Adjective formation

[R. Joe Campbell]

Thanks Matthew,
   My comments follow ***

On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Matthew Montchalin wrote:

> |    ahhuiya (be fragrant)              ahhuiyac           fragrant
>
> Thanks for the excellent list!
>
> I notice that you are using the conventional Spanish orthography.
***  I use the conventional Spanish orthography mostly because my
materials and focus of work are from the 16th century.  The Franciscans
contributed/imposed their way of writing Nahuatl in the way that most
people coming into contact with a new language do.  They wrote down the
new words in their own orthography (having no other) in the way it sounded
to them -- we all hear phonemically, not phonetically, anyway -- just as
the French did in their contact with indigenous peoples in what is now
called the United States.  Since Spanish did not have phonemic vowel
length or a glottal stop phoneme, their writing system was faulty in that
regard, but people have used those "faulty" materials to great advantage
since then.  In the 17th century Horacio Carochi repaired the system --
and in the 20th, Richard Andrews and Fran Karttunen have done mountainous
work to make it available to all of us.
   I have no emotional reaction against the "modern" / "anthropological" /
"k" / "Spanish-rejecting"  system that has gained some use in the 20th
century.  However, as I have said before, I think that it has a few
powerful arguments against its use:
  1.  It splits the available literature into two writing systems.  And
with all the other problems that we have to deal with, we really don't
need to hamper our facility in reading with a little clumsiness in reading
the "other" system (whichever one the "other" one is).
  2.  Most of the people who get into Nahuatl are already familiar and
competent with the Spanish spelling system.  Why not take advantage of
that?

I'm
> curious, does the letter y in Nahuatl represent the English y sound or the
> Spanish y sound?
*** Roughly, yes.

These sounds can be distinguished with some practice.
*** Again, yes.  A lot of Spanish students in their first few years would
probably argue with this, but the successful ones would not.  Some Spanish
professors with 40 years of experience would also argue with it, but that
isn't evidence against your claim.  The English y almost has little right
to the name of "consonant" since the aperture is so open and the result so
vowel-like, but the shorter Spanish y has a tighter aperture, frequently
resulting in light (or non-light) friction (or even stoppage).


> For instance, ahhuiya would really be awiya?  What are the lengths of the
> vowels?
***Not exactly.  There is an implementation layer between the orthography
of any language and its pronunciation.  In a Carochi-affected orthography
which fails to mark vowel length (such as the one that I frequently use),
/w/ is spelled 'hu' or 'uh' depending on whether it is at the beginning of
a syllable or at the end, respectively.  And the glottal stop consonant is
always written 'h', so 'hhu' is not [w], but [h] followed by [w]: [hw],
something that is dying out among younger speakers of American speakers
who don't distinguish "whale" and "wail".
   Further, although a given word might have the underlying (read
"systematic" or even "mental") contrast between /ia/ and /iya/ (parallel
to /oa/ and /ohua/) the presence or absence of the [y] or [w] was never
contrastive -- nor is it in modern dialects.  /iya/ was *normally*
pronounced [ia], so "ahhuiya" was [ahwi'a] (' indicates stress).


>
> 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?
>
*** I see that Richard has ably answered this part .

Best regards,

Joe