Salutations and farewells

[Joost Kremers]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 08:34:00AM -0600, John F. Schwaller wrote:
> I am finishing up the first semester with my Nahuatl students.  They have
> asked for common salutations, greetings, and farewells.  To be perfectly
> frank given the way I learned Nahuatl, I never learned these things.  Would
> any of you be willing to share the "hellos", "Good byes" and "how ya'
> doin's" with us all?  I'll collect them and post them on the web.

in the course that i took, our teacher used 'piali' for 'hello'. she once
said it could also be used for 'bye', but i don't think i heard it used
that way. (the course included a week's stay in the teacher's village,
which, BTW, was in Vera Cruz.)

for 'goodbye', i only heard 'timoittaceh'.  (which would be 'timottazqueh'
in classical: the supportive i is usually retained in this dialect, and the
future plural suffix is -eh, not -queh.) this was also used as 'timoittaceh
moztla' 'see you tomorrow'.

for 'how are you', our teacher used 'quenihqui tiitztoc', 'quenihqui
initztoqueh' for plural. 'itztoc' is 'to be located at', so it may function
as cognate of spanish 'estar' (cómo estás).

--
Joost Kremers
University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Department of Arabic and Islam

Erasmusplein 1
PO Box 9103
6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands

tel: +31 24 3612996
fax: +31 24 3612807