Vowel length in lyrics

[Richard Haly]

> Did Classical Nahuatl care about lengths of vowels when it came to poetry?
> If uppercase denotes long vowels, would the word be awiyA or awIya or
> Awiya?  Does a trisyllabic word usually have only one syllable long, the
> other two short?

To the best of my knowledge, Nahuatl lyrics did not concern themselves with
length as a marker of a "foot" eventually creating a line. (Yet another
reason to ditch the adj. "Classical") Instead, I argue that line length was
determined by the number of stresses (primary and secondary) as in Anglo
Saxon strong stress (without the alliteration). These corresponded with the
syllabic drum notation in the Cantares and Romances manuscripts. The
vocables ohuaya ahuiya etc. were used to fill out the line as other formulae
were. I have a very old article with considerably more detail on this in the
journal New Scholar 10 from around 1985 (though I wrote the article in
1981).

re: trisyllabic words, yes. the stress is on the penultimate syllable (the
next to last) in a four syllable word, primary stress (1) is on penultimate
with secondary stress (2) on anteantepenult (the one before the one before
the next to last) que(2)tzal- co(1)atl, vs. simple que-tzal(1) -li. So word
stress shifts as roots are combined just like we do in English with
pho(1)to-graph, pho-to(1)-graph-er, and pho-to-graph(1)-ic.

Hope this helps.

Richard Haly