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[Michael Mccafferty]

The verb <piya> means 'have, guard', not 'lie down' or 'tell a lie'.



On Fri, 16 Mar 2001, Anthony Appleyard wrote:

> John Joseph Sullivan Hendricks <jsullivan at prodigy.net.mx> wrote:-
> ...
>  > 3. "nipixtos" = preterite form of "piya" + "ti" ligature, + "o" (to be
>  > lying) + "s" (future). This is the Nahuatl equivalent of the past
>  > subjunctive in Spanish.
>  > I'm not going to analyze anything else, because its in all the grammars.
>  > What is interesting to me is the productivity of the auxiliary verb "o":
>  > A) "-tok", nikwalantok = I am angry. ...
> Sorry to be petty, but does this "lying" mean "tell a lie" or "lie down"? "To
> lie" is to me the classical example of a word with two meanings that language
> dictionaries often list without saying which meaning applies. I had this with
> Greek {keimai} and Russian {lgat'}, and in both cases I did not find which
> meaning was meant until I found a use in context where only one of the two
> meanings made sense. In this case, I can tell which it is because I have seen
> the rain god's name Tlaloc analyzed as "ground lie-down -er" = "that which
> lies down on the ground", i.e. a description of surface water left by rain.
> Citlalyani
>
>
>


Michael McCafferty
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Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana
47405
mmccaffe at indiana.edu

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