Understanding of a folk etymology

[Campbell, R. Joe]

I'd like to second Galen's judgement of "good question".  "nemontemi" 
certainly gets the linguistic cogs turning in more frenzy than the 
analysis of some other problems.  I'll give here what is a short form 
of what I think is a possible solution and come back later with more 
material.

   I think the initial element of "nemontemi" is the particle "ne:m" 
and the rest of the "phrase" is "on-te:mi".  "ne:m" means "useless, in 
vain, fruitless" and usually shows up as "nen", since it appears more 
often before consonants than before vowels (e.g., "ninenquiza (I fail 
to have success), nentlacatl (worthless person, nentlachiuhtli 
(unnecessary thing), etc.).

   I think the sense of "nemontemi" (or perhaps earlier, as a phrase, 
"nen ontemi": it uselessly fills (those empty five days)

   Mary finds in the vocabulario anonimo (Ayer ms. 1478):

  nenontemi             Bissiesto

  ilhuitl nenontemi     entrepuesto dia

I'll be back later,

Joe


Quoting Galen Brokaw <brokaw at buffalo.edu>:

> This is a good question. I'd be interested in any responses as well. I
> puzzled over this for quite a while at one time. I seem to remember
> posting this same question to the list a number of years ago, but I
> couldn't find it in the archive. In my possibly false memory of that
> query, I don't think I got any response.
> I've seen several different interpretations of the morphology of this
> word, all of which seemed to be based on merely identifying certain
> elements as morphemes without explaining grammatically how they work
> together. And they also often fail to account for all of the morphology.
> I think the rationale behind claiming that it means "what has been
> lived, to complete" is based on the fact that the beginning of the word
> is 'nem' which calls to mind 'nemi' (to live) and the last part is
> 'temi' which means 'to fill up.' But the grammatical implication of this
> morphological interpretation is that you have a verb-verb compound
> ostensibly joined by the directional particle 'on.' The problem is that
> I don't think we have any other examples of this kind of structure.
> Having said that, interpreting the 'temi' part as 'to fill up' is
> particularly attractive. As I'm sure you know, the word refers to the
> five day period in the calendar at the end of the solar year between the
> end of the 360-cycle of 20 day signs and 13 numbers and the beginning of
> the new solar year. So 'temi' makes a certain sort of sense in that the
> period to which 'nemontemi' refers could be conceived of as the five-day
> remainder left over from the completion of the calendrical cycle
> involving the combination of the 20 day signs and 13 numbers, which is
> used to "fill up" the difference between that 360-day cycle and the
> 365-day solar year. I won't bore you with all of my other speculative
> attempts to make sense of the other elements. They are probably fairly
> obvious anyway. In the end, though, I couldn't figure out a way to
> account for all of the elements of the word in a way that would also be
> grammatically consistent. I may be missing something obvious here,
> though. If I'm not, then we have to keep in mind that the calendar had a
> very long tradition, and the Nahuas inherited it from other groups. So
> the term may even have originally derived from some other language.
> There are a good number of other morphological puzzles sort of like this
> in Nahuatl, but my impression is that relatively speaking they are few.
> This has always been sort of surprising to me. I have a theory about why
> this is the case, but I won't subject you to it at this point.
>
> Galen Brokaw
>
>
>
> micc2 wrote:
>> In a yahoo group dedicated to Aztec dancers, I saw this:
>> *[ConsejoQuetzalcoat l] NEMONTEMI means "what has been lived, to complete"
>>
>> *
>>
>> *can anyone tell me what the generally accepted meaning of this word
>> is, and how a definitition of the end of the yeara could be seen as
>> **"what has been lived, to complete"?
>> *
>>
>> *
>> Thanks in advanced!***
>>
>> --
>>
>> I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:
>>
>> "Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz
>>
>>
>> Mario E. Aguilar, PhD
>> www.mexicayotl.org
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
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