Snakes and monkey

[Frances Karttunen]

I think I have confused Leonel's question with part of Joe's answer.

When L. asked about cocoa, I assumed that he was talking about the
transitive/reflexive verb 'to hurt someone, to be hurting or sick.'  THAT
has a saltillo only in the plural.  (To say nothing of an obligatory object
prefix.)

But since the other part of his question was about ozomahtli 'monkey,'
probably what L. was asking about was cocoa, the plural of the word for
'snake.'  Yes, being plural, that always has a final saltillo ("h").  It
also has a long vowel in the initial, reduplicated syllable:  co:co:ah,

The singular is co:a:tl 'snake.'  Or, as Joe, Mary and I all agree, it could
be co:hua:tl.  There's no way of telling for sure whether there is a /w/
between the two internal vowels.


Returning to verb morphology, using it reflexively, the verb cocoa: works in
the following way:

ninococoa 'I am sick, hurting'
timococoa 'you-sg are sick, hurting'
mococoa 'he/she/it is sick, hurting'

titicocoah 'we are sick, hurting'
ammococoah 'y'all are sick, hurting'
mococoah 'they are sick, hurting'

There is an intransitive verb cocoya that means about the same thing:

nicocoya 'I am sick'
etc.

ticocoyah 'we are sick'
etc.

The preterite form of this, as Joe points out, has an "x" where an
underlying /y/ ends up in word-final position:

o:nicocox 'I was sick'

But this is a weird construction, because it implies an instance of
sickness.  More likely would be the imperfect:

nicocoyaya 'I was being sick'

Sorry for the confusion.  I hope I have put it right.  Joe may want to add
his thoughts about the relation of cocoya to cocoa:.

Isn't Nahuatl a marvelous language?

Fran