U'uyeh, Listeros,
>>
>>         The recent interchange (on Aztlan) about the word for armadillo in
>> nahuatl,
>>
>>        eg:
>>
>> "It is ayotochtli not azotochtli.  Whoever told you azo... Probably was
>> misinformed.
>>
>> Yes, it means something along the lines of turtle rabbit.
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>> John Schwaller
>> Professor of History
>> University at Albany "
>>
>> ......prompted an off-line discussion among some of my Mayanist friends,
>>
>>        in which I made the point that armadillos can move fast, when they
>> want to:
>>
>>           " Also NB armadillo ears, rather rabbit-like.
>>
>>        and they can really moooove.
>>
>>        once upon a long long time ago, W. and I out in the [Texas] hill
>> country, we encountered a dillo, by the road. W. began to walk in her
>> direction; she started ambling away. W. walked a little faster, she began
>> to slowly lope away. W. began a slow run, and she took off. Then he ran
>> full speed, and she was moving about twice as fast. And, like a
>> jackrabbit, she was gone.
>>
>>      a delightful animal, long the mascot of the counter-culture. Dillos
>> are pretty laid back, unless you are running after them. "
>>
>>        Which elicited the image below from W (still running, or at least
>> ambling, after all these years), that I suspect most of our Nahuatl
>> listeros already know:
>>
>> "Early (? earliest) illustration of an armadillo (Florentine Codex, Book
>> 11; page 61, fig. 201)."
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>       I urge interested parties to visit the web to see more accurate
>> photographic depictions of this peaceful critter.
>>
>>
>> http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=armadillo&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=QHQtVN38NZT-yQTMjYHIDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ
>>
>>   that's all,
>>
>>                Peter
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nahuatl mailing list
>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>
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From obarajas at tulane.edu  Sun Oct  5 15:52:22 2014
From: obarajas at tulane.edu (Barajas, Octavio)
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2014 15:52:22 +0000
Subject: Altepetl: case of assimilation?
In-Reply-To: <BE02F62E-9C9E-4420-B9F3-8653630F3668@me.com>
Message-ID: <SUN.5.OCT.2014.155222.0000.OBARAJAS@TULANE.EDU>

Thank you both for your feedback! Your examples offer much more to consider on this question. I look forward to seeing what takes place with pichia. 

Saludos, octavio
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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Sun Oct  5 22:40:56 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 00:40:56 +0200
Subject: -ti verber (again-3)
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.004056.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear Mary, dear Tomas, dear listeros

I suggested in the preceding messages that there was only one (N)–ti verber, meaning something like « bring N to existence », and that within this unicity there were indeed two subtypes, one where N can apply as a predicate to the subject of N-ti (e.g. tēuc-ti « act in such a way that there be a lord », i.e. « behave like a lord, become a lord… »), and one where N refers to an external entity (e.g. tequi-ti « act in such a way that the tequitl exist », i.e. « make the tequitl, fulfill the tequitl… »). My claim is that, while this leads to admittedly two different semantic values, stating this difference as « be » vs. « have » is misleading. Now, I’ll comment Tomas Amaya’s example, and I’ll do the same with Mary’ ones in a following message.

Tomas points out that in some dialects there is a verb chān-ti meaning « live, dwell », and that’s true (and as I said, I found that puzzling when I heard it first in Milpa Alta). But I’m still reluctant to a gloss like « have one’s house somewhere ». What strikes me that it is not cal-ti. There are several differences between calli and chān- (I've never met the absolutive *chāntli in the Classical Nahuatl texts, only the possessed forms no-chān, mo-chān etc.), and one is that, while calli refers to a « thing », chān- refers to a place, and is much vaguer, possibly referring to one’s house, one’s town, or one’s country (English « home » is closer than « house » to translate chān-). So while cal-ti (if it exists) will mean « make a house », chān-ti means « make one’s home somewhere », i.e. live there. Note that again this verb is dynamic : when I live somewhere, this means that I can have a lot of activities there. Also note that the verb nemi, which is usually translated by « live », actually means « go, walk » or maybe better « keep going, keep walking », i.e., is typically dynamic, and this is congruent with the dynamicity of chān-ti.

I hope I’ll be able to comment Mary’s examples tomorrow. Sorry for the delay, but I’ve been really hectic these days.

Best

Michel L.
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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Mon Oct  6 09:48:54 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 11:48:54 +0200
Subject: =?utf-8?Q?=C2=A0-ti_?=verber (again-4)
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.114854.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear listeros

In a preceding message, I challenged the idea of N-ti meaning « have N », as I had found no occurrence of such forms in the corpus. Mary Clayton managed to find a few ones which deserve consideration, and I thank her for that, but in my opinion they are not convincing.

First of all, for N-tia verbs. Since they mean « give N to s.o. », « provide s.o. with N » (and I agree with these translations), Mary and Joe analyze « make s.o. have N », and this could be a hint for a « have N » meaning of N-ti. But if as I believe N-ti means « make N », then N-tia is not « make s.o. have N », but rather « make N for s.o. » (occasionally « … for/to/into sth. »), i.e., has an applicative meaning. The semantic result is the same, but the morphological path is different. This holds for ninocactia « I make shoes for myself », « I get shoes », nitēnāntia « I give a mother to s.o. », ninochimaltia « I make a shield for myself », nitlaāyōtia « I put liquid in sth. » etc.

Now for the N-ti examples which possibly could mean « have N ». Mary’s examples are :

(1) tequiti « for a slave to have work, duty » This is the easiest to rule out, since the « make » gloss is clearly more appropriate

(2) tzinti « for something to have a beginning ». But remember that N-ti has a dynamic meaning (and so has « begin »), so « realize its beginning » works better. From there we have tzintia « make the beginning for sth. », i.e. « begin (transitive) »

(3) ohxiti « have resin » FC 11. « Have resin », « be full of resin » would be ohxiyoh. Again, « produce resin » is better. I’m not a native speaker of English, so I do not know how you feel with « make resin », but as a French speaker I admit « faire de la résine », speaking of a tree (though "donner/produire de la résine" would be better). In the same way, I find in the Florentine Codex (XI,13) nanahuati « he grows pustules » (better in my opinion than « he has pustules », because it marks a process rather than a state).

(4) huictih « they wield a hoe » FC 7 (p.24 in Dibble & Anderson). Actually, this translation is wrong. Book 7 chapter 8 speaks of the people who must pay for their fathers’ or grandfathers’ faults, and sell themselves as slaves. The context says « Ye huictih, ye mecapaltih, ye tēitzcuinhuān, ye tētotōlhuān ». Huictli metlapalli « hoe, tump line » is a difrasismo, synecdoche for « slave ». There is in the FC at least another occurrence of this, correctly translated (but I can’t find the exact reference right now) : Tēhuic tēmecapal mochīhuaya « he became someone's digging stick and tump line ». So the right meaning is « They become hoes and tump lines (= slaves), they are someone else’s dogs and turkeys » (= they have the status of animals).

There remain two trickier cases, hueliti and pahti. I’ll deal with them in a following message.

I hope I'm not bothering you.


Best


Michel L.

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From micc at cox.net  Mon Oct  6 19:43:45 2014
From: micc at cox.net (micc)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 12:43:45 -0700
Subject: [Aztlan] A question about Aztecs and armadillos
In-Reply-To: <zNzV1o00B3Wj1Vk01NzWC1>
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.124345.0700.MICC@COX.NET>

I do not have the exact sources on hand. But I have read several 
articles in journals that the Spanish crown was worried that the 
recently arrived Spanish instrument makers where losing business to the 
indigenous instrument makers.  As you say, the Franciscans taught the 
indigenous people, especially in Michoacan  (where Paracho to this day 
is famous for its instruments) to make vihuelas, mandolinas, mandolones, 
violas, violins, and even organs for church services. I recall reading 
that by the 159o0's however, the colonial authorities were making it 
difficult for the indigenous luthiers to practice their arts in the 
Spanish colonial cities.  They did however continue to work in the small 
towns and villages where the Danza Chichimeca evolved.

> Mas aun en el siglo XVI no había guitarras creo que ni en España. Fue
> el siglo de la vihuela...

Esto es cierto, y la guitarra conchera es efectivamente una copia de la 
laúd del siglo 16.


> Y de hecho en el siglo XVI y buena parte del XVII los otomies fueron
> conquistadores, fueron parte del bando ganador no fueron de los
> perdedores
Esto también es cierto.  Y por eso la Danza "chichimeca/Conchera/Azteca" 
se fue expandiendo al centro sur, y hasta el norte de mesoamerica.

Pero la historia de la danza no termina en estos siglos, Los 
contratiempos siguen viniendo en los siglos XVII hasta la revolución de 
1910.

-- 
I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:

"Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz


Mario E. Aguilar, PhD

619.948.8861

www.mexicayotl.net
www.mexicayotl.org
www.mexicayotl.com
www.aguila-blanca.com

On 10/5/2014 12:04 AM, Roberto Romero wrote:
> Mario
>
> No tengo noticia alguna de que los españoles hayan prohibido a los
> indios otomies y a los demás indígenas el tener guitarras y mandolinas
> de madera.
>
> Mas aun hay datos iconográficos y textuales que inidican que los
> indios los usaban , y los fabricaban. De hecho la enseñanza de oficios
> y de construcción de intrumentos musicales de tipo europeo fue uno de
> los medidas que acompañaron a la evangelización católica...
>
> De que fuente histórica , libro, ensayo obtuviste esa información de
> la prohibición  de usar instrumentos musicales que me parece
> absolutamante falsa y ajena a la verdad histórica.
>
> Mas aun en el siglo XVI no había guitarras creo que ni en España. Fue
> el siglo de la vihuela...
>
> Y de hecho en el siglo XVI y buena parte del XVII los otomies fueron
> conquistadores, fueron parte del bando ganador no fueron de los
> perdedores
>
> Roberto Romero
>
> 2014-10-03 8:59 GMT+06:00, mario <micc2 at cox.net>:
>> It is said in the Danza Chichimeca/Conchera/Azteca that when the Spanish
>> prohibited the Otomi and other indigenous people from getting wood
>> materials to make their guitars and mandolins, they began to use the
>> shells of the Armadillo. Thus we are called "concheros".....
>>
>> Today, certain revisionist new age "Mexi'ca dancers" use the word
>> Conchero as a disparaging term for "Hispanicized Ladino" dancers.
>>
>> But those of us that follow the Indocristiano traditions of La Danza, we
>> dance with our "dillos" with pride!!!!!
>>
>> On another note, when My son found out that armadillos can carry
>> Leprosy, he went around spraying all our Conchas with Lysol!!!
>>
>> --
>> I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:
>>
>> "Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz
>>
>>
>> Mario E. Aguilar, PhD
>>
>> 619.948.8861
>>
>> www.mexicayotl.net
>> www.mexicayotl.org
>> www.mexicayotl.com
>> www.aguila-blanca.com
>>
>> On 10/2/2014 9:02 AM, Peter Keeler wrote:
>>> U'uyeh, Listeros,
>>>
>>>          The recent interchange (on Aztlan) about the word for armadillo in
>>> nahuatl,
>>>
>>>         eg:
>>>
>>> "It is ayotochtli not azotochtli.  Whoever told you azo... Probably was
>>> misinformed.
>>>
>>> Yes, it means something along the lines of turtle rabbit.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>> John Schwaller
>>> Professor of History
>>> University at Albany "
>>>
>>> ......prompted an off-line discussion among some of my Mayanist friends,
>>>
>>>         in which I made the point that armadillos can move fast, when they
>>> want to:
>>>
>>>            " Also NB armadillo ears, rather rabbit-like.
>>>
>>>         and they can really moooove.
>>>
>>>         once upon a long long time ago, W. and I out in the [Texas] hill
>>> country, we encountered a dillo, by the road. W. began to walk in her
>>> direction; she started ambling away. W. walked a little faster, she began
>>> to slowly lope away. W. began a slow run, and she took off. Then he ran
>>> full speed, and she was moving about twice as fast. And, like a
>>> jackrabbit, she was gone.
>>>
>>>       a delightful animal, long the mascot of the counter-culture. Dillos
>>> are pretty laid back, unless you are running after them. "
>>>
>>>         Which elicited the image below from W (still running, or at least
>>> ambling, after all these years), that I suspect most of our Nahuatl
>>> listeros already know:
>>>
>>> "Early (? earliest) illustration of an armadillo (Florentine Codex, Book
>>> 11; page 61, fig. 201)."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>        I urge interested parties to visit the web to see more accurate
>>> photographic depictions of this peaceful critter.
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=armadillo&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=QHQtVN38NZT-yQTMjYHIDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ
>>>
>>>    that's all,
>>>
>>>                 Peter
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Nahuatl mailing list
>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nahuatl mailing list
>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>

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From jfschwaller at gmail.com  Mon Oct  6 19:51:14 2014
From: jfschwaller at gmail.com (John Schwaller)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 15:51:14 -0400
Subject: Aztecs & armadillos
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.155114.0400.JFSCHWALLER@GMAIL.COM>

I have done quite a bit of research on 16th cen. Mexico and do not recall
any legislation relating to the making of instruments.  Not saying it could
not have happened, I just would need to see the particulars.  What
*was *outlawed
was natives dressing up in the old garb and engaging in the old dances.

The making of instruments out of various animals is found throughout the
Americas.  In particular, in Paraguay (and possibly up into the Bolivian
highlands)  they also make small mandolins (charangos) out of armadillos.

-- 
John F. Schwaller
Professor,
University at Albany
1400 Washington Ave.
Albany NY 12222

jfschwaller at gmail.com
315-212-0064
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From mmccaffe at indiana.edu  Mon Oct  6 23:52:05 2014
From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 19:52:05 -0400
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=A0-ti_?=verber (again-4)
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.195205.0400.MMCCAFFE@INDIANA.EDU>

The verber explained by Andrews and identified in Campbell's work as 
"-ti04" and meaning 'have' is a common animal in Nahuatl. There aren't 
simply a couple handfuls of these verbs lying around like unusual stray 
dogs in classical Nahuatl; there are *several thousand* of them, and 
their meanings are clear: "have". Someone who has the time and interest 
to write this matter up may lay it to rest.

Nahuatl, like every language, has intrinsic ambiguity. There are 
homophonous verb endings in Nahuatl, and what we have been looking at 
over the past week are two of them, and these two have clear meanings. 
One means "become, be", and the other means "have".

