Altepetl

[David Wright]

A brief comment on Frances' statement:



>Whether one word or two, the reference is to the concept of the Nahua
corporate community and hardly to literal water and hills.



I would just like to add that the concept of the water-mountain as a
metaphor for the sum of calpolli units under the domain of a ruler extended
beyond the Nahuatl-speaking community; it was a basic aspect of Central
Mexican translinguistic culture and extended up into the Sierra Madre
Oriental and down to Oaxaca. Equivalent expressions with morphemes for water
and mountain (calques, that is, where each group takes the idea and supplies
its own morphemes) may also be found across the language families, in Otomi,
Pame, Mazatec, Totonac, Popoluca de Sayula, and Pochutec. In Otomi the term
is andehent'oho (both O's underlined; the vowel is intermediate between
Spanish O and E).



an + dehe + n + t'oho (underlined O's again)



singular nominal prefix + noun: water + epenthetic phoneme (or syncopated
singular nominal prefix) + noun: mountain



This word is attested in Alonso Urbano's trilingual (Spanish-Nahuatl-Otomi)
vocabulary (c 1605) and in the Otomi historical annals of the Huichapan
Codex (c 1632).



We tend to view Central Mexican culture as "Nahua culture" because we have
so much more data on the Nahuas. When we look at verbal and iconic metaphors
across linguistic boundaries we begin to see the big picture: most elements
of culture don't divide along linguistic boundaries in this part of the
world. The Mesoamerican network of cultural interaction has very ancient
roots.