The use of XIHUIT

[Anthony Appleyard]

  Frances Karttunen <karttu at nantucket.net> wrote:-
> I am pretty confident that the extension of the use of xiuh- as an
> intensifier meaning 'hot' has to do with the Mesoamerican way of dealing
> with the color spectrum.  If something is quite hot, in English we say it is
> red hot.  If it is even hotter, we say it is white hot. But astronomers talk
> about blue stars (which are hotter than red stars). ...

Erh??? Blue may mean hot to an astronomer, or to nuclear men handling very
high-temperature plasma, or to people who use blowtorches, but not to the
general population of an area where Nahuatl is likely to be spoken. {chi} is
so simple and short a morpheme that most likely we have a stray coincidence.