Best,

Michael


Quoting M Launey <mlauney at wanadoo.fr>:

>
>
>
>
> Dear listeros
>
> In a preceding message, I challenged the idea of N-ti meaning « have
> N », as I had found no occurrence of such forms in the corpus. Mary
> Clayton managed to find a few ones which deserve consideration, and I
> thank her for that, but in my opinion they are not convincing.
>
> First of all, for N-tia verbs. Since they mean « give N to s.o. »,
> « provide s.o. with N » (and I agree with these translations), Mary
> and Joe analyze « make s.o. have N », and this could be a hint for a
> « have N » meaning of N-ti. But if as I believe N-ti means « make
> N », then N-tia is not « make s.o. have N », but rather « make N for
> s.o. » (occasionally « ? for/to/into sth. »), i.e., has an
> applicative meaning. The semantic result is the same, but the
> morphological path is different. This holds for ninocactia « I make
> shoes for myself », « I get shoes », nit?n?ntia « I give a mother to
> s.o. », ninochimaltia « I make a shield for myself », nitla?y?tia « I
> put liquid in sth. » etc.
>
> Now for the N-ti examples which possibly could mean « have N ».
> Mary?s examples are :
>
> (1) tequiti « for a slave to have work, duty » This is the easiest to
> rule out, since the « make » gloss is clearly more appropriate
>
> (2) tzinti « for something to have a beginning ». But remember that
> N-ti has a dynamic meaning (and so has « begin »), so « realize its
> beginning » works better. From there we have tzintia « make the
> beginning for sth. », i.e. « begin (transitive) »
>
> (3) ohxiti « have resin » FC 11. « Have resin », « be full of resin »
> would be ohxiyoh. Again, « produce resin » is better. I?m not a
> native speaker of English, so I do not know how you feel with « make
> resin », but as a French speaker I admit « faire de la résine »,
> speaking of a tree (though "donner/produire de la résine" would be
> better). In the same way, I find in the Florentine Codex (XI,13)
> nanahuati « he grows pustules » (better in my opinion than « he has
> pustules », because it marks a process rather than a state).
>
> (4) huictih « they wield a hoe » FC 7 (p.24 in Dibble & Anderson).
> Actually, this translation is wrong. Book 7 chapter 8 speaks of the
> people who must pay for their fathers? or grandfathers? faults, and
> sell themselves as slaves. The context says « Ye huictih, ye
> mecapaltih, ye t?itzcuinhu?n, ye t?tot?lhu?n ». Huictli metlapalli
> « hoe, tump line » is a difrasismo, synecdoche for « slave ». There
> is in the FC at least another occurrence of this, correctly
> translated (but I can?t find the exact reference right now) : T?huic
> t?mecapal moch?huaya « he became someone's digging stick and tump
> line ». So the right meaning is « They become hoes and tump lines (=
> slaves), they are someone else?s dogs and turkeys » (= they have the
> status of animals).
>
> There remain two trickier cases, hueliti and pahti. I?ll deal with
> them in a following message.
>
> I hope I'm not bothering you.
>
>
> Best
>
>
> Michel L.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>




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From dcwright at prodigy.net.mx  Tue Oct  7 00:12:53 2014
From: dcwright at prodigy.net.mx (David Wright)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 19:12:53 -0500
Subject: -ti verber (again-4)
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.191253.0500.DCWRIGHT@PRODIGY.NET.MX>

Dear Michel:
 
As I was cutting up hardcopies of your latest messages and glueing them to
file cards (call me old-fashioned), I read again the sentence "I hope I'm
not bothering you", and I was motivated to write the following words.
 
It is great to have on Nahuat-l another of the scholars that gave us a
renewed understanding of the phonology, lexicology, and grammar of this
language during the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decades
of the 21st. I'm certain that we were all very pleasantly surprised when you
began posting here not long ago. Thank you for injecting some high quality
input into our conversations!
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From mmccaffe at indiana.edu  Tue Oct  7 01:11:52 2014
From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 21:11:52 -0400
Subject: -ti verber (again-4)
In-Reply-To: <000001cfe1c3$70aafc80$5200f580$@prodigy.net.mx>
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.211152.0400.MMCCAFFE@INDIANA.EDU>

I agree with David in toto. Michel has very interesting and informative ideas.


Michael



Quoting David Wright <dcwright at prodigy.net.mx>:

> Dear Michel:
>
> As I was cutting up hardcopies of your latest messages and glueing them to
> file cards (call me old-fashioned), I read again the sentence "I hope I'm
> not bothering you", and I was motivated to write the following words.
>
> It is great to have on Nahuat-l another of the scholars that gave us a
> renewed understanding of the phonology, lexicology, and grammar of this
> language during the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decades
> of the 21st. I'm certain that we were all very pleasantly surprised when you
> began posting here not long ago. Thank you for injecting some high quality
> input into our conversations!
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>



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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Tue Oct  7 10:37:15 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 12:37:15 +0200
Subject: N-ti verbs (again-5/5)
Message-ID: <TUE.7.OCT.2014.123715.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear listeros

One last message about N-ti verbs and Mary’s examples (ah-)hueliti (5) and pahti (6). After that, my plan is to keep silent unless new elements pop up in the list (I mean, new elements for discussion, not just assertive statements that « have » will be « have » and that there is no reason for analyzing what « have » stands for).

(5) (ah-)hueliti (I see no occurrence of hueliti without negation in my notes, but it may be omission from me, or casual lack in the corpus). The word hueli has a very specific behavior, its status is unclear, adverb or noun (« possible » or « possibly », I can give examples if you like). But –ti also appears with clearly adverbial roots, like mōztlati « arrive to tomorrow », teohtlacti (usually impersonal) « it’s getting late », nēnti (Carochi : ōnēntic in nociyahuiz « my efforts were vain »), immanti (FC VI,131 Immantiz in cāhuitl… « The day will come [when…] »), so hueli-ti is plausible with a meaning like « realize a possibility ».

(6) pahti, clearly related to pahtli « medicine » (of all kinds : drinkable, eatable, plaster, splint or maybe magic). Pahti is usually translated by « recover, cure, heal » (intransitive) and from there we have the transitive pahtia « cure (s.o.) ». Since it nipahti cannot be glossed by « I am/become/am used as medicine », Mary and other colleagues suggest the glosss « I have medicine ».

I’m not a native speaker of English, but it seems to me that this gloss doesn’t work very well. In French at least « J’ai un médicament/des médicaments » describes a stative, aspectless situation, e.g. « I have some medicine in my purse/closet », not « I am healed/recovering », and two native English speakers I asked agree with that interpretation. Of course things are a little better if you admit that « have » stands for an abstract relation : if X « has » Y, that means that Y has some kind of relation (spatial, possessive…) to X which is used as its « localizer », if this word exists, so in this particular case a better gloss would be something like « a medicine is related to me ». But even so, we miss the most important point, namely : N-ti describes a dynamic event, which is expressed through verbal categories of Tense, Aspect and Mood. But I admit that my usual gloss « make N » is not pretty good either (this word does not mean « I make some medicine »). So we are in a quandary.

But there is a way out, and I thank Michael Swanton for that. In a personal mail, he pointed out that some nouns are ambiguous, referring both to a general, abstract notion, and to a specific entity that contributes to the realization of this notion. The most striking one, for the present issue, is yāōtl, which sometimes means « war » and sometimes « enemy ». This means (or is the consequence of ?) that yāōti can be accounted for in both semantic subtypes of N-ti : either « I realize war, wage war » (as an external process), or « I behave like an enemy » (and for this reason I am an enemy).

Things are admittedly different with pahtli, but if pahtli also can mean « cure » in general (and remember that it applies to all kinds of medicines and healings), then « I realize a cure » is a good gloss and fits in the general interpretation I suggested.

Thanks for your attention

Michel Launey
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From mmccaffe at indiana.edu  Tue Oct  7 10:37:29 2014
From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty)
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 06:37:29 -0400
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=A0-ti_?=verber (again-4)
In-Reply-To: <20141006195205.en9nmqm0owgs0ow8@webmail.iu.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.7.OCT.2014.063729.0400.MMCCAFFE@INDIANA.EDU>

Sorry for the slip. I should have said that there are several thousand 
examples of words containing the -ti04 verber.

Best,

Michael

Quoting Michael McCafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>:

> The verber explained by Andrews and identified in Campbell's work as
> "-ti04" and meaning 'have' is a common animal in Nahuatl. There
> aren't simply a couple handfuls of these verbs lying around like
> unusual stray dogs in classical Nahuatl; there are *several thousand*
> of them, and their meanings are clear: "have". Someone who has the
> time and interest to write this matter up may lay it to rest.
>

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From hosler at mit.edu  Tue Oct  7 13:45:42 2014
From: hosler at mit.edu (Dorothy Hosler)
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 13:45:42 +0000
Subject: FW:  Aztecs & armadillos
In-Reply-To: <CADJgdh1aoVPUkdtNvTYf-fwd+vT0sbWt39ZVy4qS3Amji6M66w@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.7.OCT.2014.134542.0000.HOSLER@MIT.EDU>

Hello,

Charangos were common throughout Bolivia and northern Chile. I don;t know about  Peru but it is likely.

Dorothy Hosler
________________________________________
From: nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org [nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org] on behalf of John Schwaller [jfschwaller at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 3:51 PM
To:
Subject: [Nahuat-l] Aztecs & armadillos

I have done quite a bit of research on 16th cen. Mexico and do not recall
any legislation relating to the making of instruments.  Not saying it could
not have happened, I just would need to see the particulars.  What
*was *outlawed
was natives dressing up in the old garb and engaging in the old dances.

The making of instruments out of various animals is found throughout the
Americas.  In particular, in Paraguay (and possibly up into the Bolivian
highlands)  they also make small mandolins (charangos) out of armadillos.

--
John F. Schwaller
Professor,
University at Albany
1400 Washington Ave.
Albany NY 12222

jfschwaller at gmail.com
315-212-0064
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From magnuspharao at gmail.com  Tue Oct  7 17:25:07 2014
From: magnuspharao at gmail.com (Magnus Pharao Hansen)
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 10:25:07 -0700
Subject: ti
Message-ID: <TUE.7.OCT.2014.102507.0700.MAGNUSPHARAO@GMAIL.COM>

Dear Listeros,

Thanks for a long and informative discussion about the -ti verber. I get a
bit of a feeling that people are talking across each other.

>From my perspective it is the translators dilemma that we are facing. It
seems clear to me that Dr. Launey is correct when he points out that it is
not possible to identify the suffix -ti directly with the meaning have. It
has more meanings than that, and a sometimes it seems to produce more
general verbs - sometimes being more active in their sense than merely "to
have". On the other hand it also seems clear that it is frequently the best
translation to use "have" to translate it into English and "tener" in
Spanish. But on the other hand we know  that there was no verb in
precolonial Nahuatl that corresponded exactly to have. The different senses
of the word have (to possess, to own, to be characterized by, to keep, to
be composed of etc.) were expressed by different morphemes and
constructions. So if we claim that its meaning is clearly "have" then we
posit that Nahuas did have a concept of "to have" and that this was encoded
with this suffix. This is clearly not the case because most of the time
when "have" would be expected in English, Nahuatl does not use the -ti
verber. So probably we just have to accept that the semantic structures of
the two languages do not map directly onto each other, and that
consequently we have to accept that translations are merely approximations
- and that whether to settle for a specific approximation or look for a
more nuanced one is a matter of choice.

Now, I think there is  also a difference in perspective between those who
are most interested in translating Nahuatl texts into Spanish or English
and the linguistic perspective that is more interested in analyzing the
finer details of structure and meaning, that often fall in between the
cracks of translation - and hence often are inconsequential to translators,
but important to linguists trying to capture minute typological
distinctions between languages. For an example of how a detailed functional
analysis can challenge the received ways of classifying and translating
morphemes I recommend the following article by Una Canger. 2007. Some
languages do not respect the designs of linguists.
https://www.academia.edu/1430077/Some_languages_do_not_respect_the_designs_of_linguists_2007_




-- 
Magnus Pharao Hansen
PhD. candidate
Department of Anthropology

Brown University
128 Hope St.
Providence, RI 02906

*magnus_pharao_hansen at brown.edu <magnus_pharao_hansen at brown.edu>*
US: 001 401 651 8413
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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Wed Oct  8 00:59:58 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 02:59:58 +0200
Subject: =?utf-8?Q?=C2=A0N-ti_?=verbs (supplement)
Message-ID: <WED.8.OCT.2014.025958.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear listeros

I had planned to give up the N-ti issue, but reading some messages really gives me a strange feeling. So let me put it another way.

I can admit that very often the translation of N–ti by « be N » is possible, however unsatisfactory (because it misses the dynamic, aspectual nature of what is actually a verb of action).

I fully agree that in nearly all its occurrences N-tia can be translated by « give N to s.o. », « provide s.o. with N », even if my gloss would not be « make s.o. have N », but rather « make N for s.o. » (that is, I analyze the form as an applicative) ; but both glosses give the correct sense anyway.

But if you say adamantly that « have N » is a common translation for N-ti, and all the more so if you claim that it is the most frequent one, then I hate to be blunt, but it is just false. Again, I challenge you to bring any substantial evidence from the Classical Nahuatl corpus (note that I am speaking of N-ti allegedly meaning « have N », not of N-tia admittedly meaning « give N »). For instance, take the Florentine Codex with Dibble and Anderson’s translation, which is very reliable because these people have a deep knowledge of Nahuatl language and culture, and count how many occurrences of N-ti are or even could be translated by « have N ».

Mary Clayton and Tomas Anaya met the challenge, and picked up a few possible examples, with their references. In my opinion these examples were not convincing, and I tried to explain why, with arguments that everyone is free to find convincing or less convincing. So at least that was food for thought and discussion between peers, and I thank Mary and Tomas for that.

Sincerely

Michel L.
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From clayton at indiana.edu  Wed Oct  8 04:03:30 2014
From: clayton at indiana.edu (Clayton, Mary L.)
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 00:03:30 -0400
Subject: N-ti verber 'have'. morphological meaning
In-Reply-To: <186990192.31137.1412729998016.JavaMail.www@wwinf1j19>
Message-ID: <WED.8.OCT.2014.000330.0400.CLAYTON@INDIANA.EDU>

Michel and listeros,
	Our main point -- for which the fine points of how to translate [-ti - 
have] (Joe’s V04) are irrelevant -- is that [-ti - be/become] expresses 
an equation, while [-ti - have] expresses a transfer (including the 
reflexive meaning to apply to oneself). Given that these two morphemes 
have nothing in common except their form, we see no reason to try to 
group them together.

