Nahuatl Word Recognition I

[Mary Clayton]

On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, R. Joe Campbell wrote:

> ***** I've wondered about "tenamaztli" and I'm still wishing that someone
> would give me a good answer...

     Normally, I would check this with Joe directly, since we work
literally shoulder to shoulder at our computers, but I'm in Urbana at the
LSA Linguistic Institute.

     my guess on "tenamaztli" is almost too obvious to be right, and it
has both phonological and semantic questions.
     It could be tena:mitl ('stone wall', breakable down into te(tl)
'stone' and na:m(itl) 'wall') plus hua:ztli.
     The semantic question involves the use of -hua:ztli with something so
inert as hearth-stones. But if you look at them as being the things with
with tena:mitl's are built... maybe that's not so bad.
     phonologically, one would expect the m-w brought together at the
morpheme boundary to go the same way as n-w in the tzoaztli case
 (well, almost). But there seems to be some room for variation here.
Molina, whose morphophonemics are (is?) usually fairly conservative, gives
both
     tenanuituma, ni (tenanhuitoma, ni-) with the n-w cluster preserved.
He also gives
     tenaueloa, ni (tenanhueloa, ni-) with only the w preserved, and since
there is no rounded vowel in tenamaztli to 'eat up' the w, that's where it
should stop.
     Now in the case at hand we have proposed n-w giving not n-w or just
-w-, but just -n- (the form that na:mitl normally takes when the nasal is
morpheme final). My guess, if this hypothesis is the correct one, is that
whatever happens to the w- in hua:ztli takes precedence, and then there's
no need for the n- to delete.

     Any thoughts on this?

Mary