cuaxochtli
Michael McCafferty
mmccaffe at INDIANA.EDU
Thu Feb 16 18:20:19 UTC 2006
If you come up with a semantic relation of "head-flower" or even "flower-head"
for "borderline," then I'll love to hear about it. Following Joe's lead, it's
obvious from experience that, while some people may hope that any noun with
apparently two or more parts such as cuaxochitl seems like it can be parsed,
that just ain't the case. For example, in Miami-Illinois, a native North
American language, there are many nice, really *long* words that just can't be
chopped up. /kiteehpikwanwa/, the term for the species of carp known in
English as the buffalo fish comes to mind. Now, while a lot of terms can be
cut up, such as /myaalameekwa/ 'channel catfish' (/myaal- 'ugly, gaunt' and
/-(a)meekw-/ 'fish', /kiteepihkwanw-/ is just its own morpheme, semantically
unanalyzable.
cuaxoch- *could be* homophonous with cua-xoch- 'head-flower', but it may not
be. Vowel length is always a question, too.
Michael
Quoting Yukitaka Inoue Okubo <takaio at PO.AIANET.NE.JP>:
> Anthony and Joe:
>
> Thank you for your comments.
> The problem is that I don't understand exactly what cuaxochtli means. That
> is, if it is a some kind of clear border"line",or places with certain
> extention of surface(for example, a hill or mountain). This question made me
>
> to start thinking of the possibility of a compound.
> Any way, I will check if "head" and "flower" could have semantic relation,
> or not, with land border (or land itself).
>
> Yukitaka Inoue O.
>
>
>
>
> > --- Yukitaka Inoue Okubo <takaio at PO.AIANET.NE.JP> wrote:
> >> Hello. Could anyone help me with the etymology of `cuaxochtli'
> >> (land border, lindero)? Does it have something to do
> >> with "cuaitl" and/or "xochitl"? In some colonial documents I'm
> >> reading, I've also seen the form "cuaxochitli" instead ...
> >
> > Uhh. `It-is-a-head-flower'. Was there a custom somewhere, of planting
> > flowering bushes to mark land borders?
> >
> > Citlalyani
> >
> >
>
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