	A morpheme is a combination of a FORM and a MEANING, and if a form has 
two meanings, or a meaning two forms, where these differences cannot be 
explained as some regular or predictable variant, then we have two 
separate morphemes. (e.g., /tu/ in English, which is ‘to’, ‘too’, and 
‘two’).
	Thus, we (Joe and I) would say that your “two semantic values” for -ti 
are simply the meanings of two separate morphemes. The semantic values 
that we assign to these in other languages may be open to questions. 
They won’t always be “the same” for all instances of one morpheme, and 
we may differ at times on how to express the meaning in another 
language. (You are quite right that translations raise their own 
problems, especially as the number of languages involved increases 
beyond two, as I am well aware since my main project is the Vocabulario 
trilingue, where I deal with three languages plus English.)
	As a way of expressing the unity of the [-ti - have] morpheme, we find 
‘have’ to be a good cover translation, although we agree that in 
individual instances, and in specific contexts, other translations will 
be better.
	In the preface to the first edition of his Introduction to Classical 
Nahuatl, Andrews says (p.x) “Nahuatl is an exotic language. It is not 
just foreign like Spanish, German or Russian; it is strangely foreign.” 
This characteristic of Nahuatl freqently leads us to “explain” the 
meaning of a word (that is HOW a word means, not just WHAT it means) by 
using words in ways that certainly aren’t elegant. Thus we translate 
nipahti as ‘I have medicine’, rather than ‘I am cured’, ‘I recover’, ‘I 
get well’, because it shows us what the relationship is between the 
meaning of pahtli and the meaning of -ti, and what the basic meaning of 
the combination is. It also “explains” the Nahuatl meaning of the -ti-a 
forms, ‘I cause someone to have medicine’, in a way that ‘I cure 
someone’ does not. Of course, if we were translating text rather than 
defining basic linguistic meanings, we would look for something a 
little more elegant -- and a little more English-like.

	One reason for using ‘have’ as the basic translation for -ti is that 
it neatly captures the relationship between the very common -tia, which 
can be translated ‘to cause to have’ and the (as you point out) 
uncommon intransitive form -ti, which is in any case a necessary 
jumping off point for the -tia form. -a is a common causative morpheme 
in Nahuatl , so adding that to -ti captures both the form and the 
meaning of -tia. We agree that whether you see this as a causative or a 
benefactive will depend on your translation: “cause X to have Y” sounds 
causative, while “give Y to X” sounds benefactive and “provide X with 
Y” (a translation we use frequently) can be seen either way. Once 
again, the “translation” ‘have’ is not about the fine points of 
rendering Nahuatl in English; it is simply an identification of the 
general semantic content of the verb-forming element. You want one word 
(or maybe two, as in ‘be/become’) to represent the general meaning of 
each morpheme. That doesn’t mean that that’s the translation you will 
use in all or even most cases.
	For your specific comments on the four verbs that you single out, we 
would agree with much of what you say. The BIG point is that none of 
these can be translated with “be”, “become” or any other equational 
expression.
	Some specifics:
	1) Actually, I would say “For a slave to DO work, produce work”. In 
English, we wouldn’t use “make”, and I think that we’re just talking 
about differences between French and English, not basic Nahuatl.
	2) and 3)We agree that aspect has a place in some translations, though 
in tzinti, the meaning of tzintli carries much of the meaning. For me, 
whether a tree “makes”, “has”, or “produces” resin are all about the 
same thing. I couldn’t use “gives” unless whatever it “gives” (fruit, 
syrup, resin) has a use. But again, we’re talking about English and 
French, not Nahuatl. But “The tree is/becomes resin” is out of the 
question. That -ti is a different morpheme.
	4) You make a good point about huictli mecapalli, though I’m not sure 
which exact figure of speech is being employed. I can imagine it 
meaning either “they become digging sticks and tump lines” or “they use 
digging sticks and tump lines”. The figure exists primarily in the 
juxtaposition of the two entities, regardless of their grammatical 
forms. Joe found the other example that you mention. It’s in book 4 
p.91 “injc cujtiloque in victli, mecapalli, injc victique, 
mecapaltique,” “so they had been forced into bondage and had become 
slaves.” (original transcription; Dibble and Anderson’s translation).

	One further point that I intended to take up soon after my first 
message, but I got busy with other things, is that I found that the 
relationship between the two causatives and the two -ti verbers is not 
as absolute as I had originally thought, though a look through Joe’s 
data shows that it is in fact much closer to absolute than one would 
think from reading Andrews’ exposition, which begins on p.578 of the 
second edition of his book.

	I’ll close by quoting the first couple of paragraphs of Andrews presentation.

“54.4. The Intransitive Suffx ti of Possession. The inceptive/stative 
suffix ti of 54.2.1. has a homophonous verbstem-forming suffix ti that 
creates a denominal intransitive verbstem with the meaning of “to 
have/be in possession of (what is signified by the source nounstem).” 
This ti of possession is unlike the inceptive/stative ti in that the 
verbstem it creates cannot form a deverbal verbstem with ya.
	Another difference between the two suffixes has to do with focus. A 
VNC [verbal nuclear clause] formed on the inceptive/stative ti is 
oriented toward the subject pronoun (i.e., the predicate identifies or 
clarifies the nature of the subject entity just as a subject complement 
does in English -- the ti suffix is similar to an English copular 
verbword), but a VNC formed on the ti-of-possession is oriented toward 
the nounstem source (i.e., it names what in English would be a direct 
object-- the ti suffix is similar to an English transitive verbword of 
having).”
	Following this is a list of examples from which some of ours were 
taken, though I don’t think I used any that aren’t also in Joe’s data.

     Best,
        Mary




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From Ian.Mursell at btinternet.com  Wed Oct  8 19:24:38 2014
From: Ian.Mursell at btinternet.com (Ian Mursell)
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 20:24:38 +0100
Subject: FW:  Aztecs & armadillos
Message-ID: <WED.8.OCT.2014.202438.0100.IAN.MURSELL@BTINTERNET.COM>

Hello Listeros,

Charangos remain highly popular instruments throughout much of the Andean
region, from Chile and NW Argentina up to Ecuador, though they're less and
less made with armadillo shell soundboxes now - wood has largely taken
over.  Quite apart from the strain on the armadillo population one of the
weaknesses of armadillo-shell-backed charangos is that they're
structurally weaker and tend to 'bow' in the middle under the pressure
from the ten taut strings, whereas all-wooden ones are stronger all round.
 I returned to London from Chile with (a cheap) one in 1970 and was so
keen to get another that I paid a £1 deposit to London Zoo - writing on
the form something about wanting to study the hair follicles - in
anticipation of their armadillo dying.  I've still got the receipt and
order confirmation!  As far as I know the bloody thing's still going
strong...

They are of course wonderful animals, and charangos - armadillo or wood,
both produce a hauntingly beautiful sound - are hugely evocative of Andean
culture, as well as being central to popular movements inspired by this
culture, such as the New Chilean Song Movement in the '70s.  As
instruments it doesn't look as if they're more than a couple of centuries
old, however. 

I remember being horrified to see, in La Paz in the early '70s, dozens of
taxi bonnets bedecked with stuffed armadillos affixed to colourful rugs
during major festivals.  It was said at the time that Peru had banned the
hunting of armadillos as they were getting more and more scarce, and that
if you stood on the Peru-Bolivia border you could see large numbers of
armadillos high-tailing it for sanctuary in Peru...

Good wishes,

Ian

Ian Mursell
Mexicolore, London
www.aztecs.org
Now: The Maya AND the Aztecs!





On 07/10/2014 14:45, "Dorothy Hosler" <hosler at mit.edu> wrote:

>Hello,
>
>Charangos were common throughout Bolivia and northern Chile. I don;t know
>about  Peru but it is likely.
>
>Dorothy Hosler
>________________________________________
>From: nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org [nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org]
>on behalf of John Schwaller [jfschwaller at gmail.com]
>Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 3:51 PM
>To:
>Subject: [Nahuat-l] Aztecs & armadillos
>
>I have done quite a bit of research on 16th cen. Mexico and do not recall
>any legislation relating to the making of instruments.  Not saying it
>could
>not have happened, I just would need to see the particulars.  What
>*was *outlawed
>was natives dressing up in the old garb and engaging in the old dances.
>
>The making of instruments out of various animals is found throughout the
>Americas.  In particular, in Paraguay (and possibly up into the Bolivian
>highlands)  they also make small mandolins (charangos) out of armadillos.
>
>--
>John F. Schwaller
>Professor,
>University at Albany
>1400 Washington Ave.
>Albany NY 12222
>
>jfschwaller at gmail.com
>315-212-0064
>_______________________________________________
>Nahuatl mailing list
>Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>_______________________________________________
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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Wed Oct  8 21:25:26 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 23:25:26 +0200
Subject: N-ti verber 'have'. morphological meaning
Message-ID: <WED.8.OCT.2014.232526.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>

Dear Mary and listeros
Mary's message deserves an answer, since at least she gives arguments (even if they still do not convince me) and brings the discussion a step forward by pointing out the abstract nature of what is expressed by "be" and "have" (a position which I fully support, although I'd put it in a slightly different way) .

I'm in the final step of my move, so please allow me a few days.

Thanks for your comprehension

Michel Launey

 

> Message du 08/10/14 06:03
> De : "Clayton,  Mary L." 
> A : "M Launey" 
> Copie à : nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> Objet : N-ti verber 'have'. morphological meaning
> 
> Michel and listeros,
> Our main point -- for which the fine points of how to translate [-ti -
> have] (Joe’s V04) are irrelevant -- is that [-ti - be/become] expresses
> an equation, while [-ti - have] expresses a transfer (including the
> reflexive meaning to apply to oneself). Given that these two morphemes
> have nothing in common except their form, we see no reason to try to
> group them together.
> 
> A morpheme is a combination of a FORM and a MEANING, and if a form has
> two meanings, or a meaning two forms, where these differences cannot be
> explained as some regular or predictable variant, then we have two
> separate morphemes. (e.g., /tu/ in English, which is ‘to’, ‘too’, and
> ‘two’).
> Thus, we (Joe and I) would say that your “two semantic values” for -ti
> are simply the meanings of two separate morphemes. The semantic values
> that we assign to these in other languages may be open to questions.
> They won’t always be “the same” for all instances of one morpheme, and
> we may differ at times on how to express the meaning in another
> language. (You are quite right that translations raise their own
> problems, especially as the number of languages involved increases
> beyond two, as I am well aware since my main project is the Vocabulario
> trilingue, where I deal with three languages plus English.)
> As a way of expressing the unity of the [-ti - have] morpheme, we find
> ‘have’ to be a good cover translation, although we agree that in
> individual instances, and in specific contexts, other translations will
> be better.
> In the preface to the first edition of his Introduction to Classical
> Nahuatl, Andrews says (p.x) “Nahuatl is an exotic language. It is not
> just foreign like Spanish, German or Russian; it is strangely foreign.”
> This characteristic of Nahuatl freqently leads us to “explain” the
> meaning of a word (that is HOW a word means, not just WHAT it means) by
> using words in ways that certainly aren’t elegant. Thus we translate
> nipahti as ‘I have medicine’, rather than ‘I am cured’, ‘I recover’, ‘I
> get well’, because it shows us what the relationship is between the
> meaning of pahtli and the meaning of -ti, and what the basic meaning of
> the combination is. It also “explains” the Nahuatl meaning of the -ti-a
> forms, ‘I cause someone to have medicine’, in a way that ‘I cure
> someone’ does not. Of course, if we were translating text rather than
> defining basic linguistic meanings, we would look for something a
> little more elegant -- and a little more English-like.
> 
> One reason for using ‘have’ as the basic translation for -ti is that
> it neatly captures the relationship between the very common -tia, which
> can be translated ‘to cause to have’ and the (as you point out)
> uncommon intransitive form -ti, which is in any case a necessary
> jumping off point for the -tia form. -a is a common causative morpheme
> in Nahuatl , so adding that to -ti captures both the form and the
> meaning of -tia. We agree that whether you see this as a causative or a
> benefactive will depend on your translation: “cause X to have Y” sounds
> causative, while “give Y to X” sounds benefactive and “provide X with
> Y” (a translation we use frequently) can be seen either way. Once
> again, the “translation” ‘have’ is not about the fine points of
> rendering Nahuatl in English; it is simply an identification of the
> general semantic content of the verb-forming element. You want one word
> (or maybe two, as in ‘be/become’) to represent the general meaning of
> each morpheme. That doesn’t mean that that’s the translation you will
> use in all or even most cases.
> For your specific comments on the four verbs that you single out, we
> would agree with much of what you say. The BIG point is that none of
> these can be translated with “be”, “become” or any other equational
> expression.
> Some specifics:
> 1) Actually, I would say “For a slave to DO work, produce work”. In
> English, we wouldn’t use “make”, and I think that we’re just talking
> about differences between French and English, not basic Nahuatl.
> 2) and 3)We agree that aspect has a place in some translations, though
> in tzinti, the meaning of tzintli carries much of the meaning. For me,
> whether a tree “makes”, “has”, or “produces” resin are all about the
> same thing. I couldn’t use “gives” unless whatever it “gives” (fruit,
> syrup, resin) has a use. But again, we’re talking about English and
> French, not Nahuatl. But “The tree is/becomes resin” is out of the
> question. That -ti is a different morpheme.
> 4) You make a good point about huictli mecapalli, though I’m not sure
> which exact figure of speech is being employed. I can imagine it
> meaning either “they become digging sticks and tump lines” or “they use
> digging sticks and tump lines”. The figure exists primarily in the
> juxtaposition of the two entities, regardless of their grammatical
> forms. Joe found the other example that you mention. It’s in book 4
> p.91 “injc cujtiloque in victli, mecapalli, injc victique,
> mecapaltique,” “so they had been forced into bondage and had become
> slaves.” (original transcription; Dibble and Anderson’s translation).
> 
> One further point that I intended to take up soon after my first
> message, but I got busy with other things, is that I found that the
> relationship between the two causatives and the two -ti verbers is not
> as absolute as I had originally thought, though a look through Joe’s
> data shows that it is in fact much closer to absolute than one would
> think from reading Andrews’ exposition, which begins on p.578 of the
> second edition of his book.
> 
> I’ll close by quoting the first couple of paragraphs of Andrews presentation.
> 
> “54.4. The Intransitive Suffx ti of Possession. The inceptive/stative
> suffix ti of 54.2.1. has a homophonous verbstem-forming suffix ti that
> creates a denominal intransitive verbstem with the meaning of “to
> have/be in possession of (what is signified by the source nounstem).”
> This ti of possession is unlike the inceptive/stative ti in that the
> verbstem it creates cannot form a deverbal verbstem with ya.
> Another difference between the two suffixes has to do with focus. A
> VNC [verbal nuclear clause] formed on the inceptive/stative ti is
> oriented toward the subject pronoun (i.e., the predicate identifies or
> clarifies the nature of the subject entity just as a subject complement
> does in English -- the ti suffix is similar to an English copular
> verbword), but a VNC formed on the ti-of-possession is oriented toward
> the nounstem source (i.e., it names what in English would be a direct
> object-- the ti suffix is similar to an English transitive verbword of
> having).”
> Following this is a list of examples from which some of ours were
> taken, though I don’t think I used any that aren’t also in Joe’s data.
> 
> Best,
> Mary
> 
> 
> 
> 
>
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From idiez at me.com  Thu Oct  2 04:53:30 2014
From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan)
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2014 23:53:30 -0500
Subject: "ca" and factitives
Message-ID: <WED.1.OCT.2014.235330.0500.IDIEZ@ME.COM>

Notequixpoyohuan,
	There is a note in chapter 14 of Nahuatl as Written, stating that the particle ?ca? can introduce dependent cl?uses after factitive verbs. Does anyone have any examples of this?
John
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From mmccaffe at indiana.edu  Thu Oct  2 10:36:22 2014
From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty)
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 06:36:22 -0400
Subject: "ca" and factitives
In-Reply-To: <2C30CFFA-7B3C-4714-BF76-8DEC266EC10C@me.com>
Message-ID: <THU.2.OCT.2014.063622.0400.MMCCAFFE@INDIANA.EDU>

Quoting John Sullivan <idiez at me.com>:

> Notequixpoyohuan,
> 	There is a note in chapter 14 of Nahuatl as Written, stating that
> the particle ?ca? can introduce dependent cl?uses after factitive
> verbs. Does anyone have any examples of this?
> John
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>

See p. 536 of Andrews II, section 50.11.

