altepetl and sacred landscape

[idiez at MAC.COM]

Compañeros,
        Just a comment on the term "altepetl". Yes, a town needs water. But 
curiously enough, when nahuas established settlements, they preferred 
places like valleys, rinconadas, and ravines, where flooding often 
occured. The mountain is not used to escape this.
        "Altepetl" can only by understood within the context of sacred 
landscape. The mountain is a container of life, like a womb, a breast, 
a piece of fruit, or the primordial lake of Aztlán. Often it has caves 
with springs, which represent, Chicomostoc, the mythic passage between 
the primordial lake of creation and Colhuahcan, the settlements or 
altepetl, established by ancient migrating groups of people. Aside from 
proximity to a main sacred hill, the settlements tend to be located 
near a spring or river, whose gushing represents birth (of ancestors 
and new generations) and the birth canal.
        A few days ago, there was a discussion of a gliph with a hand 
clutching water. I didn´t say anything then, but this may be a good 
time. In many sacred ravines a hand is painted on the side of the 
cliff. The side of a ravine is reminiscent of the outer wall of a 
gourd, which in turn represents the outer wall of the container of the 
primordial lake, Aztlán. The ravine wall is especially attractive to 
the indigenous mind if it has cracks where water drips out. The hand 
was painted on the wall of the ravine, because during certain 
ceremonies, the indigenous people would knock on the rock, to summon 
their ancestors forth in the form of the new generations.
        This information is taken from work done on Mesoamerican sacred 
landscape  by María Elena Bernal García and Angel Julián García 
Zambrano at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos.

John Sullivan, Ph.D.
Profesor de lengua y cultura nahua
Unidad Académica de Idiomas
Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas
Director
Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C.
Tacuba 152, int. 47
Centro Histórico
Zacatecas, Zac. 98000
México
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idiez at mac.com
www.idiez.org.mx

On May 28, 2005, at 3:31 PM, ANTHONY APPLEYARD wrote:

> --- zorrah at ATT.NET wrote:
>> Maybe I didn’t understand the lesson in the “Chimalpahin” thread, but
>> can someone please clarify why "altepetl" does not follow the general
>> assimilation patterns as these other examples do:
>> General Assimilation Examples:
>> 1)  na:huatl + tlahto:lli (word, language) = na:huallahto:lli
>> 'Nahuatl language'
>> 2)  a:tl + tla:lli (earth) = a:tla:lli 'irrigated land'
>> 3)  a:tl + tlapechtli (bed) = a:tlape:chtli 'slope, side of a gully'
>> Also, in examples 2 and 3, is it the presence of the long vowel “a:”
>> stem that is left after the -tl is dropped, only to be confronted
>> with a twin “absolutive suffix-looking tl-” (of course the tl- of
>> tla:lli or tlape:chtli is NOT absolutive)
>>
>> Looking at altepetl, is it the strong “a:” stem again, who this time
>> will accept a half-image or mirror-image of its former self?
>>
>> 4)  a:tl (water) + tepe:tl (hill) = a:ltepe:tl (town, pueblo)
>> What is going on here?
>> citlalin xochime
>
> (4) A town needs water for irrigation and a hill to keep out of floods.
> Thus the components have equal status and the compound is a dvandva.
> The basic meaning is "it is water (and) it is a hill", "it is water and
> a hill", originally two words, and people gradually started letting
> them run together into one; and the sequence -tlt- became -lt-.
>
> (1) na:huatl + tlahto:lli is also a dvandva: "it is something
> clear-sounding (and) it is a language", became na:huallahto:lli ; the
> sequence -tltl- became -ll-.
>
> 2)  a:tl + tla:lli (earth) = a:tla:lli 'irrigated land', as it is (a
> sort of) land, but it is not (a sort of) water: it is an ordinary
> compound, not a dvandva.
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Citltlyani
>
> Some languages have next to no assimilation of adjacent sounds;
> some langages have enough assimilation to keep a shipload of Borg busy.
>