Pidiginization in nawatl ?

[Karen Dakin]

on 2/20/01 11:47 AM, Jim Rader at jrader at Merriam-Webster.com wrote:
 > Lyle Campbell has pointed out, in a _Language_ article of 1986 and
 > some other places,
[stuff snipped]

Just to be a bit more precise, that article was by Lyle Campbell, Terrence
Kaufman and Thomas Smith-Stark, and Smith-Stark provided the detail about
all the compounds, including distribution maps, etc., in a 1982 paper,
"Mesoamerican Calques" later published in Investigaciones Lingüísticas en
Mesoamérica, edited by Carolyn J. MacKay and Veronica Vazquez, Instituto de
Investigaciones Filologicas, UNAM, Mexico, DF, 1994. Pp. 15-52, for anyone
interested.
Also to add to comments to the general question on compounding and pidgins
with relation to Nahuatl, I think proto-Uto-Aztecan was a compounding
language basically, perhaps best seen reflected in the Numic languages' use
of instrumental prefixes -- look for example at Jon Dayley's
Tümpisa(Panamint) Shoshone grammar and dictionary published by the
University of California. The instrumental prefixes show up frozen in
Nahuatl words like chikiwitl and tlapa:ni, and are also found in other
languages, as pointed out by several linguists. My conclusions have been
that Nahuatl through phonological change has fused old compounds into what
look like single morphemes in many cases (*se(-)wa-ci- > xo:chi-, for
example. One could perhaps consider compounding as one of the productive
processes inherited along with the language, and for that reason it
continues to be used to make new words.