Length of the vowel in -tzin"

[Frances Karttunen]

People who yearn for symmetry in morphology want the vowel in -tzin/-tzi:n
to be long to make it like the long vowels in the other attitudinal suffixes
(-to:n, -pi:l, -po:l).  I don't think this is much of a reason.  But the
fact that the vowels in the other suffixes are long MIGHT have been a factor
in changing the one in -tzin to long over time, regularizing it in the same
fashion of English has regularized many "strong" verbs.

There is no doubt that -tzin has the reflex of a long vowel in most or all
varieties of Nahuatl as spoken recently.

The glyphic evidence, as you say, is not strong, since the glyphs seem to
have been gross approximations.  Someone with a good sense of contrastive
vowel length should go through the Codex Mendoza, for instance, and see how
many unequivocal cases of vowel-length conflict between elements of names
and the symbols used for the.  Does vowel length matter in glyphs or not?

Fran

----------
>From: "Anthony Appleyard" <mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk>
>To: nahuat-l at server2.umt.edu
>Subject: Length of the vowel in -tzin"
>Date: Thu, Apr 5, 2001, 5:09 AM
>

>
> 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
>
>
> John Frederick Schwaller                             schwallr at selway.umt.edu
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