The use of XIHUIT

[Frances Karttunen]

Oh heavens!  I didn't mean that Nahuatl speakers had borrowed this usage
from English.  I mean that if some people who speak Indo-European languages
describe things hotter than red-hot as blue-hot, it's likely that
Mesoamericans would describe really hot things as blue-green hot.  We divide
up the spectrum as going through the steps yellow-green-blue-violet, but
Mesoamericans have a single word (xiuh- for Nahuatl speakers) for the
green-blue continuum of the spectrum.

Chi- may seem like a very short, simple morphological element, but if it's
cognate with xiuh-, it's a CVC morpheme, and such structures are the
building blocks of the morphology and lexicon of Nahuatl.

If you want a REALLY short lexical item, consider i:-, which is the stem of
the transitive verb 'to drink something.'

Fran

----------
>From: "Anthony Appleyard" <mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk>
>To: nahuat-l at server2.umt.edu
>Subject: Re: The use of XIHUIT
>Date: Mon, Sep 4, 2000, 6:05 AM
>

>   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.
>