Pidiginization in nawatl ?

[Jim Rader]

Lyle Campbell has pointed out, in a _Language_ article of 1986 and
some other places, that kenning-like compounds are a
Mesoamerican areal feature with some cross-linguistic sharing of
metaphor, so that they look like a set of loan-translations, whatever
language they originated in. I don't know enough about languages
other than Nahuatl to give examples, but maybe others on the list
can.
Some Campbell mentions are the following (the Nahuatl equivalents
are my addition, and subject to correction):
"boa" = deer-snake (maza:co:a:tl)
"egg" = bird-stone/bone (to:toltetl)
"door" = "house-mouth" (Nahuatl cali:xtli is more like "house-eye,"
and doesn't exactly mean "door")
"eye" = face-fruit/seed (no such compound in Nahuatl, as far as I
know, but i:xtli means both "face" and "eye")
"wrist" = hand-neck (maquechtli)
"knee" = "leg-head" (Nahuatl tlancua:itl has "head," but the identity
of the first element doesn't seem to be clear)
My gut feeling is that some languages just do this, and
pidginization is not really a factor, though strong influence from
adjacent languages may be. Northwest Caucasian languages
(Circassian, Abkhaz) also tend to use fairly transparent
compounds for body parts and other fairly basic vocabulary items.
Jim Rader