Nahuatl imperatives

[Frances Karttunen]

>Colegas:
>
>A friend just asked me for the imperative paradigm in Nahuatl, and I'm just
>to darn lazy to dig out my Nahuatl grammars, and figured that many of you
>would know off the top of your head.  So how do you say
>
>You eat your tortilla (every day) (indicative)
>Eat your tortilla (imperative)
>
>We need second person singular and/or plural, and please identify the
>morphological structure of the verb as well as the particular Nahuatl
>variety.
>
>Many thanks!!
>
>Jeff


I think that if you want this sort of information and know where to find
it, you shouldn't announce that you are too lazy and ask someone else to do
the work for you and your friend.

Nahuatl has a first-second-third-person, singular and plural "optative"
rather than just a second-person singular and plural imperative.  Not only
are there optative forms for all persons, but there are present and past
optative forms.

The second-person is characterized by having the prefix xi- rather than
singular ti- and plural am-/an-.

Moreover, Nahuatl has a customary present (for stuff like "every day") that
is different from the present indicative.

If you want to know more, the place to look is Andrews's Introduction to
Classical Nahuatl, pp. 383-4.