tlahueliloc

[Frances Karttunen]

> The difference between the derivations may be "obvious" to the experts
> (who don't need an answer to Rick's question anyway) but there are thousands
> of mere mortal Nahuatl enthusiasts (like me for instance) to whom it's not at
> all obvious.



OK.  Conventional Nahuatl spelling, that originated in the 1500s, when
Franciscan friars applied Spanish/Latin spelling conventions to a language
with a very different sound system than Spanish or Latin, doesn't
consistently mark contrastive vowel length or the syllable-final consonant
that they called "saltillo."  When they DID indicate saltillo, they did so
with the letter "h."  In some varieties of Nahuatl, this is pronounced as a
very h-like aspiration at the end of the syllable.  In other varieties it
was/is a sharp glottal stop.  Whatever the pronunciation, saltillo functions
as a consonant.  Omitting it altogether in spelling makes numbers of stems
LOOK as through they are the same when, if you just heard them, you would
notice that they sound different.

Sometime later Jesuit grammarians, notably Horacio Carochi, modified Nahuatl
spelling to indicate which vowels are long and where the saltillos are, but
the spelling reform didn't catch on.  Hence, most Nahuatl dictionaries
under-differentiate entries in such a way that several different things fall
together as one when they are not.

In the case of tlahue:l- versus ahhuel, in the first case you have no
saltillo in the first syllable and a long vowel in the second.  In the
latter, you have a saltillo in the first syllable and a short vowel in the
second.  Furthermore, ahhuel is transparently the negation of huel, whereas
in tlahue:l-, the first syllable is not a prefix but an integral part of the
stem.


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