Michael

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From keeler.peter at gmail.com  Thu Oct  2 16:02:17 2014
From: keeler.peter at gmail.com (Peter Keeler)
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 11:02:17 -0500
Subject: [Aztlan] A question about Aztecs and armadillos
Message-ID: <THU.2.OCT.2014.110217.0500.KEELER.PETER@GMAIL.COM>

U'uyeh, Listeros, 

       The recent interchange (on Aztlan) about the word for armadillo in nahuatl, 

      eg:

"It is ayotochtli not azotochtli.  Whoever told you azo... Probably was misinformed.

Yes, it means something along the lines of turtle rabbit.


Sent from my iPad
John Schwaller
Professor of History
University at Albany "

......prompted an off-line discussion among some of my Mayanist friends, 

      in which I made the point that armadillos can move fast, when they want to: 

         " Also NB armadillo ears, rather rabbit-like. 

      and they can really moooove. 

      once upon a long long time ago, W. and I out in the [Texas] hill country, we encountered a dillo, by the road. W. began to walk in her direction; she started ambling away. W. walked a little faster, she began to slowly lope away. W. began a slow run, and she took off. Then he ran full speed, and she was moving about twice as fast. And, like a jackrabbit, she was gone. 

    a delightful animal, long the mascot of the counter-culture. Dillos are pretty laid back, unless you are running after them. "

      Which elicited the image below from W (still running, or at least ambling, after all these years), that I suspect most of our Nahuatl listeros already know:    

"Early (? earliest) illustration of an armadillo (Florentine Codex, Book 11; page 61, fig. 201)."


-------------- next part --------------


     I urge interested parties to visit the web to see more accurate photographic depictions of this peaceful critter. 

  http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=armadillo&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=QHQtVN38NZT-yQTMjYHIDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ

 that's all, 

              Peter
-------------- next part --------------
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From idiez at me.com  Thu Oct  2 20:14:15 2014
From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan)
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 15:14:15 -0500
Subject: 2015 Winter Intensive Course in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl
Message-ID: <THU.2.OCT.2014.151415.0500.IDIEZ@ME.COM>

Notequixpoyohuan, 
	Here is the announcement for this winter?s Intensive Course in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl.
It will be held in the city of Zacatecas from January 5-16, 2015. The course will be taught in Nahuatl and Spanish.
John

Te invitamos a participar en esta experiencia acad?mica ?nica
CURSO INTENSIVO DE N?HUATL MODERNO
del 5 al 16 de enero del 2015 en Zacatecas

El Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C. (IDIEZ), te invita a participar en el Curso Intensivo de N?huatl Moderno que se llevar? acabo del 5 al 16 de enero del 2015 en las instalaciones del mismo instituto en la ciudad de Zacatecas. Su curriculum innovador incluye instrucci?n el n?huatl moderno a los niveles principiante e intermedio/avanzado. Al final del curso se contar? con un concierto en lengua n?huatl, con la participaci?n del cantautor Crisp?n Mart?nez Rosas y con un recital de poes?a en lengua n?huatl interpretado por el escritor, Gustavo Zapoteco Side?o.
Instructores: Ofelia Cruz Morales, Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz y Abelardo de la Cruz de la Cruz. 
Colegiatura e inscripci?n:  1500 pesos (residentes de M?xico), 350 USD (no-residentes de M?xico). Debe pagarse antes del 30 de noviembre de 2014. Favor de inscribirse lo m?s pronto posible: hay cupo limitado. Para inscribirse y para realizar el pago de la colegiatura, favor de comunicarse con Eduardo de la Cruz Cruz a xochiayotzin at icloud.com o a +52 1 (492) 127 52 64 (M?xico). 
Hospedaje: Los organizadores ayudar?n a los alumnos a encontrar opciones de hospedaje durante el curso. Favor de comunicarse con Eduardo de la Cruz al xochiayotzin at icloud.com
Descripci?n del curso: Los estudiantes asistir?n a clase seis horas diariamente, de lunes a viernes durante dos semanas para un total de sesenta horas de clase). 
La instrucci?n consistir? en: 
1. Tres horas diarias por la ma?ana de inmersi?n en n?huatl moderno de la Huasteca Veracruzana, incluyendo conversaci?n, lectura, escritura y gram?tica. 
2. Tres horas diarias por la tarde de actividades culturales, incluyendo danza, canto, bordado y teatro.
3. Presentaci?n optativa de temas de docencia, investigaci?n y revitalizaci?n realizados por los alumnos e instructores.
 Objetivos del curso: 
1) Desarrollar en el alumno la comprensi?n oral, el habla, la lectura, la escritura y el conocimiento de la estructura del idioma, as? como la erudici?n y la sensibilidad cultural, con el fin de facilitar su capacidad de comunicarse eficaz, correcta y creativamente en las situaciones cotidianas; 
2) penetrar en los aspectos hist?ricos, econ?micos, pol?ticos, sociales y culturales de la civilizaci?n nahua;
3) preparar a los alumnos a tomar cursos de nivel universitario en las humanidades impartidos en n?huatl junto con nativohablantes;
4) promover la conciencia de los retos metodol?gicos y las oportunidades que implican el estudio del n?huatl, las amenazas contempor?neas a la sobrevivencia del n?huatl, y las actividades de revitalizaci?n que puedan realizar tanto nativo hablantes como no-nativohablantes. 
Horario (de lunes a viernes): 
08:30-11:30. N?huatl moderno de la Huasteca (principiante e intermedio/avanzado).
11:30-15:00. Descanso y comidas.
15:00-18:00. Actividades culturales.
18:30-19:00. Presentaci?n de proyectos de docencia, investigaci?n y revitalizacion. 
Materiales del curso: Una semana antes de iniciar el curso, se les eviar?n a los alumnos, sin costo, copias electr?nicas de los manuales de ejercicios, los esquemas gramaticales, las listas de vocabulario. 
Actividad optativa para el fin de semana del 10-11 de enero: Visita a la zona arqueol?gica y al museo de Chicomoztoc. 

Instituto de Docencia e Investigaci?n Etnol?gica de Zacatecas, A.C.
Tacuba 152, int. 43, Colonia Centro, Zacatecas, Zac. 98000
+52 (492) 892-3610	   idiez at me.com	www.macehualli.org

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From micc2 at cox.net  Fri Oct  3 02:59:42 2014
From: micc2 at cox.net (mario)
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 19:59:42 -0700
Subject: [Aztlan] A question about Aztecs and armadillos
In-Reply-To: <yG731o00M3Wj1Vk01G74j6>
Message-ID: <THU.2.OCT.2014.195942.0700.MICC2@COX.NET>

It is said in the Danza Chichimeca/Conchera/Azteca that when the Spanish 
prohibited the Otomi and other indigenous people from getting wood 
materials to make their guitars and mandolins, they began to use the 
shells of the Armadillo. Thus we are called "concheros".....

Today, certain revisionist new age "Mexi'ca dancers" use the word 
Conchero as a disparaging term for "Hispanicized Ladino" dancers.

But those of us that follow the Indocristiano traditions of La Danza, we 
dance with our "dillos" with pride!!!!!

On another note, when My son found out that armadillos can carry 
Leprosy, he went around spraying all our Conchas with Lysol!!!

-- 
I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:

"Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz


Mario E. Aguilar, PhD

619.948.8861

www.mexicayotl.net
www.mexicayotl.org
www.mexicayotl.com
www.aguila-blanca.com

On 10/2/2014 9:02 AM, Peter Keeler wrote:
> U'uyeh, Listeros,
>
>         The recent interchange (on Aztlan) about the word for armadillo in nahuatl,
>
>        eg:
>
> "It is ayotochtli not azotochtli.  Whoever told you azo... Probably was misinformed.
>
> Yes, it means something along the lines of turtle rabbit.
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
> John Schwaller
> Professor of History
> University at Albany "
>
> ......prompted an off-line discussion among some of my Mayanist friends,
>
>        in which I made the point that armadillos can move fast, when they want to:
>
>           " Also NB armadillo ears, rather rabbit-like.
>
>        and they can really moooove.
>
>        once upon a long long time ago, W. and I out in the [Texas] hill country, we encountered a dillo, by the road. W. began to walk in her direction; she started ambling away. W. walked a little faster, she began to slowly lope away. W. began a slow run, and she took off. Then he ran full speed, and she was moving about twice as fast. And, like a jackrabbit, she was gone.
>
>      a delightful animal, long the mascot of the counter-culture. Dillos are pretty laid back, unless you are running after them. "
>
>        Which elicited the image below from W (still running, or at least ambling, after all these years), that I suspect most of our Nahuatl listeros already know:
>
> "Early (? earliest) illustration of an armadillo (Florentine Codex, Book 11; page 61, fig. 201)."
>
>
>
>
>
>       I urge interested parties to visit the web to see more accurate photographic depictions of this peaceful critter.
>
>    http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=armadillo&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=QHQtVN38NZT-yQTMjYHIDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ
>
>   that's all,
>
>                Peter
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl

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From keeler.peter at gmail.com  Fri Oct  3 15:21:37 2014
From: keeler.peter at gmail.com (Peter Keeler)
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2014 10:21:37 -0500
Subject: [Aztlan] A question about Aztecs and armadillos
Message-ID: <FRI.3.OCT.2014.102137.0500.KEELER.PETER@GMAIL.COM>

U'uyeh, Listeros, 

      The recent interchange (on Aztlan) about the word for armadillo in nahuatl, 

     eg:

"It is ayotochtli not azotochtli.  Whoever told you azo... Probably was misinformed.

Yes, it means something along the lines of turtle rabbit.


Sent from my iPad
John Schwaller
Professor of History
University at Albany "

......prompted an off-line discussion among some of my Mayanist friends, 

     in which I made the point that armadillos can move fast, when they want to: 

        " Also NB armadillo ears, rather rabbit-like. 

     and they can really moooove. 

     once upon a long long time ago, W. and I out in the [Texas] hill country, we encountered a dillo, by the road. W. began to walk in her direction; she started ambling away. W. walked a little faster, she began to slowly lope away. W. began a slow run, and she took off. Then he ran full speed, and she was moving about twice as fast. And, like a jackrabbit, she was gone. 

   a delightful animal, long the mascot of the counter-culture. Dillos are pretty laid back, unless you are running after them. "

     Which comment elicited an armadillo image from the Florentine Codex from W (still running, or at least ambling, after all these years), that I suspect most of our Nahuatl listeros already know:    

"Early (? earliest) illustration of an armadillo (Florentine Codex, Book 11; page 61, fig. 201)."

     the image he sent can be seen on the Aztecs section of the Mexicolore site, picture 4:

http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/ask-experts/what-did-they-do-with-the-shells-of-armadillos-after-eating-the-meat

 Those who are unfamiliar with 'dillos can compare the codex image with more accurate photographic depictions of this peaceful critter, in many sites on the web, including this:  

 http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=armadillo&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=QHQtVN38NZT-yQTMjYHIDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ

that's all, 

             Peter
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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Fri Oct  3 16:31:51 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2014 18:31:51 +0200
Subject: -ti verber (again-1)
In-Reply-To: <20140925150656.0o7mu2q9kwkwcsgg@webmail.iu.edu>
Message-ID: <FRI.3.OCT.2014.183151.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear listeros.

Sorry for coming back to a cold case, but I had promised to do so.

Mary and Joe?s rationale consists of two points?: (1) there are two different verbers ?ti, one meaning ??be?? and one meaning ??have???; (2) the proof of this difference lies in the causative, which is in ?ti-lia in the first case, e.g. tl?ca-ti-lia lit. ??cause to become a human being??, i.e. ??give birth to??), in ?tia in the second case, e.g. cac-tia ??cause to have shoes??, i.e. ??shoe?? (the verb, as in ??Who?s gonna shoe your pretty little foot??). Let me suggest another approach and try to convince you that it is more satisfactory.

Objection (1) I still challenge anyone to find a single example of ni-cac-ti / ni-cal-ti / ni-n?n-ti etc. meaning ??I have shoes / a house / a mother?? etc. In this meaning, you find ni-caqu-? / ni-cal-? / ni-n?n-? etc., or onc? no-cac / no-cal / no-n?n etc.?; or in some dialects ni-c-piya no-cac etc. I?ll return later to some possible examples adduced by Mary Clayton and Tomas Amaya. But you could say?: OK, you never find that, but there is an underlying structure with that meaning, so let?s pass to another objection

Objection (2) There is nothing like a clear translinguistic meaning of ??be?? and ??have???: there are specific uses of these specific verbs in English, which only partly correspond to the uses of partly similar verbs in other languages, e.g. French ???tre?? and ??avoir??, not to speak of Spanish which has ??ser?? + ??estar?? (would one of them, or both, be the ??real?? ??be????), and still less of languages that have no verb ??have??, or neither ??have?? nor ??be??. Actually, ??be?? and ??have?? typically belong to grammar, not to lexicon. This means that, like grammatical categories (say, number, aspect?) or syntactic rules and constraints, they mark abstract structures and relations, which are organized by each language in its own specific way, and which cannot be captured by a single word belonging to a specific language. [In this particular case, it is something like ??X is spotted (I find it hard to find a good translation of French rep?rer) with relation to Y, located near Y??, or ??Y is the localisator (again, French ??rep?re?? is better) of X??. But this is not the main point here.]

Objection (3) I have challenged the translation (again, I say translation, not meaning) ??have?? for ?ti. But translating ?ti by ??be?? may be still worse. ??I?m a lord?? (if I dare say) is ni-t?uc-tli, not ni-t?uc-ti, which has more into it. Whatever the translation of ?ti, one thing is sure?: it forms verbs from noun (sometimes adverb) stems. That is, it confers verbal categories (tense, aspect, mood) to a notion that by itself lacks such categories. Moreover, -ti verbs are clearly dynamic, i.e. verbs of action. So if you translate them by the most prototypically stative English verbs, which are most particular (and defective) in relation to aspect, you miss the most interesting and explanatory point.

