altepetl

[Frances Karttunen]

On May 29, 2005, at 5:24 AM, Rikke Marie Olsen wrote:

>
> I think altepetl is a fossilized form. We have already discussed 
> (Chimalpahin) and largely agreed that there are exeptional forms, 
> where monosyllable verbs keeps the absolutive suffix in composites and 
> incorporations.
>  
> I believe that the original form was atl-tepetl. Only if you try to 
> pronounce it, it will sound more and more like al-tepetl the more you 
> say it. In other words I see it as an assimilation of ‘tl’ in front of 
> ‘t’ gives ‘lt’.
>  
>

Widely across extant Nahuatl writing one finds alternation between the 
difrasismo atl tepetl and the word altepetl with no discernable 
difference in reference.  Whether one word or two, the reference is to 
the concept of the Nahua corporate community and hardly to literal 
water and hills.

The corresponding possessed forms (first person here by way of example) 
are nauh tepeuh (two words) and naltepeuh (one word).  If the latter 
were an unexceptional compound word, the absolutive and possessed forms 
would be *atepetl, natepeuh respectively, which to my knowledge are 
totally unattested. The "l" is always in there.

One could think of altepetl hovering in the interstice between 
difrasismo (two words) and regular compound word (one word composed of 
two stems, only the second of which carries suffixes), but on the other 
hand, the complex morphology of Nahuatl treats altepetl as a unitary 
word.  As Joe has said before, it's an exceptional case, one of those 
things one learns as a unit instead of constructing by rule.  Every 
language has such lexical items.

As to José's broader questions, I hope he isn't selling short us 
contemporary linguists and what we do.  The thrust of our profession is 
to discern by research across languages what categories are common to 
human languages (even if not historically, "genetically" related) and 
the dimensions on which variation can and does take place.  This, of 
course, is not what 16th- and 17th-century grammarians were up to and 
is not what modern prescriptivists do, but it IS what linguists do and 
has been for well over a century.

Back in the 1970s Bill Bright provided his students at UCLA with notes 
on Nahuatl that pointed out that the earliest grammars of Nahuatl best 
represent the language on its own terms.  In the 18th and 19th 
centuries, as later grammarians tried to impose their particular 
theoretical molds on Nahuatl, their descriptions of the language grew 
ever more off-the-mark and unusable. I hope that beginning early in the 
20th century, and particularly gathering force since the 1970s, we have 
gotten back to an understanding of Nahuatl on its own structural terms.
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