tlahtoa / saltillo

[Michael Mccafferty]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2000 brokawg at mail.lafayette.edu wrote:

> The difficulty I had was in
> determining if there was an aspiration at the end of the plural or not. I
> like to think there was a faint aspiration just as you have noted in the
> speech of Huastecan Nahuatl. So, if this is the case, then we have a
> contrastive pair in the third person singular and third person plural
> indicative verbs such as quicua [kwa?] and quicuah [kwah] where the
> [?]=3Dglottal stop.

Joe is off-line at the present, but as I remember his teaching it,
Hueyapan Nahuatl distinguished between singular and plural in the way
Galen describes above:  [kwa?] or as Joe wrote it [kwa'] 'heshe eats'  and
[kwah] 'they eat'.  It would be interesting to know if other modern
dialects distinguish the two by making such a minimal pair.

Michael