[Before coming to a suggestion?: note that English ??be?? and ??have?? are more easily used in some typical verbal (i.e., aspectual or modal) contexts that in other languages. For instance, they may be used in imperative, e.g. ??Be brave??, but this means ??behave bravely??, and could perfectly be translated by a ?ti verb in Nahuatl (xicu?uhti, xoc?l?ti lit. ??behave like an eagle and a jaguar)?; or ??have a drink??, but it means ??take a drink??, not ??be the owner of a drink??. I said in a preceding message that this English idiosyncrasy could be part of the misunderstanding, for instance in French ??be brave?? has a plausible exact translation (??sois brave??), but if you translate ??have a drink?? by ??aie un verre??, it sounds silly (except in some contexts, but this would lead us astray)]

So, my suggestion?: a verb which has the structure N-ti is used to mark a behavior of some sort which has as an effect the realization of N?: not as a stable property, but as an action. And here we come to what is admittedly an idiosyncrasy of Nahuatl grammar, because there are two different cases, which can mislead us into the ??be?? vs. ??have?? theory. The real difference is that this behavior can apply (a) to oneself, or (b) to an external object.

Case (a) (to oneself)?: the person who can say ni-t?uc-ti can also say ni-t?uc-tli (I?m a lord, and so ni-t?uc-ti?: I behave / act like a lord), or at least shares some properties (e.g. while the lord is away, I take on his charge and responsibilities), or accedes to the status of lord (inceptive aspect?: I become a lord, or in the same way ni-tl?cati ??I become a human being ? by birth??). In many cases, translation by ??be?? is possible, but impoverishing because it blurs the dynamic nature of the verb.

Case (b) (to an external object) This is more unusual (and you can imagine a language which would have a morpheme very similar to Nahuatl ?ti, but only of type (a)). Actually, it seems very lexicalized and not as freely productive as case (a). In this case, there is a clear action, which brings something (usually inanimate) to existence. For obvious reasons the ??be?? interpretation is ruled out?: of course, if you say ni-tequi-ti, you can hardly say ni-tequi-tl. But the ??have?? translation is in most cases awkward and sometimes just impossible?: ??I have medicine?? is not a satisfying gloss for ni-pah-ti, even if you take ??have?? as a paraphrase of ??take?? (and still worse if it is a paraphrase of ??possess??).

In a nutshell?: the best gloss for N?ti is not the opposed pair ??be??/ ??have??, but rather a single one, ??make N exist??, and if you look for a single, semantically vague and encompassing word, ??do?? is better than both ??be?? and ??have??.

But I fear to bore you with long messages, so please wait for a following one, dealing with the ??causative?? issue and Mary?s examples.

Best

Michel L.





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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Sat Oct  4 15:09:18 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2014 17:09:18 +0200
Subject: -ti verber (again-2)
Message-ID: <SAT.4.OCT.2014.170918.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear listeros

Back to the ?ti verber and the ??causative?? issue.

I tried to explain why both ??be?? and ??have?? were bad glosses, and that ??do?? was better, the most satisfying ones being in fact ??cause to exist?? or ??act in such a way that N becomes a reality ? where this reality keeps developing in time (and this fact is expressed by the verbal categories of Tense, Aspect and Mood).

Now, for the two ??causatives?? e.g. tl?ca-ti-lia ??cause to be a human being??, i.e. ??give birth to?? (related to the alleged ??be?? meaning) vs. e.g. cac-tia ??cause to have shoes??, i.e. ??give shoes to??, or n?n-tia ??give a mother to?? (related to the alleged ??have?? meaning). If we give up the ??have?? gloss of the latter, the difference is accounted for by the ? type (a)?? vs. ? type (b)?? opposition, namely?: we have ?ti-lia with type (a) (an action applied to oneself: tl?ca-ti is ??realize the existence of a human being by becoming a human being??) vs. ?tia with type (b)? (it applies to an external object: tequi-ti is ??realize the existence of the tequitl without being a tequitl in any way??.)

But if we drop the ??have?? meaning, are the N?tia verbs causatives after all??

For the meaning, tl?catilia ??cause to be/become a human being?? is indeed the causative of tl?cati?; but since n?nti does not mean ??have a mother?? (again, in all its occurrences it means ??be/behave like/act as a mother?? then the meaning of n?ntia is not causative, but rather applicative (ni-mitz-n?n-tia ??I act in such a way that there is a mother for you??, ??I provide you with a mother??. As you know, there is a ditransitive use of these verbs, mostly (but not always) reflexive, e.g. ni-mitz-no-n?n-tia ??I act in such a way that you are a mother for me??.

We could then consider that there is a transitivizer ?a (or perhaps ?ia), which is not per se causative or applicative, but more generally marks valency increasing, the semantic interpretation of this increase being variable. Some data support this idea, though admittedly scarce and sometimes idiosyncratic, so that I admit some nitpicking. But consider the fact that ?a or ?ia can sometimes be used as an applicative suffix (pepena / pepenia, quetza / quechia, c?hua / c?huia ? and also ch?huia or p?huia, in the sense of ??cast a spell??), but also as a causative one (calaqui / calaquia, tlatla / tlatia, tlami / tlamia, olini /olinia, and the whole series -ni / -nia, and ?ihui / -oa). Also consider the fact that cu?catia is not causative (??make sing??) but applicative (??sing for??, ??sing in honor of??). I was long embarrassed with this, until I realized that it was the ?tia form of cu?ca-tl, and that ni-mitz-cu?ca-tia was to be interpreted as ??I provide you with a song??, just like ni-mitz-cal-tia ??I provide you with a house??. This opens onto the (not totally loony) idea that causatives are related to object nouns, and, as I said in a preceding message, that ni-mitz-tla-cua-l-tia ??I make you eat?? was somehow related to tla-cua-l-li ??food??, and could be glossed ??I provide you with food??. Of course, this relation is blurred by the fact that causatives can occur with definite objects (ni-mitz-cua-l-tia tlaxcalli ??I give you tortillas to eat?? etc.

Again, I was long, and Mary?s and Tomas? examples deserve consideration. I?ll come to that as soon as I can (tomorrow or the day after??)

Thanks for your attention

Best
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From obarajas at tulane.edu  Sat Oct  4 22:32:59 2014
From: obarajas at tulane.edu (Barajas, Octavio)
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2014 22:32:59 +0000
Subject: Altepetl: case of assimilation?
Message-ID: <SAT.4.OCT.2014.223259.0000.OBARAJAS@TULANE.EDU>

Notlacuilol Mixpantinzco Estimados Nahuat-listeros:

Can someone please explain the linguistic process that results in Altepetl? Why is it not atepetl* as predicated by early colonial Nahuatl grammar? Why does the letter <L> precede <tepetl>? Is this a case of linguistic assimilation? Or is something else taking place? How or why did this phrase become lexicalized this way?

I apologize if this may have already come up in prior dialogue. My search, suggested by a friend, in the Nahuat-listserv archive didn't turn up an answer.

Tlazohcamati, octavio


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From dcwright at prodigy.net.mx  Sun Oct  5 00:20:34 2014
From: dcwright at prodigy.net.mx (David Wright)
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2014 19:20:34 -0500
Subject: Altepetl: case of assimilation?
In-Reply-To: <1412461987702.97510@tulane.edu>
Message-ID: <SAT.4.OCT.2014.192034.0500.DCWRIGHT@PRODIGY.NET.MX>

Octaviotzin:

I see this as a partial regressive assimilation that occurs when two nouns
are compounded and the first noun, exceptionally, retains the absolutive
suffix -tl, where normally this suffix would be removed to form a regular
compound noun (root + root + absolutive suffix). This is sometimes the case
with lexicalized phrases, in which the second noun begins with a consonant.
The /tl/ of the first noun may become an /l/. To date I have found these
changes:

tl + t > lt
tl + p > lp
tl + m > lm
tl + ch > lch
tl + hu > lhu (/lw/)

Thus, a:ltepe:tl (a:tl + tepe:tl (tl + t > lt)).

The latter "difrasismo" also appears as a nonlexicalized phrase, for example
in the Cantares Mexicanos manuscript: "ynatl, intepetly" (in a:tl in
tepe:tl, with the phoneme /i/ added at the end as a poetic device,
apparently for the sake of rhythm).

We can also find this sort of assimilation in certain anthroponyms:

Xi:huilte:mo:c (xi:huitl + te:mo: (tl + t > lt) + c);
A:lpopo:ca (a:tl + popo:ca (tl + p > lp)).

Here are three cases where the same change occurs in toponyms:

A:lmolo:ya:n (a:tl + (molo:ni - i) (tl + m > lm) + ya:n (n + y > y));
A:lchaya:huaca:n (a:tl + chaya:hua (tl + ch > lch) + ca:n);
A:lhuexo:yohca:n (a:tl + (huexo:tl - tl) (tl + hu > lhu) + yoh + ca:n).

SOURCES OF THE EXAMPLES

A:ltepe:tl may be found in Molina (1571, II, 4r) and of course in many other
sources.  For the non-lexicalized form, see Cantares Mexicanos (1994: 12r).

Xi:huiltemoc appears in texts by Alva Ixtlilxochitl (1975-1977: I, 412; II,
144). (The /i/ could perhaps have been short, changing the meaning of this
name. It is also written "Xihuitltemoc", without the partial assimilation.)

A:lpopo:ca, A:lmolo:ya:n, and A:lchaya:huaca:n may be found in Cantares
Mexicanos (1994: 9r, 33v, 54v, 79v, 84r).

A:lhuexo:yohca:n appears in the Codex Mendoza (Berdan/Anawalt, 1992: 26r).

Some of these examples were suggested by Gordon Whittaker on this list over
five years ago (August 21 and 22, 2009).

REFERENCES

ALVA Ixtlilx?chitl, Fernando de
1975-1977 Obras hist?ricas, incluyen el texto completo de las llamadas
Relaciones e Historia de la naci?n chichimeca en una nueva versi?n
establecida con el cotejo de los manuscritos m?s antiguos que se conocen, 2
vols., Edmundo O?Gorman, editor, Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones
Hist?ricas, Universidad Nacional Aut?noma de M?xico. 

BERDAN, Frances F.; ANAWALT, Patricia Rieff (editoras)
1992 The Codex Mendoza, facsimile, vol. 3, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford,
University of California Press.

CANTARES MEXICANOS
1994 Cantares mexicanos, facsimile, Mexico, Instituto de Investigaciones
Bibliogr?ficas, Universidad Nacional Aut?noma de M?xico.

MOLINA, Alonso de
1571 Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana/Vocabulario en lengua
mexicana y castellana, Mexico, Casa de Antonio de Espinosa.

Best regards,

David

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From idiez at me.com  Sun Oct  5 01:15:53 2014
From: idiez at me.com (John Sullivan)
Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2014 20:15:53 -0500
Subject: Altepetl: case of assimilation?
In-Reply-To: <000c01cfe032$2e3e3890$8abaa9b0$@prodigy.net.mx>
Message-ID: <SAT.4.OCT.2014.201553.0500.IDIEZ@ME.COM>

David huan Octavio, I?m not sure if this is phonetic, given the large number of compounds within the categories you name below, the first element of which indeed does lose the entire absolutive ending. Having said that, here are two more examples of this phenomenon.
1. a:lpichia: ?to spray s.t. on s.t. or s.o. (Huastecan Nahuatl)
2. a:ltia: ?to bathe s.o. And this is also another example of the noun + ti (to have) + a (causative) that we have been discussing recently on the list.
John

P.S. And I?ll have more to say about pichia later.
> On Oct 4, 2014, at 19:20, David Wright <dcwright at prodigy.net.mx> wrote:
> 
> Octaviotzin:
> 
> I see this as a partial regressive assimilation that occurs when two nouns
> are compounded and the first noun, exceptionally, retains the absolutive
> suffix -tl, where normally this suffix would be removed to form a regular
> compound noun (root + root + absolutive suffix). This is sometimes the case
> with lexicalized phrases, in which the second noun begins with a consonant.
> The /tl/ of the first noun may become an /l/. To date I have found these
> changes:
> 
> tl + t > lt
> tl + p > lp
> tl + m > lm
> tl + ch > lch
> tl + hu > lhu (/lw/)
> 
> 

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From cuecuex at gmail.com  Sun Oct  5 07:04:30 2014
From: cuecuex at gmail.com (Roberto Romero)
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2014 13:04:30 +0600
Subject: [Aztlan] A question about Aztecs and armadillos
In-Reply-To: <542E111E.2010006@cox.net>
Message-ID: <SUN.5.OCT.2014.130430.0600.CUECUEX@GMAIL.COM>

Mario

No tengo noticia alguna de que los espa?oles hayan prohibido a los
indios otomies y a los dem?s ind?genas el tener guitarras y mandolinas
de madera.

Mas aun hay datos iconogr?ficos y textuales que inidican que los
indios los usaban , y los fabricaban. De hecho la ense?anza de oficios
y de construcci?n de intrumentos musicales de tipo europeo fue uno de
los medidas que acompa?aron a la evangelizaci?n cat?lica...

De que fuente hist?rica , libro, ensayo obtuviste esa informaci?n de
la prohibici?n  de usar instrumentos musicales que me parece
absolutamante falsa y ajena a la verdad hist?rica.

Mas aun en el siglo XVI no hab?a guitarras creo que ni en Espa?a. Fue
el siglo de la vihuela...

Y de hecho en el siglo XVI y buena parte del XVII los otomies fueron
conquistadores, fueron parte del bando ganador no fueron de los
perdedores

Roberto Romero

2014-10-03 8:59 GMT+06:00, mario <micc2 at cox.net>:
> It is said in the Danza Chichimeca/Conchera/Azteca that when the Spanish
> prohibited the Otomi and other indigenous people from getting wood
> materials to make their guitars and mandolins, they began to use the
> shells of the Armadillo. Thus we are called "concheros".....
>
> Today, certain revisionist new age "Mexi'ca dancers" use the word
> Conchero as a disparaging term for "Hispanicized Ladino" dancers.
>
> But those of us that follow the Indocristiano traditions of La Danza, we
> dance with our "dillos" with pride!!!!!
>
> On another note, when My son found out that armadillos can carry
> Leprosy, he went around spraying all our Conchas with Lysol!!!
>
> --
> I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:
>
> "Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz
>
>
> Mario E. Aguilar, PhD
>
> 619.948.8861
>
> www.mexicayotl.net
> www.mexicayotl.org
> www.mexicayotl.com
> www.aguila-blanca.com
>
> On 10/2/2014 9:02 AM, Peter Keeler wrote:
>> U'uyeh, Listeros,
>>
>>         The recent interchange (on Aztlan) about the word for armadillo in
>> nahuatl,
>>
>>        eg:
>>
>> "It is ayotochtli not azotochtli.  Whoever told you azo... Probably was
>> misinformed.
>>
>> Yes, it means something along the lines of turtle rabbit.
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>> John Schwaller
>> Professor of History
>> University at Albany "
>>
>> ......prompted an off-line discussion among some of my Mayanist friends,
>>
>>        in which I made the point that armadillos can move fast, when they
>> want to:
>>
>>           " Also NB armadillo ears, rather rabbit-like.
>>
>>        and they can really moooove.
>>
>>        once upon a long long time ago, W. and I out in the [Texas] hill
>> country, we encountered a dillo, by the road. W. began to walk in her
>> direction; she started ambling away. W. walked a little faster, she began
>> to slowly lope away. W. began a slow run, and she took off. Then he ran
>> full speed, and she was moving about twice as fast. And, like a
>> jackrabbit, she was gone.
>>
>>      a delightful animal, long the mascot of the counter-culture. Dillos
>> are pretty laid back, unless you are running after them. "
>>
>>        Which elicited the image below from W (still running, or at least
>> ambling, after all these years), that I suspect most of our Nahuatl
>> listeros already know:
>>
>> "Early (? earliest) illustration of an armadillo (Florentine Codex, Book
>> 11; page 61, fig. 201)."
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>       I urge interested parties to visit the web to see more accurate
>> photographic depictions of this peaceful critter.
>>
>>
>> http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=armadillo&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=QHQtVN38NZT-yQTMjYHIDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ
>>
>>   that's all,
>>
>>                Peter
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nahuatl mailing list
>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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From obarajas at tulane.edu  Sun Oct  5 15:52:22 2014
From: obarajas at tulane.edu (Barajas, Octavio)
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2014 15:52:22 +0000
Subject: Altepetl: case of assimilation?
In-Reply-To: <BE02F62E-9C9E-4420-B9F3-8653630F3668@me.com>
Message-ID: <SUN.5.OCT.2014.155222.0000.OBARAJAS@TULANE.EDU>

Thank you both for your feedback! Your examples offer much more to consider on this question. I look forward to seeing what takes place with pichia. 

