'Totatzine'

[Frances Karttunen]

Dear Lionel,

In case Joe doesn't answer for a bit while he's on his trip to Illinois, let
me give your queries a start:

>
>>TOtatzine in ilhuicac timoetztica, ma c/enca
>>yectenehuallo in motocatzin
>
> "Our revered father, which art in heaven: hallowed be thy revered
> name".
> I suppose final -e in 'totatzine' is a vocative suffix, am I right?

Yes.  And it implies that the person praying is male, because women didn't
use the -e vocative.


> The first difficulty is 'timoetztica': ti- is 2nd. p. subj.

ti- is the second person singular subject prefix meaning 'you'.
(Confusingly enough, ti- is also the first person plural one meaning 'we',
but here it's clear that 'you-singular' is what is intended.)


> mo- is perhaps the reflexive

Right.  Here the reflexive combines with the causative form of the verb to
form the honorific.  One is addressing God, so this complicated honorific
verb form is required.


> and it ends up with -tica (perhaps better ticah) which is the present of cah
(be)

Right again.  The verb cah (equiv. to Spanish estar) is combined with verbs
using the ligature -ti- to form a durative construction: 'to be V-ing'

> but I was unable to deal with etz- (or moetz-?)

The Nahuatl verb 'to be" is suppletive.  That is, it has different forms for
different tenses and modes.  For the present there is -cah.  For the
causative, it has the form etz (or more commonly yetz). So this phrase means
'You are honorifically being in heaven'.


>Is it correct to put *totahtzine instead of
> totatzine, *timoetzticah instead of timoetztica

Why not?  With the h, you are indicating the saltillo, which is a real
consonant in Nahuatl.  Without the h, you are using the traditional
orthography, which left out the saltillo because the Spaniards had a lot of
trouble hearing it.  (Nahuatl speakers knew where the saltillos were in any
case and didn't actually have to write them.  It's just we, today, who don't
know where they all are.)


> and yectenehuallo with a single 'l' so *yectenehualo?

The impersonal patientive noun formed from the verb yectenehua is
yectenehualli 'something that is praised'.  One can then add the suffix -yoh
to mean 'thing invested with the quality of N'.  The y of the suffix
assimilates to the final l of the stem to give ll, so you get
yectenehual-yoh > yectenehualloh.  The phrase yectenehualloh in motocatzin
means 'your name-honorific [is] a thing invested with the quality of being
praised.'

>>ma hualauh in motlatocayotzin
>
> No difficulties except that my glossary has 'huallauh= to come' instead
> of 'hualauh' . Which one is correct?

This verb should properly have a double ll.  It is composed of the
directional hual- 'in this direction' and yauh 'come' with the same ly > ll
assimilation that one gets in yectenehuallo

>
>>ma chihuallo in motlanequillitzin in yuh chihuallo in ilhuicac in tlalticpac
>
> this time I'm afraid my source indicates 'chihualo' would be better than
> 'chihuallo' as a passive of 'chihua= to do, make'

Again, you are absolutely right.  The "ma' at the beginning of this clause
indicates that the verb is in the optative form, that is it expresses a wish
that something should be.  Adding -lo to the verb chihua (twice) means that
people in general, not just some specific people do God's will.  It's not so
much passive as impersonal.  "May Thy will be done" corresponds to "May it
be that people-in-general do Thy will."


> and *tlanequiliztzin instead of tlanequillitzin (it has 'tlanequiliztli= will,
willpower'). Which one is the best?

The single l, as you have surmised.

>  Also I have not found the meaning of 'yuh'

It's a little verb meaning 'to be a particular way'.  So yuh and yuhquin
both mean 'it is thus', or 'it is so'.

> so the whole passage
> would translate: "Thy revered will be done on earth as it is in heaven",
> pretty much the same as the English version except in that Nahuatl
> repeats the verb (chihualo) and puts 'in heaven' before 'in earth'
> according perhaps better with the Latin "sicut in caelo et in terra" which
> follows the original Greek "hws yn ouranwi kai epi gys" (I put eta=y,
> omega =w and the spiritus asper=h).

Right.  It might be read 'as in heaven it is done, so on earth may it be
done'.


Have to stop now, because work calls.  I'm sure Joe will pick up on the rest
of your query.

Your message is wonderful because it shows that you have done a lot of
thinking and looking up of things before posting your query.  That makes it
irresistible.

It's terribly hard to take a sophisticated text with every sort of
grammatical complexity and try to ravel it all out at once.  I know that
this is the appraoch that has been used by a lot of teachers, but it seems
to frustrate learners.  At the risk of self-promotion, let me risk saying
that if you are going to invest all this work in Nahuatl, you might want to
ask Fritz Schwaller about getting a copy of Foundation Course in Nahuatl
Grammar.

Fran