What you are describing seems quite interesting from a phonological point of view. It looks like when you have a word (generally, ...VC) ending in a non-continuant consonant suffixed with -ya, you end up with ...VhCa. Can you come up with more examples? Is this attested in other dialects?<br>
<br>Without knowing better, I would guess that the process might at some earlier point been phonologically "natural," but has now become more abstract (maybe at a time when /h/ was pronounced as a glottal stop, the first of two identical stop consonants meeting at a word boundary got neutralized to [ʔ], and then the sound change which changed the glottal stop to fricative [h] affected this place too)<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 12:03 AM, John Sullivan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:idiez@me.com">idiez@me.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style="word-wrap: break-word;">Listeros,<div><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span>Something interesting came up today at IDIEZ. We were working on defining the word "elotlah" (elo-tl, -tlah), "a field with many elotes." And the macehualmeh kept pronouncing it "elohtla." So we figured out that there is indeed the "elotlah" with the relational "-tlah," but there is also an "elohtla" that is made up of "elotl + ya." You linguists can explain this better, but it looks like the "y" is being turned into a "tl", and then the first "tl" in the sequence is being reduced to an "h" (aspiration). This also happens when "ya" is added to a word ending in "c". So itztoc, "it is", + "ya" goes to "itztocca", "it now is," where the first "c" is pronounced like an "h" (aspiration). </div>
<div><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span>"Elohtla" means "There are elotes now"</div><div><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span>The "ye", "now, already" of Classical is "ya" in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl and it never appears independently, rather it's always suffixed to words. It's also interesting (I think I already talked about this on the list) that the "ya" can be suffixed to verbs and nouns. So.....</div>
<div>1. Nichoca, "I'm crying"</div><div>2. Nichocaya, "I'm crying now"</div><div>3. Nichocayaya, "I was crying"</div><div>4. Nichocayayaya, "I was already crying"</div><div>
5. Nitetahtzin, "I'm an old man"</div><div>6. Nitetahtzinya, "I'm an old man now"</div><div>John</div><div><br></div><div>
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<font size="3" face="Helvetica">John Sullivan, Ph.D.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3" face="Helvetica">Professor of Nahua language and culture</font></p><p style="margin: 0px;"><font size="3" face="Helvetica">Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas</font></p>
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