Saludos, octavio
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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Sun Oct  5 22:40:56 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 00:40:56 +0200
Subject: -ti verber (again-3)
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.004056.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear Mary, dear Tomas, dear listeros

I suggested in the preceding messages that there was only one (N)?ti verber, meaning something like ??bring N to existence??, and that within this unicity there were indeed two subtypes, one where N can apply as a predicate to the subject of N-ti (e.g. t?uc-ti ??act in such a way that there be a lord??, i.e. ??behave like a lord, become a lord???), and one where N refers to an external entity (e.g. tequi-ti ??act in such a way that the tequitl exist??, i.e. ??make the tequitl, fulfill the tequitl???). My claim is that, while this leads to admittedly two different semantic values, stating this difference as ??be?? vs. ??have?? is misleading. Now, I?ll comment Tomas Amaya?s example, and I?ll do the same with Mary? ones in a following message.

Tomas points out that in some dialects there is a verb ch?n-ti meaning ??live, dwell??, and that?s true (and as I said, I found that puzzling when I heard it first in Milpa Alta). But I?m still reluctant to a gloss like ??have one?s house somewhere??. What strikes me that it is not cal-ti. There are several differences between calli and ch?n- (I've never met the absolutive *ch?ntli in the Classical Nahuatl texts, only the possessed forms no-ch?n, mo-ch?n etc.), and one is that, while calli refers to a ??thing??, ch?n- refers to a place, and is much vaguer, possibly referring to one?s house, one?s town, or one?s country (English ??home?? is closer than ??house?? to translate ch?n-). So while cal-ti (if it exists) will mean ??make a house??, ch?n-ti means ??make one?s home somewhere??, i.e. live there. Note that again this verb is dynamic?: when I live somewhere, this means that I can have a lot of activities there. Also note that the verb nemi, which is usually translated by ??live??, actually means ??go, walk?? or maybe better ??keep going, keep walking??, i.e., is typically dynamic, and this is congruent with the dynamicity of ch?n-ti.

I hope I?ll be able to comment Mary?s examples tomorrow. Sorry for the delay, but I?ve been really hectic these days.

Best

Michel L.
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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Mon Oct  6 09:48:54 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 11:48:54 +0200
Subject: =?utf-8?Q?=C2=A0-ti_?=verber (again-4)
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.114854.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear listeros

In a preceding message, I challenged the idea of N-ti meaning ??have N??, as I had found no occurrence of such forms in the corpus. Mary Clayton managed to find a few ones which deserve consideration, and I thank her for that, but in my opinion they are not convincing.

First of all, for N-tia verbs. Since they mean ??give N to s.o.??, ??provide s.o. with N?? (and I agree with these translations), Mary and Joe analyze ??make s.o. have N??, and this could be a hint for a ??have N?? meaning of N-ti. But if as I believe N-ti means ??make N??, then N-tia is not ??make s.o. have N??, but rather ??make N for s.o.?? (occasionally ??? for/to/into sth.??), i.e., has an applicative meaning. The semantic result is the same, but the morphological path is different. This holds for ninocactia ??I make shoes for myself??, ??I get shoes??, nit?n?ntia ??I give a mother to s.o.??, ninochimaltia ??I make a shield for myself??, nitla?y?tia ??I put liquid in sth.?? etc.

Now for the N-ti examples which possibly could mean ??have N??. Mary?s examples are?:

(1) tequiti ??for a slave to have work, duty?? This is the easiest to rule out, since the ??make?? gloss is clearly more appropriate

(2) tzinti ??for something to have a beginning??. But remember that N-ti has a dynamic meaning (and so has ??begin??), so ??realize its beginning?? works better. From there we have tzintia ??make the beginning for sth.??, i.e. ??begin (transitive)??

(3) ohxiti ??have resin?? FC 11. ??Have resin??, ??be full of resin?? would be ohxiyoh. Again, ??produce resin?? is better. I?m not a native speaker of English, so I do not know how you feel with ??make resin??, but as a French speaker I admit ??faire de la r?sine??, speaking of a tree (though "donner/produire de la r?sine" would be better). In the same way, I find in the Florentine Codex (XI,13) nanahuati ??he grows pustules?? (better in my opinion than ??he has pustules??, because it marks a process rather than a state).

(4) huictih ??they wield a hoe?? FC 7 (p.24 in Dibble & Anderson). Actually, this translation is wrong. Book 7 chapter 8 speaks of the people who must pay for their fathers? or grandfathers? faults, and sell themselves as slaves. The context says ??Ye huictih, ye mecapaltih, ye t?itzcuinhu?n, ye t?tot?lhu?n??. Huictli metlapalli ??hoe, tump line?? is a difrasismo, synecdoche for ??slave??. There is in the FC at least another occurrence of this, correctly translated (but I can?t find the exact reference right now)?: T?huic t?mecapal moch?huaya ??he became someone's digging stick and tump line??. So the right meaning is ??They become hoes and tump lines (= slaves), they are someone else?s dogs and turkeys ? (= they have the status of animals).

There remain two trickier cases, hueliti and pahti. I?ll deal with them in a following message.

I hope I'm not bothering you.


Best


Michel L.

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From micc at cox.net  Mon Oct  6 19:43:45 2014
From: micc at cox.net (micc)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 12:43:45 -0700
Subject: [Aztlan] A question about Aztecs and armadillos
In-Reply-To: <zNzV1o00B3Wj1Vk01NzWC1>
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.124345.0700.MICC@COX.NET>

I do not have the exact sources on hand. But I have read several 
articles in journals that the Spanish crown was worried that the 
recently arrived Spanish instrument makers where losing business to the 
indigenous instrument makers.  As you say, the Franciscans taught the 
indigenous people, especially in Michoacan  (where Paracho to this day 
is famous for its instruments) to make vihuelas, mandolinas, mandolones, 
violas, violins, and even organs for church services. I recall reading 
that by the 159o0's however, the colonial authorities were making it 
difficult for the indigenous luthiers to practice their arts in the 
Spanish colonial cities.  They did however continue to work in the small 
towns and villages where the Danza Chichimeca evolved.

> Mas aun en el siglo XVI no hab?a guitarras creo que ni en Espa?a. Fue
> el siglo de la vihuela...

Esto es cierto, y la guitarra conchera es efectivamente una copia de la 
la?d del siglo 16.


> Y de hecho en el siglo XVI y buena parte del XVII los otomies fueron
> conquistadores, fueron parte del bando ganador no fueron de los
> perdedores
Esto tambi?n es cierto.  Y por eso la Danza "chichimeca/Conchera/Azteca" 
se fue expandiendo al centro sur, y hasta el norte de mesoamerica.

Pero la historia de la danza no termina en estos siglos, Los 
contratiempos siguen viniendo en los siglos XVII hasta la revoluci?n de 
1910.

-- 
I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:

"Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz


Mario E. Aguilar, PhD

619.948.8861

www.mexicayotl.net
www.mexicayotl.org
www.mexicayotl.com
www.aguila-blanca.com

On 10/5/2014 12:04 AM, Roberto Romero wrote:
> Mario
>
> No tengo noticia alguna de que los espa?oles hayan prohibido a los
> indios otomies y a los dem?s ind?genas el tener guitarras y mandolinas
> de madera.
>
> Mas aun hay datos iconogr?ficos y textuales que inidican que los
> indios los usaban , y los fabricaban. De hecho la ense?anza de oficios
> y de construcci?n de intrumentos musicales de tipo europeo fue uno de
> los medidas que acompa?aron a la evangelizaci?n cat?lica...
>
> De que fuente hist?rica , libro, ensayo obtuviste esa informaci?n de
> la prohibici?n  de usar instrumentos musicales que me parece
> absolutamante falsa y ajena a la verdad hist?rica.
>
> Mas aun en el siglo XVI no hab?a guitarras creo que ni en Espa?a. Fue
> el siglo de la vihuela...
>
> Y de hecho en el siglo XVI y buena parte del XVII los otomies fueron
> conquistadores, fueron parte del bando ganador no fueron de los
> perdedores
>
> Roberto Romero
>
> 2014-10-03 8:59 GMT+06:00, mario <micc2 at cox.net>:
>> It is said in the Danza Chichimeca/Conchera/Azteca that when the Spanish
>> prohibited the Otomi and other indigenous people from getting wood
>> materials to make their guitars and mandolins, they began to use the
>> shells of the Armadillo. Thus we are called "concheros".....
>>
>> Today, certain revisionist new age "Mexi'ca dancers" use the word
>> Conchero as a disparaging term for "Hispanicized Ladino" dancers.
>>
>> But those of us that follow the Indocristiano traditions of La Danza, we
>> dance with our "dillos" with pride!!!!!
>>
>> On another note, when My son found out that armadillos can carry
>> Leprosy, he went around spraying all our Conchas with Lysol!!!
>>
>> --
>> I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:
>>
>> "Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz
>>
>>
>> Mario E. Aguilar, PhD
>>
>> 619.948.8861
>>
>> www.mexicayotl.net
>> www.mexicayotl.org
>> www.mexicayotl.com
>> www.aguila-blanca.com
>>
>> On 10/2/2014 9:02 AM, Peter Keeler wrote:
>>> U'uyeh, Listeros,
>>>
>>>          The recent interchange (on Aztlan) about the word for armadillo in
>>> nahuatl,
>>>
>>>         eg:
>>>
>>> "It is ayotochtli not azotochtli.  Whoever told you azo... Probably was
>>> misinformed.
>>>
>>> Yes, it means something along the lines of turtle rabbit.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sent from my iPad
>>> John Schwaller
>>> Professor of History
>>> University at Albany "
>>>
>>> ......prompted an off-line discussion among some of my Mayanist friends,
>>>
>>>         in which I made the point that armadillos can move fast, when they
>>> want to:
>>>
>>>            " Also NB armadillo ears, rather rabbit-like.
>>>
>>>         and they can really moooove.
>>>
>>>         once upon a long long time ago, W. and I out in the [Texas] hill
>>> country, we encountered a dillo, by the road. W. began to walk in her
>>> direction; she started ambling away. W. walked a little faster, she began
>>> to slowly lope away. W. began a slow run, and she took off. Then he ran
>>> full speed, and she was moving about twice as fast. And, like a
>>> jackrabbit, she was gone.
>>>
>>>       a delightful animal, long the mascot of the counter-culture. Dillos
>>> are pretty laid back, unless you are running after them. "
>>>
>>>         Which elicited the image below from W (still running, or at least
>>> ambling, after all these years), that I suspect most of our Nahuatl
>>> listeros already know:
>>>
>>> "Early (? earliest) illustration of an armadillo (Florentine Codex, Book
>>> 11; page 61, fig. 201)."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>        I urge interested parties to visit the web to see more accurate
>>> photographic depictions of this peaceful critter.
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=armadillo&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ei=QHQtVN38NZT-yQTMjYHIDQ&ved=0CCoQsAQ
>>>
>>>    that's all,
>>>
>>>                 Peter
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Nahuatl mailing list
>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nahuatl mailing list
>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>>
> _______________________________________________
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> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>

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From jfschwaller at gmail.com  Mon Oct  6 19:51:14 2014
From: jfschwaller at gmail.com (John Schwaller)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 15:51:14 -0400
Subject: Aztecs & armadillos
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.155114.0400.JFSCHWALLER@GMAIL.COM>

I have done quite a bit of research on 16th cen. Mexico and do not recall
any legislation relating to the making of instruments.  Not saying it could
not have happened, I just would need to see the particulars.  What
*was *outlawed
was natives dressing up in the old garb and engaging in the old dances.

The making of instruments out of various animals is found throughout the
Americas.  In particular, in Paraguay (and possibly up into the Bolivian
highlands)  they also make small mandolins (charangos) out of armadillos.

-- 
John F. Schwaller
Professor,
University at Albany
1400 Washington Ave.
Albany NY 12222

jfschwaller at gmail.com
315-212-0064
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From mmccaffe at indiana.edu  Mon Oct  6 23:52:05 2014
From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 19:52:05 -0400
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=A0-ti_?=verber (again-4)
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.195205.0400.MMCCAFFE@INDIANA.EDU>

The verber explained by Andrews and identified in Campbell's work as 
"-ti04" and meaning 'have' is a common animal in Nahuatl. There aren't 
simply a couple handfuls of these verbs lying around like unusual stray 
dogs in classical Nahuatl; there are *several thousand* of them, and 
their meanings are clear: "have". Someone who has the time and interest 
to write this matter up may lay it to rest.

Nahuatl, like every language, has intrinsic ambiguity. There are 
homophonous verb endings in Nahuatl, and what we have been looking at 
over the past week are two of them, and these two have clear meanings. 
One means "become, be", and the other means "have".

