10 questions about Nahuat-l and the Aztecs

[anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk]

  CHMuths at aol.com wrote:-
> 1. The material I got speak of Nahuat-l as aglutinant language. What
> does it mean?

  That words can have a miscellaneous assortment of suffixes and
prefixes, more so than in an inflected language.

  This email group is NAHUAT-L; but the language is `Nahuatl', without
the hyphen.

> 2. In which category fall the germanic languages such as English and
German?

Inflecting; but English has largely become a word-order language

(Off-topic PS : please what is an "ergative language"? Everybody uses
the word and nobody says what it means.)

> 3. Do Spanish, French and Italian for example fall in the same
category as English and German because they are indo-germanic languages?

They are all Indo-European languages. They are all inflecting.

> 4. Is there a connection between Nahuat-l and Finnish for example?

No. Their common ancestor was so long ago that by now any remaining
cognate words very long ago vanished "behind the noise" of accidental
resemblances. There have been long threads about that sort of thing on
NOSTRATIC group and elsewhere, where people have talked about a Proto-
World language and suchlike.

Beware also of look-alike words imitated from the same natural noise,
e.g. Nahuatl "papalotl" = Latin "papilio" = "butterfly", both perhaps
imitated from the sound of a butterfly flapping against a hard surface.

> Those languages seem to have a similar grammar construction.

That is a coincidence.

> 5. Which dimensions are recognised in Nahuat-l or by the Aztecs? (we
have 4: length, width, height and depth;

Erh??? I see 3. In any one set-up, two of those four words for
dimensions of space are synonyms.

> 6. How is space understood and described in Nahuat-l?

If you mean space-travel space, perhaps try some compound such as "star-
realm".

> 7. As I am not a linguist but a sociologist/social psychiatrist ...
Does this mean that they have a different understand of themselves in
space and therefore a different spatial understanding?

Probably merely that their language tends to work in affixes rather than
in separate words. In e.g. {nicoatl} = "I am a snake", perhaps the ni-
was once a separate word which has become affixed.

> 9. Some linguistics (Charles William Johnson for example) detected the
close similarity between the old Egyptian language and Nahuat-l ...

See (4).

> This seem to make sense as Archaeologists and Egyptologists found
traces of South-American drugs in Egyptian mummies.

Perhaps there was once a cocaine-producing plant in reach of Egypt, but
over-collection and/or the land turning to desert drove it to
extinction.