Some grammar doubts

[Jesse Lovegren]

LISTCAN CHANEQUIH:
1- As Sr. McCafferty noted, NOXCIUH is the preferred form.  In Classical
Nahuatl, The dictionary form for "foot" is (i)cxi-tl.  It loses the initial
i when prefixed.  The absolutive suffix is only present in the non-possessed
form.  The possessed suffix -uh is added when a noun stem ends in a vowel.
 A noun whose stem ends in a consonant, i.e. oquich-tli, does not take a
possessed suffix, so "my man" would be noquich, without any suffix.

2- In classical Nahuatl, the written sequences HU and UH are digraphs, two
letters to denote one sound, viz. /w/.  H in any other place is for a
glottal stop (sounding like the t in kitten).  The glottal stop has been
lost from most modern varieties of Nahuatl, and is now a more or less
weakly-aspirated /h/.  So sometimes H is silent (in UH and HU), and
sometimes it is not (elsewhere, unless there is some dialect which has lost
it completely)




On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 7:12 AM, Susana Moraleda <susana at losrancheros.org>wrote:

> Sorry if I'm being too primitive and elementary (I'm not an expert in
> Nahuatl, but I love it), but in revising my Nahuatl grammar I came across
> the following doubts which I tried to clear reading several sources, but
> with no success.
>
> 1 - I found NOCXI and NOCXIUH for "my foot". Which one is correct?
>
> 2 - Should the H be pronounced as in English? Many people in Mexico do not
> pronounce it, while some others do.
>
> 3 - ALTEPETL comes from water and hill. I can understand the "hill" part
> and
> the A for "water", but why do we have an extra L?
>
> 4 - CALEH is one who has a house. Does this have anything to do with
> Spanish
> "calle"?
>
> 5 - I believe CHANEHQUEH is people who have homes. Why and how did this
> word
> come to mean those imaginary little men residing in the forests?
>
> I would appreciate any comments.
>
> Thank you.
> Susana Moraleda
>
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>


-- 
Jesse Lovegren
Department of Linguistics
645 Baldy Hall
office +1 716 645 0136
cell +1 512 584 5468
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