Best,

Michael


Quoting M Launey <mlauney at wanadoo.fr>:

>
>
>
>
> Dear listeros
>
> In a preceding message, I challenged the idea of N-ti meaning ??have
> N??, as I had found no occurrence of such forms in the corpus. Mary
> Clayton managed to find a few ones which deserve consideration, and I
> thank her for that, but in my opinion they are not convincing.
>
> First of all, for N-tia verbs. Since they mean ??give N to s.o.??,
> ??provide s.o. with N?? (and I agree with these translations), Mary
> and Joe analyze ??make s.o. have N??, and this could be a hint for a
> ??have N?? meaning of N-ti. But if as I believe N-ti means ??make
> N??, then N-tia is not ??make s.o. have N??, but rather ??make N for
> s.o.?? (occasionally ??? for/to/into sth.??), i.e., has an
> applicative meaning. The semantic result is the same, but the
> morphological path is different. This holds for ninocactia ??I make
> shoes for myself??, ??I get shoes??, nit?n?ntia ??I give a mother to
> s.o.??, ninochimaltia ??I make a shield for myself??, nitla?y?tia ??I
> put liquid in sth.?? etc.
>
> Now for the N-ti examples which possibly could mean ??have N??.
> Mary?s examples are?:
>
> (1) tequiti ??for a slave to have work, duty?? This is the easiest to
> rule out, since the ??make?? gloss is clearly more appropriate
>
> (2) tzinti ??for something to have a beginning??. But remember that
> N-ti has a dynamic meaning (and so has ??begin??), so ??realize its
> beginning?? works better. From there we have tzintia ??make the
> beginning for sth.??, i.e. ??begin (transitive)??
>
> (3) ohxiti ??have resin?? FC 11. ??Have resin??, ??be full of resin??
> would be ohxiyoh. Again, ??produce resin?? is better. I?m not a
> native speaker of English, so I do not know how you feel with ??make
> resin??, but as a French speaker I admit ??faire de la r?sine??,
> speaking of a tree (though "donner/produire de la r?sine" would be
> better). In the same way, I find in the Florentine Codex (XI,13)
> nanahuati ??he grows pustules?? (better in my opinion than ??he has
> pustules??, because it marks a process rather than a state).
>
> (4) huictih ??they wield a hoe?? FC 7 (p.24 in Dibble & Anderson).
> Actually, this translation is wrong. Book 7 chapter 8 speaks of the
> people who must pay for their fathers? or grandfathers? faults, and
> sell themselves as slaves. The context says ??Ye huictih, ye
> mecapaltih, ye t?itzcuinhu?n, ye t?tot?lhu?n??. Huictli metlapalli
> ??hoe, tump line?? is a difrasismo, synecdoche for ??slave??. There
> is in the FC at least another occurrence of this, correctly
> translated (but I can?t find the exact reference right now)?: T?huic
> t?mecapal moch?huaya ??he became someone's digging stick and tump
> line??. So the right meaning is ??They become hoes and tump lines (=
> slaves), they are someone else?s dogs and turkeys ? (= they have the
> status of animals).
>
> There remain two trickier cases, hueliti and pahti. I?ll deal with
> them in a following message.
>
> I hope I'm not bothering you.
>
>
> Best
>
>
> Michel L.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>




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From dcwright at prodigy.net.mx  Tue Oct  7 00:12:53 2014
From: dcwright at prodigy.net.mx (David Wright)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 19:12:53 -0500
Subject: -ti verber (again-4)
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.191253.0500.DCWRIGHT@PRODIGY.NET.MX>

Dear Michel:
 
As I was cutting up hardcopies of your latest messages and glueing them to
file cards (call me old-fashioned), I read again the sentence "I hope I'm
not bothering you", and I was motivated to write the following words.
 
It is great to have on Nahuat-l another of the scholars that gave us a
renewed understanding of the phonology, lexicology, and grammar of this
language during the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decades
of the 21st. I'm certain that we were all very pleasantly surprised when you
began posting here not long ago. Thank you for injecting some high quality
input into our conversations!
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From mmccaffe at indiana.edu  Tue Oct  7 01:11:52 2014
From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty)
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 21:11:52 -0400
Subject: -ti verber (again-4)
In-Reply-To: <000001cfe1c3$70aafc80$5200f580$@prodigy.net.mx>
Message-ID: <MON.6.OCT.2014.211152.0400.MMCCAFFE@INDIANA.EDU>

I agree with David in toto. Michel has very interesting and informative ideas.


Michael



Quoting David Wright <dcwright at prodigy.net.mx>:

> Dear Michel:
>
> As I was cutting up hardcopies of your latest messages and glueing them to
> file cards (call me old-fashioned), I read again the sentence "I hope I'm
> not bothering you", and I was motivated to write the following words.
>
> It is great to have on Nahuat-l another of the scholars that gave us a
> renewed understanding of the phonology, lexicology, and grammar of this
> language during the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decades
> of the 21st. I'm certain that we were all very pleasantly surprised when you
> began posting here not long ago. Thank you for injecting some high quality
> input into our conversations!
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>



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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Tue Oct  7 10:37:15 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 12:37:15 +0200
Subject: N-ti verbs (again-5/5)
Message-ID: <TUE.7.OCT.2014.123715.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear listeros

One last message about N-ti verbs and Mary?s examples (ah-)hueliti (5) and pahti (6). After that, my plan is to keep silent unless new elements pop up in the list (I mean, new elements for discussion, not just assertive statements that ??have?? will be ??have?? and that there is no reason for analyzing what ??have?? stands for).

(5) (ah-)hueliti (I see no occurrence of hueliti without negation in my notes, but it may be omission from me, or casual lack in the corpus). The word hueli has a very specific behavior, its status is unclear, adverb or noun (??possible?? or ??possibly??, I can give examples if you like). But ?ti also appears with clearly adverbial roots, like m?ztlati ??arrive to tomorrow??, teohtlacti (usually impersonal) ??it?s getting late??, n?nti (Carochi?: ?n?ntic in nociyahuiz ??my efforts were vain??), immanti (FC VI,131 Immantiz in c?huitl? ??The day will come [when?]??), so hueli-ti is plausible with a meaning like ??realize a possibility??.

(6) pahti, clearly related to pahtli ??medicine?? (of all kinds?: drinkable, eatable, plaster, splint or maybe magic). Pahti is usually translated by ??recover, cure, heal?? (intransitive) and from there we have the transitive pahtia ??cure (s.o.)??. Since it nipahti cannot be glossed by ??I am/become/am used as medicine??, Mary and other colleagues suggest the glosss ??I have medicine??.

I?m not a native speaker of English, but it seems to me that this gloss doesn?t work very well. In French at least ??J?ai un m?dicament/des m?dicaments?? describes a stative, aspectless situation, e.g. ??I have some medicine in my purse/closet??, not ??I am healed/recovering??, and two native English speakers I asked agree with that interpretation. Of course things are a little better if you admit that ??have?? stands for an abstract relation?: if X ??has?? Y, that means that Y has some kind of relation (spatial, possessive?) to X which is used as its ??localizer??, if this word exists, so in this particular case a better gloss would be something like ??a medicine is related to me??. But even so, we miss the most important point, namely?: N-ti describes a dynamic event, which is expressed through verbal categories of Tense, Aspect and Mood. But I admit that my usual gloss ??make N?? is not pretty good either (this word does not mean ??I make some medicine??). So we are in a quandary.

But there is a way out, and I thank Michael Swanton for that. In a personal mail, he pointed out that some nouns are ambiguous, referring both to a general, abstract notion, and to a specific entity that contributes to the realization of this notion. The most striking one, for the present issue, is y??tl, which sometimes means ??war?? and sometimes ??enemy??. This means (or is the consequence of??) that y??ti can be accounted for in both semantic subtypes of N-ti?: either ??I realize war, wage war?? (as an external process), or ??I behave like an enemy?? (and for this reason I am an enemy).

Things are admittedly different with pahtli, but if pahtli also can mean ??cure?? in general (and remember that it applies to all kinds of medicines and healings), then ??I realize a cure?? is a good gloss and fits in the general interpretation I suggested.

Thanks for your attention

Michel Launey
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From mmccaffe at indiana.edu  Tue Oct  7 10:37:29 2014
From: mmccaffe at indiana.edu (Michael McCafferty)
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 06:37:29 -0400
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=A0-ti_?=verber (again-4)
In-Reply-To: <20141006195205.en9nmqm0owgs0ow8@webmail.iu.edu>
Message-ID: <TUE.7.OCT.2014.063729.0400.MMCCAFFE@INDIANA.EDU>

Sorry for the slip. I should have said that there are several thousand 
examples of words containing the -ti04 verber.

Best,

Michael

Quoting Michael McCafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>:

> The verber explained by Andrews and identified in Campbell's work as
> "-ti04" and meaning 'have' is a common animal in Nahuatl. There
> aren't simply a couple handfuls of these verbs lying around like
> unusual stray dogs in classical Nahuatl; there are *several thousand*
> of them, and their meanings are clear: "have". Someone who has the
> time and interest to write this matter up may lay it to rest.
>

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Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
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From hosler at mit.edu  Tue Oct  7 13:45:42 2014
From: hosler at mit.edu (Dorothy Hosler)
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 13:45:42 +0000
Subject: FW:  Aztecs & armadillos
In-Reply-To: <CADJgdh1aoVPUkdtNvTYf-fwd+vT0sbWt39ZVy4qS3Amji6M66w@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <TUE.7.OCT.2014.134542.0000.HOSLER@MIT.EDU>

Hello,

Charangos were common throughout Bolivia and northern Chile. I don;t know about  Peru but it is likely.

Dorothy Hosler
________________________________________
From: nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org [nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org] on behalf of John Schwaller [jfschwaller at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 3:51 PM
To:
Subject: [Nahuat-l] Aztecs & armadillos

I have done quite a bit of research on 16th cen. Mexico and do not recall
any legislation relating to the making of instruments.  Not saying it could
not have happened, I just would need to see the particulars.  What
*was *outlawed
was natives dressing up in the old garb and engaging in the old dances.

The making of instruments out of various animals is found throughout the
Americas.  In particular, in Paraguay (and possibly up into the Bolivian
highlands)  they also make small mandolins (charangos) out of armadillos.

--
John F. Schwaller
Professor,
University at Albany
1400 Washington Ave.
Albany NY 12222

jfschwaller at gmail.com
315-212-0064
_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
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From magnuspharao at gmail.com  Tue Oct  7 17:25:07 2014
From: magnuspharao at gmail.com (Magnus Pharao Hansen)
Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 10:25:07 -0700
Subject: ti
Message-ID: <TUE.7.OCT.2014.102507.0700.MAGNUSPHARAO@GMAIL.COM>

Dear Listeros,

Thanks for a long and informative discussion about the -ti verber. I get a
bit of a feeling that people are talking across each other.

>From my perspective it is the translators dilemma that we are facing. It
seems clear to me that Dr. Launey is correct when he points out that it is
not possible to identify the suffix -ti directly with the meaning have. It
has more meanings than that, and a sometimes it seems to produce more
general verbs - sometimes being more active in their sense than merely "to
have". On the other hand it also seems clear that it is frequently the best
translation to use "have" to translate it into English and "tener" in
Spanish. But on the other hand we know  that there was no verb in
precolonial Nahuatl that corresponded exactly to have. The different senses
of the word have (to possess, to own, to be characterized by, to keep, to
be composed of etc.) were expressed by different morphemes and
constructions. So if we claim that its meaning is clearly "have" then we
posit that Nahuas did have a concept of "to have" and that this was encoded
with this suffix. This is clearly not the case because most of the time
when "have" would be expected in English, Nahuatl does not use the -ti
verber. So probably we just have to accept that the semantic structures of
the two languages do not map directly onto each other, and that
consequently we have to accept that translations are merely approximations
- and that whether to settle for a specific approximation or look for a
more nuanced one is a matter of choice.

Now, I think there is  also a difference in perspective between those who
are most interested in translating Nahuatl texts into Spanish or English
and the linguistic perspective that is more interested in analyzing the
finer details of structure and meaning, that often fall in between the
cracks of translation - and hence often are inconsequential to translators,
but important to linguists trying to capture minute typological
distinctions between languages. For an example of how a detailed functional
analysis can challenge the received ways of classifying and translating
morphemes I recommend the following article by Una Canger. 2007. Some
languages do not respect the designs of linguists.
https://www.academia.edu/1430077/Some_languages_do_not_respect_the_designs_of_linguists_2007_




-- 
Magnus Pharao Hansen
PhD. candidate
Department of Anthropology

Brown University
128 Hope St.
Providence, RI 02906

*magnus_pharao_hansen at brown.edu <magnus_pharao_hansen at brown.edu>*
US: 001 401 651 8413
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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Wed Oct  8 00:59:58 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 02:59:58 +0200
Subject: =?utf-8?Q?=C2=A0N-ti_?=verbs (supplement)
Message-ID: <WED.8.OCT.2014.025958.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>





Dear listeros

I had planned to give up the N-ti issue, but reading some messages really gives me a strange feeling. So let me put it another way.

I can admit that very often the translation of N?ti by ??be N?? is possible, however unsatisfactory (because it misses the dynamic, aspectual nature of what is actually a verb of action).

I fully agree that in nearly all its occurrences N-tia can be translated by ??give N to s.o.??, ??provide s.o. with N??, even if my gloss would not be ??make s.o. have N??, but rather ??make N for s.o.?? (that is, I analyze the form as an applicative)?; but both glosses give the correct sense anyway.

But if you say adamantly that ??have N?? is a common translation for N-ti, and all the more so if you claim that it is the most frequent one, then I hate to be blunt, but it is just false. Again, I challenge you to bring any substantial evidence from the Classical Nahuatl corpus (note that I am speaking of N-ti allegedly meaning ??have N??, not of N-tia admittedly meaning ??give N??). For instance, take the Florentine Codex with Dibble and Anderson?s translation, which is very reliable because these people have a deep knowledge of Nahuatl language and culture, and count how many occurrences of N-ti are or even could be translated by ??have N??.

Mary Clayton and Tomas Anaya met the challenge, and picked up a few possible examples, with their references. In my opinion these examples were not convincing, and I tried to explain why, with arguments that everyone is free to find convincing or less convincing. So at least that was food for thought and discussion between peers, and I thank Mary and Tomas for that.

Sincerely

Michel L.
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From clayton at indiana.edu  Wed Oct  8 04:03:30 2014
From: clayton at indiana.edu (Clayton, Mary L.)
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 00:03:30 -0400
Subject: N-ti verber 'have'. morphological meaning
In-Reply-To: <186990192.31137.1412729998016.JavaMail.www@wwinf1j19>
Message-ID: <WED.8.OCT.2014.000330.0400.CLAYTON@INDIANA.EDU>

Michel and listeros,
	Our main point -- for which the fine points of how to translate [-ti - 
have] (Joe?s V04) are irrelevant -- is that [-ti - be/become] expresses 
an equation, while [-ti - have] expresses a transfer (including the 
reflexive meaning to apply to oneself). Given that these two morphemes 
have nothing in common except their form, we see no reason to try to 
group them together.

