-tla:n and -tlan; high-order chars in email; 1st person honorifi

[Frances Karttunen]

I'm sorry if through carelessness on my part there has been some
miscommunication about -tlan and -tla:n.  Please rely on the dictionary.
-tla:n with a long vowel is a locative meaning 'place of, at.'  It doesn't
take the ligature -ti-.  The short-vowel postposition -tlan 'at the base of,
below, next to' takes -ti- when bound to nouns to form place names but not
in ordinary postpositional constructions.  It can go either way with body
parts.

Spanish places final stress on uninflected words that end in -n in any case,
right?  It's not tied to Nahuatl vowel length.

The only use of first-person honorifics that I have seen in Nahuatl writing
is where a person refers to her corpse after her death.  She says that she
(as corpse)-Honorific is to lie before the main altar before burial.

Fran

----------
>From: "Anthony Appleyard" <mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk>
>To: nahuat-l at server2.umt.edu
>Subject: -tla:n and -tlan; high-order chars in email; 1st person honorifi
>Date: Tue, May 30, 2000, 11:00 AM
>

>   Chichiltic Coyotl <notoca at hotmail.com> wrote that:-
> 1) "An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl - 1983 Edition" and
> 2) "A Posting By F Karttunen - May 1999"
> both say that (a) {-tlan} = "below, next to the base of" prefixes {-ti-}, and
> (b) {-tlan} = "place of/at" does not.
> (1) says that (a) has long wowel and (b) has short vowel; (2) says vice-versa.
>
> I read that Nahuatl stresses words on the last syllable but one. Sometimes in
> history books I have seen the name "Tenochtitla'n" with the last vowel marked
> stressed. Spanish does not have vowel length distinction. For a Spaniard to
> hear "teno:chTItla(:)n" (uppercase = stress) and pronounce it with the stress
> moved to the end, likeliest the last vowel was long.
>
> Re use of high-order characters (accented vowels, etc) in this email group,
> the next line should contain accented and circumflexed vowels and n-tilde:-
>     áéíóú âêîôû ñ
>   Are there any members who see something else there? I am sorry to seem
> silly, but I have seen too much down the years of high-order characters
> (= with ascii codes more than 127) getting distorted in email transmission.
>
> The books say that using honorifics of oneself in Nahuatl is not done because
> it would seem too pompous. But are there any examples of it found in the
> literature. perhaps to achieve a special effect? (Chinese has an example: a
> pronoun pronounced "ching", written by a special character, which could be
> fairly translated as {nehhua:tzin}; only the Emperor was allowed to use it!)
>