is it zin or tzin??

[Frances Karttunen]

It's been an intriguing idea for a very, very long time, but the peculiar 
distribution of Spanish diminutive -ito/a in the Americas is much broader
than the formerly Nahuatl-speaking areas of core Mesoamerica.

Still, I feel (as everyone else does) that the difunditos/muertitos usage of
Mexico parallels the Nahuatl use so closely that it's hard to convince
oneself that they have nothing to do with each other.  The only
quasi-first-person use of honorific -tzin that Jim Lockhart and I found in
the hundreds of colonial Nahuatl documents we read was in the case of a
woman dictating her testament and making provisions for her corpse to lie
before the altarof her local church before burial.  Referring to herself
after death, she used the honorific.

Fran Karttunen

----------
>From: Craig Berry <cberry at cinenet.net>
>To: Multiple recipients of list <nahuat-l at server.umt.edu>
>Subject: Re: is it zin or tzin??
>Date: Tue, Feb 8, 2000, 1:07 PM
>

> On Tue, 8 Feb 2000, Michael Mccafferty wrote:
>
>> The two rather seem to be independent creations. Spanish -ito/a seems to
>> have a cognate form in French -et (m.) and -ette (f.) in French.
>> Just an idea.
>
> I think the idea was not one of word (well, suffix) borrowing, but rather
> one of form borrowing.  That is, the ubiquitous use of an honorific and
> diminutive suffix in Nahuatl led to former Nahuatl-speaking cultures
> making heavy use of the Spanish diminutive, occasionally as if it were an
> honorific.  It's an intriguing idea.
>
> --
>    |   Craig Berry - cberry at cinenet.net
>  --*--  http://www.cinenet.net/users/cberry/home.html
>    |   "The road of Excess leads to the Palace
>       of Wisdom" - William Blake
>