	A morpheme is a combination of a FORM and a MEANING, and if a form has 
two meanings, or a meaning two forms, where these differences cannot be 
explained as some regular or predictable variant, then we have two 
separate morphemes. (e.g., /tu/ in English, which is ?to?, ?too?, and 
?two?).
	Thus, we (Joe and I) would say that your ?two semantic values? for -ti 
are simply the meanings of two separate morphemes. The semantic values 
that we assign to these in other languages may be open to questions. 
They won?t always be ?the same? for all instances of one morpheme, and 
we may differ at times on how to express the meaning in another 
language. (You are quite right that translations raise their own 
problems, especially as the number of languages involved increases 
beyond two, as I am well aware since my main project is the Vocabulario 
trilingue, where I deal with three languages plus English.)
	As a way of expressing the unity of the [-ti - have] morpheme, we find 
?have? to be a good cover translation, although we agree that in 
individual instances, and in specific contexts, other translations will 
be better.
	In the preface to the first edition of his Introduction to Classical 
Nahuatl, Andrews says (p.x) ?Nahuatl is an exotic language. It is not 
just foreign like Spanish, German or Russian; it is strangely foreign.? 
This characteristic of Nahuatl freqently leads us to ?explain? the 
meaning of a word (that is HOW a word means, not just WHAT it means) by 
using words in ways that certainly aren?t elegant. Thus we translate 
nipahti as ?I have medicine?, rather than ?I am cured?, ?I recover?, ?I 
get well?, because it shows us what the relationship is between the 
meaning of pahtli and the meaning of -ti, and what the basic meaning of 
the combination is. It also ?explains? the Nahuatl meaning of the -ti-a 
forms, ?I cause someone to have medicine?, in a way that ?I cure 
someone? does not. Of course, if we were translating text rather than 
defining basic linguistic meanings, we would look for something a 
little more elegant -- and a little more English-like.

	One reason for using ?have? as the basic translation for -ti is that 
it neatly captures the relationship between the very common -tia, which 
can be translated ?to cause to have? and the (as you point out) 
uncommon intransitive form -ti, which is in any case a necessary 
jumping off point for the -tia form. -a is a common causative morpheme 
in Nahuatl , so adding that to -ti captures both the form and the 
meaning of -tia. We agree that whether you see this as a causative or a 
benefactive will depend on your translation: ?cause X to have Y? sounds 
causative, while ?give Y to X? sounds benefactive and ?provide X with 
Y? (a translation we use frequently) can be seen either way. Once 
again, the ?translation? ?have? is not about the fine points of 
rendering Nahuatl in English; it is simply an identification of the 
general semantic content of the verb-forming element. You want one word 
(or maybe two, as in ?be/become?) to represent the general meaning of 
each morpheme. That doesn?t mean that that?s the translation you will 
use in all or even most cases.
	For your specific comments on the four verbs that you single out, we 
would agree with much of what you say. The BIG point is that none of 
these can be translated with ?be?, ?become? or any other equational 
expression.
	Some specifics:
	1) Actually, I would say ?For a slave to DO work, produce work?. In 
English, we wouldn?t use ?make?, and I think that we?re just talking 
about differences between French and English, not basic Nahuatl.
	2) and 3)We agree that aspect has a place in some translations, though 
in tzinti, the meaning of tzintli carries much of the meaning. For me, 
whether a tree ?makes?, ?has?, or ?produces? resin are all about the 
same thing. I couldn?t use ?gives? unless whatever it ?gives? (fruit, 
syrup, resin) has a use. But again, we?re talking about English and 
French, not Nahuatl. But ?The tree is/becomes resin? is out of the 
question. That -ti is a different morpheme.
	4) You make a good point about huictli mecapalli, though I?m not sure 
which exact figure of speech is being employed. I can imagine it 
meaning either ?they become digging sticks and tump lines? or ?they use 
digging sticks and tump lines?. The figure exists primarily in the 
juxtaposition of the two entities, regardless of their grammatical 
forms. Joe found the other example that you mention. It?s in book 4 
p.91 ?injc cujtiloque in victli, mecapalli, injc victique, 
mecapaltique,? ?so they had been forced into bondage and had become 
slaves.? (original transcription; Dibble and Anderson?s translation).

	One further point that I intended to take up soon after my first 
message, but I got busy with other things, is that I found that the 
relationship between the two causatives and the two -ti verbers is not 
as absolute as I had originally thought, though a look through Joe?s 
data shows that it is in fact much closer to absolute than one would 
think from reading Andrews? exposition, which begins on p.578 of the 
second edition of his book.

	I?ll close by quoting the first couple of paragraphs of Andrews presentation.

?54.4. The Intransitive Suffx ti of Possession. The inceptive/stative 
suffix ti of 54.2.1. has a homophonous verbstem-forming suffix ti that 
creates a denominal intransitive verbstem with the meaning of ?to 
have/be in possession of (what is signified by the source nounstem).? 
This ti of possession is unlike the inceptive/stative ti in that the 
verbstem it creates cannot form a deverbal verbstem with ya.
	Another difference between the two suffixes has to do with focus. A 
VNC [verbal nuclear clause] formed on the inceptive/stative ti is 
oriented toward the subject pronoun (i.e., the predicate identifies or 
clarifies the nature of the subject entity just as a subject complement 
does in English -- the ti suffix is similar to an English copular 
verbword), but a VNC formed on the ti-of-possession is oriented toward 
the nounstem source (i.e., it names what in English would be a direct 
object-- the ti suffix is similar to an English transitive verbword of 
having).?
	Following this is a list of examples from which some of ours were 
taken, though I don?t think I used any that aren?t also in Joe?s data.

     Best,
        Mary




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From Ian.Mursell at btinternet.com  Wed Oct  8 19:24:38 2014
From: Ian.Mursell at btinternet.com (Ian Mursell)
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 20:24:38 +0100
Subject: FW:  Aztecs & armadillos
Message-ID: <WED.8.OCT.2014.202438.0100.IAN.MURSELL@BTINTERNET.COM>

Hello Listeros,

Charangos remain highly popular instruments throughout much of the Andean
region, from Chile and NW Argentina up to Ecuador, though they're less and
less made with armadillo shell soundboxes now - wood has largely taken
over.  Quite apart from the strain on the armadillo population one of the
weaknesses of armadillo-shell-backed charangos is that they're
structurally weaker and tend to 'bow' in the middle under the pressure
from the ten taut strings, whereas all-wooden ones are stronger all round.
 I returned to London from Chile with (a cheap) one in 1970 and was so
keen to get another that I paid a ?1 deposit to London Zoo - writing on
the form something about wanting to study the hair follicles - in
anticipation of their armadillo dying.  I've still got the receipt and
order confirmation!  As far as I know the bloody thing's still going
strong...

They are of course wonderful animals, and charangos - armadillo or wood,
both produce a hauntingly beautiful sound - are hugely evocative of Andean
culture, as well as being central to popular movements inspired by this
culture, such as the New Chilean Song Movement in the '70s.  As
instruments it doesn't look as if they're more than a couple of centuries
old, however. 

I remember being horrified to see, in La Paz in the early '70s, dozens of
taxi bonnets bedecked with stuffed armadillos affixed to colourful rugs
during major festivals.  It was said at the time that Peru had banned the
hunting of armadillos as they were getting more and more scarce, and that
if you stood on the Peru-Bolivia border you could see large numbers of
armadillos high-tailing it for sanctuary in Peru...

Good wishes,

Ian

Ian Mursell
Mexicolore, London
www.aztecs.org
Now: The Maya AND the Aztecs!





On 07/10/2014 14:45, "Dorothy Hosler" <hosler at mit.edu> wrote:

>Hello,
>
>Charangos were common throughout Bolivia and northern Chile. I don;t know
>about  Peru but it is likely.
>
>Dorothy Hosler
>________________________________________
>From: nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org [nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org]
>on behalf of John Schwaller [jfschwaller at gmail.com]
>Sent: Monday, October 06, 2014 3:51 PM
>To:
>Subject: [Nahuat-l] Aztecs & armadillos
>
>I have done quite a bit of research on 16th cen. Mexico and do not recall
>any legislation relating to the making of instruments.  Not saying it
>could
>not have happened, I just would need to see the particulars.  What
>*was *outlawed
>was natives dressing up in the old garb and engaging in the old dances.
>
>The making of instruments out of various animals is found throughout the
>Americas.  In particular, in Paraguay (and possibly up into the Bolivian
>highlands)  they also make small mandolins (charangos) out of armadillos.
>
>--
>John F. Schwaller
>Professor,
>University at Albany
>1400 Washington Ave.
>Albany NY 12222
>
>jfschwaller at gmail.com
>315-212-0064
>_______________________________________________
>Nahuatl mailing list
>Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>_______________________________________________
>Nahuatl mailing list
>Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl


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From mlauney at wanadoo.fr  Wed Oct  8 21:25:26 2014
From: mlauney at wanadoo.fr (M Launey)
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2014 23:25:26 +0200
Subject: N-ti verber 'have'. morphological meaning
Message-ID: <WED.8.OCT.2014.232526.0200.MLAUNEY@WANADOO.FR>

Dear Mary and listeros
Mary's message deserves an answer, since at least she gives arguments (even if they still do not convince me) and brings the discussion a step forward by pointing out the abstract nature of what is expressed by "be" and "have" (a position which I fully support, although I'd put it in a slightly different way) .

I'm in the final step of my move, so please allow me a few days.

Thanks for your comprehension

Michel Launey

?

> Message du 08/10/14 06:03
> De : "Clayton, ?Mary L." 
> A : "M Launey" 
> Copie ? : nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> Objet : N-ti verber 'have'. morphological meaning
> 
> Michel and listeros,
> Our main point -- for which the fine points of how to translate [-ti -
> have] (Joe?s V04) are irrelevant -- is that [-ti - be/become] expresses
> an equation, while [-ti - have] expresses a transfer (including the
> reflexive meaning to apply to oneself). Given that these two morphemes
> have nothing in common except their form, we see no reason to try to
> group them together.
> 
> A morpheme is a combination of a FORM and a MEANING, and if a form has
> two meanings, or a meaning two forms, where these differences cannot be
> explained as some regular or predictable variant, then we have two
> separate morphemes. (e.g., /tu/ in English, which is ?to?, ?too?, and
> ?two?).
> Thus, we (Joe and I) would say that your ?two semantic values? for -ti
> are simply the meanings of two separate morphemes. The semantic values
> that we assign to these in other languages may be open to questions.
> They won?t always be ?the same? for all instances of one morpheme, and
> we may differ at times on how to express the meaning in another
> language. (You are quite right that translations raise their own
> problems, especially as the number of languages involved increases
> beyond two, as I am well aware since my main project is the Vocabulario
> trilingue, where I deal with three languages plus English.)
> As a way of expressing the unity of the [-ti - have] morpheme, we find
> ?have? to be a good cover translation, although we agree that in
> individual instances, and in specific contexts, other translations will
> be better.
> In the preface to the first edition of his Introduction to Classical
> Nahuatl, Andrews says (p.x) ?Nahuatl is an exotic language. It is not
> just foreign like Spanish, German or Russian; it is strangely foreign.?
> This characteristic of Nahuatl freqently leads us to ?explain? the
> meaning of a word (that is HOW a word means, not just WHAT it means) by
> using words in ways that certainly aren?t elegant. Thus we translate
> nipahti as ?I have medicine?, rather than ?I am cured?, ?I recover?, ?I
> get well?, because it shows us what the relationship is between the
> meaning of pahtli and the meaning of -ti, and what the basic meaning of
> the combination is. It also ?explains? the Nahuatl meaning of the -ti-a
> forms, ?I cause someone to have medicine?, in a way that ?I cure
> someone? does not. Of course, if we were translating text rather than
> defining basic linguistic meanings, we would look for something a
> little more elegant -- and a little more English-like.
> 
> One reason for using ?have? as the basic translation for -ti is that
> it neatly captures the relationship between the very common -tia, which
> can be translated ?to cause to have? and the (as you point out)
> uncommon intransitive form -ti, which is in any case a necessary
> jumping off point for the -tia form. -a is a common causative morpheme
> in Nahuatl , so adding that to -ti captures both the form and the
> meaning of -tia. We agree that whether you see this as a causative or a
> benefactive will depend on your translation: ?cause X to have Y? sounds
> causative, while ?give Y to X? sounds benefactive and ?provide X with
> Y? (a translation we use frequently) can be seen either way. Once
> again, the ?translation? ?have? is not about the fine points of
> rendering Nahuatl in English; it is simply an identification of the
> general semantic content of the verb-forming element. You want one word
> (or maybe two, as in ?be/become?) to represent the general meaning of
> each morpheme. That doesn?t mean that that?s the translation you will
> use in all or even most cases.
> For your specific comments on the four verbs that you single out, we
> would agree with much of what you say. The BIG point is that none of
> these can be translated with ?be?, ?become? or any other equational
> expression.
> Some specifics:
> 1) Actually, I would say ?For a slave to DO work, produce work?. In
> English, we wouldn?t use ?make?, and I think that we?re just talking
> about differences between French and English, not basic Nahuatl.
> 2) and 3)We agree that aspect has a place in some translations, though
> in tzinti, the meaning of tzintli carries much of the meaning. For me,
> whether a tree ?makes?, ?has?, or ?produces? resin are all about the
> same thing. I couldn?t use ?gives? unless whatever it ?gives? (fruit,
> syrup, resin) has a use. But again, we?re talking about English and
> French, not Nahuatl. But ?The tree is/becomes resin? is out of the
> question. That -ti is a different morpheme.
> 4) You make a good point about huictli mecapalli, though I?m not sure
> which exact figure of speech is being employed. I can imagine it
> meaning either ?they become digging sticks and tump lines? or ?they use
> digging sticks and tump lines?. The figure exists primarily in the
> juxtaposition of the two entities, regardless of their grammatical
> forms. Joe found the other example that you mention. It?s in book 4
> p.91 ?injc cujtiloque in victli, mecapalli, injc victique,
> mecapaltique,? ?so they had been forced into bondage and had become
> slaves.? (original transcription; Dibble and Anderson?s translation).
> 
> One further point that I intended to take up soon after my first
> message, but I got busy with other things, is that I found that the
> relationship between the two causatives and the two -ti verbers is not
> as absolute as I had originally thought, though a look through Joe?s
> data shows that it is in fact much closer to absolute than one would
> think from reading Andrews? exposition, which begins on p.578 of the
> second edition of his book.
> 
> I?ll close by quoting the first couple of paragraphs of Andrews presentation.
> 
> ?54.4. The Intransitive Suffx ti of Possession. The inceptive/stative
> suffix ti of 54.2.1. has a homophonous verbstem-forming suffix ti that
> creates a denominal intransitive verbstem with the meaning of ?to
> have/be in possession of (what is signified by the source nounstem).?
> This ti of possession is unlike the inceptive/stative ti in that the
> verbstem it creates cannot form a deverbal verbstem with ya.
> Another difference between the two suffixes has to do with focus. A
> VNC [verbal nuclear clause] formed on the inceptive/stative ti is
> oriented toward the subject pronoun (i.e., the predicate identifies or
> clarifies the nature of the subject entity just as a subject complement
> does in English -- the ti suffix is similar to an English copular
> verbword), but a VNC formed on the ti-of-possession is oriented toward
> the nounstem source (i.e., it names what in English would be a direct
> object-- the ti suffix is similar to an English transitive verbword of
> having).?
> Following this is a list of examples from which some of ours were
> taken, though I don?t think I used any that aren?t also in Joe?s data.
> 
> Best,
> Mary
> 
> 
> 
> 
>
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