To Russell

[Frances Karttunen]

Russell,

I am going to answer your personal email to me, posting my answer to the
whole list.  Then I'm bowing out.  I've been following your many postings,
and I haven't anything to add.

To reiterate and expand on what I wrote to you in response to your private
email to me some time ago:

IF the place name were Teohuahcan, it would be perfectly transparent as
'place where people possess gods' (like Michoacan/michhuahca:n).  Since
Teotihuacan includes a huge ceremonial center, that makes sense.  But, as I
said before, there is the -ti-.  From the verb teoti- 'to be or become a
god, one would get teotiyan (teo:tiya:n) 'place where becoming a god/gods
customarily or habitually takes place.'  This is also consonant with
mythology surrounding Teotihuacan.

In this derivation the ti- is ok but the hua(h?)- becomes a problem.

The only possibility is to take Launey's approach and say that the
derivation is from the nonactive form of the verb teoti-, which gives you
teotihua-  (with vowel length marked:  teo:ti:hua-).  All nonactives being
Class A, the active stem and the preterite stem are identical.  The
preterite stem with the preterit suffix can be used much in the same way as
a participle can be in English or Spanish, that is it can function like an
adjective or a noun:  as when in English we refer to 'the beloved
departed'.  The preterite stem without the preterite suffix (-c for Class
A) can be used in further nominal derivations.  (This is how you get
michnamaca- with -ca:n.)

I regret using the term 'noun-ified' in my original note to you, because
the proper terminology is "nominalized."

I think the reason you are not getting responses to your speculations is
that people are tired out by your postings.  As one of the listeros has
already said to you, placenames (in ALL languages, not just English) are
very given to exceptions.  Often they are morphologically opaque. This is
sometimes because the name has passed through a couple of languages and
been reinterpreted or "folk-etymologized."

Preoccupation with individual words in Nahuatl and with place names in
particular is not likely to get continual reinforcement from the linguists
who look in on Nahuat-L.  As I said to you long ago, one cannot learn a
language word-by-word, and you do not have the right to demand that anyone
teach you a language that way or any other way by email.  You say you are
now trying to understand processes, but you are still trying to approach
these processes one word at a time.

You drove me completely off Nahuat-L for a long time soon after you came
on, and now you are at it again, feeling that you have the perfect right to
publicly and privately demand attention.

Please lay off the relentless pursuit of threads that are not eliciting the
responses you want.  Joe is very generous with his expertise, but he has a
life and work of his own, you know.


Fran