yexanztica

[brokaw at buffalo.edu]

Dear Barry and David,
Thank you for your comments on yexanztica.
By way of background, Ben Leeming, a recently converted Nahuatl
enthusiast from the Boston area, sought out Pablo, recently transplanted
from Indiana to New Hampshire, and me (I am on leave from Buffalo
spending the year in New England) about getting together to work on a
Nahuatl text. So we all got together to form what Pablo has dubbed the
New England Nahuatl Circle. We started out looking at Richley Crapo's
recently published edition of the Anonimo mexicano. But having an
available translation wasn't as much fun, and Ben was interested in
reading Pedro de Gante’s _Doctrina cristiana_, which as far as we know
has never been translated. In fact, the only form we can find it in is a
facsimile of the original printed edition from the sixteenth century.
The passage which Pablo cited is on folio 2 verso of Gante's Doctrina.
Pablo was rather modest in the way he posed the question. He makes very
good use of Molina. In addition, we had already found other errors in
the text, and it seemed clear to us that there was an error here as
well. We even discussed the perhaps very likely possibility of a
non-Nahuatl speaking printer working with a Nahuatl manuscript, the
difficulties that this would inherently involve, and the kind of errors
that would inevitably be introduced in such a context. We came up with a
couple of theories as to what “yexanztica” was supposed to be, including
the one Barry pointed out. Ultimately, given the letters that are
present, it seems that there are simply some missing letters that need
to be inserted: “yex[c]an [qui]ztica.” But we thought we would throw it
out there to see if there might be something we were missing; or if one
of our other admittedly less likely theories might prove to be viable.
None of us have any previous experience with doctrinas in Nahuatl, so,
Barry, your confirmation that “yexcan quiztica” is common in such texts
is very helpful. By the way, in these colonial doctrinas, do they ever
say "yexcan quizca" or is it always "yexcan quiztica"? Is there a
pragmatic difference between these two forms?
The semantic problem with "quiztica" to which Pablo referred, was not
with how to translate this in a general sense, but rather how to break
it down morphologically.
It seemed to us that there were two possibilities: a verbal form and a
nominalized form. Molina defines “mieccan quiztica,” for example, as “it
divides up into many parts,” which suggests a verbal form, evidently the
present progressive: quiz[a] + ti (ligature) + ca (to be); and there are
other entries that confirm this verbal form. But there are also other
entries such as "toquiquiztica," which I assume is formed by
reduplicating the first syllable of “quiza” and means “our pores,” and
cenquiztica, meaning “something whole.” In these cases, there is a
formal homology with the verbal "quiztica," but with these terms it
seems that the ending is morphologically different, apparently “quiz[a]
+ ti (ligature) + ca (nominalizer). I guess the literal meaning of this
nominalized form as “something that came out” is what conveys the idea
of “part”: something that has come out or protrudes from something else
to which it belongs, thus distinguishing itself as a "part" of a larger
whole. According to this interpretation “cenquiztica” literally means
“s.t. that comes out completely or as a whole,” that is to say without
distinguishing itself from anything else to which it might have
inherently belonged. 
In the passage in question, we might be able to read the “yexcan
quiztica” as a verbal form and the subsequent “quiztica” as a
nominalized form. Or maybe they are both the nominalized form. Or maybe
they are both verb forms. In the end, it does not really make that much
of a difference for the general meaning conveyed. We just wondered if
there was any way to disambiguate the morphology in any given instance.
The fact that in Nahuatl you don’t necessarily need a verb seems to make
it difficult in this case to determine what is going on grammatically,
because there appears to be a formal homology between two grammatically
different forms, one verbal and one nominalized. I wonder if this might
be ambiguous even to a native Nahuatl speaker.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this issue?
Thanks,
Galen



Quoting Amapohuani at aol.com:

> 
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> 
> Estimado Pablo:
> 
> Apart from David Wright's email, just a reminder to all that it is
> helpful to 
> let the list know what one is citing, for example, a publication or a
> 
> manuscript, title, year, page/folio, etc. That way, if some of us
> have the same book, 
> or the ms has been published in a critical edition, then we can
> doublecheck 
> the section it appears in, whether or not an item has been
> inadvertently 
> spelled in a different way, and so on. 
> 
> For example, it is my experience that sometimes books have outright
> errors, 
> or a ms may be a copy of something, and in the process of copying the
> scribe(s) 
> can literally misinterpret the characters and make an analysis more 
> difficult. And some books and mss have more outright errors than
> others. 
> 
> I think you have the thrust of the item, but to find the most 
> recognizable/consultable [sorry for the invented word] constituent
> parts [not that you can't 
> break them down even more] then it would look something like 'yexcan
> [or 
> excan] quiztica' or 'yexcan [or excan] quizqui' or the like -- a
> standard statement 
> in colonial Nahuatl doctrinas. By 'recognizable/consultable' I mean
> something 
> that you can more readily look up in Molina, like these entries from
> Molina 
> 2004 [the most recent version of the 1571 edition] on 36r of the
> NahtoSpan 
> side: "Yexcan. en tres parts s, o lugares" [sic] followed by "Yexcan
> quizqui. 
> partido o diuidido en tres partes." 
> 
> Good luck with your studies. 
> 
> Ye ixquich.
> Barry
> 
> In a message dated 4/6/07 6:42:08 PM, PGarcia at anselm.edu writes:
> 
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