yexanztica

Sat Apr 7 23:10:59 UTC 2007

Estimados Listeros:

I leave most of this to the more experienced grammarians on the list, but re 
two points:

1), 'yexcan quiztica' seems very familiar to me, but I hesitate to say how 
common it is. Whenever there is a question about such things, I go through a lot 
of books and mss to see what is actually there, not what I think/assume is 
there. So I can say for sure that it looks familiar and expected, but beyond 
that I won't go for the moment. 

2), never hurts to keep in mind that the line in early Nahuatl between verb 
and noun is not as strictly drawn as it is in English and Spanish [just to 
mention two of the languages that a lot of researchers bring to their study of 
Nahuatl]. So don't beat yourselves up trying to make distinctions that may prove 
to be more elusive than expected.   *Not that you shouldn't make every effort 
to break down, analyze, etc.*

Ye ixquich.
Barry

In a message dated 4/7/07 5:40:26 PM, brokaw at buffalo.edu writes:

> 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:
> 
> >
> > --part1_c0a.13565d34.334869c7_boundary
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> > Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
> >
> > 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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