location of syllabic stress in Classical Nawatl

[Matthew Montchalin]

Maybe English worries more about syllabic stress than other
languages do.

For verbs that end in -ia, should those two letters be treated
as a monosyllabic dyphthong?  Or is the letter 'i' stressed
because Nawatl usually prefers to have the penultima stressed?

And another question relates to poetry in Classical Nawatl.
Should syllables be scanned for long and short syllables, or
does it make a difference which syllables the stress accent
falls?  Is it possible to string together a number of spondees,
or is it more likely that the natural cadence of the language
will cause spondees to decompose into a mixture of iambic and
trochaic feet?

Along related lines:

I am trying to study the passive voice in Nawatl.  There's a whole
chapter on it on page 73 of the Compendium of Nahuatl Grammar
(Thelma D. Sullivan) but I guess I'm having a pretty hard time of
it.  What really throws me for a loop, is the inscrutable Spanish
spelling instead of a more down-to-earth 'phonetic' spelling.  As I
may have mentioned elsewhere in this list, I have virtually no
understanding of Spanish (but I have also mentioned that I studied
Classical Latin upwards of ten years, both at the high school level
and at the university level).

How did the Spanish missionaries originally translate "Many are
called but few are chosen" into Nawatl?  (I think that this could
make for a good bumper sticker.)

I am using the uppercase H to represent the glottal stop.

Now, if I also use uppercase vowels to represent those that are to
bear syllabic stress, and lowercase vowels for those that are
unstressed, notzaloH ought to be the third person singular present
passive plural form for "they are chosen" and pepenAloH for "they
are called"  (but I also considered the possibility that the second
person plural might also be possible).

What is the proper conjunction to unite these two words so they
take on the sense that is usually associated with the Biblical
verse, "Many are called but few are chosen"?  The conjunction would
be adversative in nature, wouldn't it?  Now, I think the singular
adjective miyek means 'many' but I don't know if a different word
is more appropriate, such as something that means "very often" or
"very frequently" instead.  In Latin, an adverb modifies a verb
much the same way that an adjective modifies a noun, but in Nawatl,
the only reference work I have right now, is the work by Thelma
Sullivan, and that leaves a lot to the imagination, and I doubt
that I can just mix-and-match the affixes willy-nilly, as I feel
like it, and still end up with a sentence that makes sense to
a scholar of Classical Nawatl.

Since Nawatl admits to a more or less free word order, is there
going to be more than one way of rendering the Biblical verse into
Nawatl?  Are any of those versions going to be considered more
poetic than the others?  I mean, did any of those versions (if there
are more than one) observe a particular metrical form that is
different than what native speakers would otherwise have gone for?


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