Length of the vowel in -tzin"

[Anthony Appleyard]

When Karttunen's book 1 discusses the length of the vowel in the suffix "-
tzin" in its various meanings at various times, it says that one evidence that
that vowel was long in classical Tenochtitlanian Nahuatl, is that the
"buttocks" heiroglyph (the lower half of a crouching man, "tzi:ntli") is used
as a phonetic for "-tzinco" as the end part of some place names. But can we
rely on a phonetic match being that exact when scribes were likely driven to
many expedients in trying to use picture writing for a language with a lot of
inflectional endings? The same difficulties arose in adapting the Chinese
writing system to write Japanese, which like Nahuatl has a lot of inflections.

Citlalyani


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