article on Aztecs

[Frances Karttunen]

Being an old veteran of the University of Texas at Austin, I can attest
that Professor Vento of the Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese has some mighty
strange ideas about the Nahuas, their language, history, and culture.

A couple of other points about the current thread:

The stem teo:- (as in teo:-tl "deity") was/is often used as an intensifier
meaning 'super' or 'supernatural'.  So if a deer is a big hooved animal,
and one sees a horse for the first time, one might quite naturally refer to
the beast as teo:maza:tl 'super deer' (or 'hooved beast bigger than any
deer heretofore known to us').  It doesn't necesarily mean 'deer of the
gods' as it has often been translated.

The Spaniards reported that Nahuatl-speaking people referred to them as
"teules" and that has been taken to mean that the indigenous people took
the Spaniards to be gods.  But maybe it just means that the indigenes were
referring to their unfamiliar (hence beyond-natural) accoutrements.

As to the comment:  "The thing that first struck me, like a huge fist, was
the overbearing Germanic -k- in the first syllable.  Mok-????????"

Syllable-final [k] is everywhere in Nahuatl.  It's just spelled as c in the
traditional orthography of Nahuatl.  Spelling it with orthographic k
instead doesn't make it Germanic.  In fact, many Nahuatl speakers in this
century have rejected the Spanish-based traditional orthography and prefer
to use k and kw instead of c and uc.

But "Moktekuzoma" was not the ruler's name.  There is no syllable-final k
at the end of the first syllable of this particular word.  Using current
non-traditional spelling, one would expect Motekwzoma.