xiuh-, "big"

[Frances Karttunen]

I am aware of xiuh- (short vowel as far as I can tell) used as an  
augmentative in a very specific context.  In the one case for which I  
can give some attestations, it is prefixed to an intransitive verb:  
xiuhtlatla and to a related reflexive/transitive verb:  
xiuhtlatia:.    In Molina the intransitive verb is glossed as being  
hungry (burning with hunger), while in the Zacapoaxtla dictionary, it  
is glossed as simply being hot ('tiene calor'). Molina glosses the  
augmented reflexive verb as 'to be tired out, impatient' and the  
corresponding transitive verb as 'to irritate someone.'  All of these  
can be seen as metaphorically engaged in a slow burn.

At the time I came across it in these two sources, I associated the  
xiuh- literally with green color. Namely, I thought that whereas we  
distinguish extreme degrees of heat as red hot and, beyond that,  
white hot, Nahuatl--dividing the spectrum somewhat differently in  
terms of color names--might think of extreme heat as blue-green hot.

However, you are reporting xiuh- as an across-the-board augmentative  
in Huastecan Nahuatl, and there may be a long vowel where my  
attestations apparently have a short one.  The productive Huastecan  
augmentative could be a generalization of something that started out  
as more specific, or on the other hand, it may be something  
completely independent.

Fran



On May 16, 2007, at 11:38 AM, John Sullivan, Ph.D. wrote:

> Listeros,
> 	We are having an interesting discussion here in Zacatecas.
> Victoriano says that in Huastecan Nahuatl there is an augmentative
> prefix, xi:uh-, which can go on pretty much any noun. The "i" sounds
> long, so we assume it is. At first we were using nouns that begin
> with a consonant, so we couldn't tell if the final aspirated
> consonant of the prefix was -c, -h or -uh. But when used with nouns
> initiating in a vowel, the sound is still aspirated, so that
> eliminates the -c. And if the "i" is indeed long, that eliminates the
> -h. 	
> 	Son we have, for example:
> xiuhelotl, "a big ear of corn" (see note below)
> xiuhtlacatl, "a big man"
> 	And.... interestingly enough, xiuhtomatl, "tomato (the big variety)".
> Has anybody seen this?
> John
>
> Nota tangencial: the /w/ in Huastecan Nahuatl is voiced at the
> beginning of a syllable, and devoiced at the end (here it sounds like
> an "h" (not rounded). An morpheme final -uh keeps it's pronunciation
> even if followed by another syllable beginning with a vowel. And it
> doesn't separate from the original morpheme to become the initial
> element of the following syllable. In other words the syllables are
> xiuh-e-lotl, not xi-hue-lotl.
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