Understanding of a folk etymology

[Galen Brokaw]

Evidently, my message last night, or early this morning rather, went 
through garbled. Here it is again.
Galen

Joe,
Your explanation sounds very familiar. So I'm sure that you did answer this
question several years ago when I originally asked, perhaps not on the list,
which would explain why I couldn’t find it in the archive. I should have
remembered this. I wish I could blame it on age. :-)
In any case, before someone else points it out, I also wanted to clarify
something in my previous message. I mispoke, or I guess mis-wrote, which is
worse, in saying that the five day differential at the end of the year is
produced by the difference between the solar year and the 360-day cycle 
produced
by the combination of the 20 days signs and 13 numbers. Of course, this
combination produces a cycle of 260 days, not 360. The 360 cycle is 
produced by
the series of 18 months of twenty days each, which comes to 360 days 
with the
five days of nemontemi left over to complete the solar year of 365 days.

Galen



Campbell, R. Joe wrote:
> 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
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Nahuatl mailing list
>>> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>>> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>>>
>>
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>
>
>
>

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