Some grammar doubts

[David Wright]

People pretty well answered Susana's questions. I just have one more comment
to add. In the standard enhanced traditional orthography used by Andrews,
Karttunen, Bierhorst, and others, the letter h can be a glottal stop /?/, or
it can be used to write the phoneme /w/, when it appears in the digraphs hu
(at the beginning of a syllable) and uh (at the end of a syllable). All of
that was explained by Jesse. What I want to add is that in some colonial
Nahuatl manuscripts we find the sequence cuh, apparently used to write the
phoneme /kw/ (like /k/ produced with rounded lips), often written with the
digraphs cu (at the beginning of a syllable) and uc (at the end of a
syllable). In colonial practice cu and cuh were also used at the end of a
syllable instead of uc. One very prominent example is tecuhtli (which would
be written teuctli in the enhanced traditional orthography used by Andrews,
Karttunen, and Bierhorst, being the phonemic sequence /tekwtli/, where the
/kw/ is one phoneme as described above). This word, when used in compound
nouns preceding other morphemes, is reduced to the root teuc- /tekw/.
Examples of this are Moteuczoma /motekwsoma/, the name of two tenochca
lords, and Tlalteuctli /tlaltekwtli/, a terrestrial deity. These names can
be found in colonial documents (and even in modern academical texts written
by phonetically naive authors) written as Motecuhzoma and Tlaltecuhtli,
giving the false impression that they contain the syllable /cuh/, when in
realty the sequence cuh is nothing more than the phoneme /kw/.

This matter has been discussed on this list in past years, and the matter is
complicated somewhat by the existence in a few modern varieties of Nahuatl
of the form /tekohtli/ (or something like that), sometimes written tecuhtli
(there is no vowel /u/ in colonial Nahuatl except as an allophone or
pronunciation variant of /o/), for example in Milpa Alta, D.F. John Sullivan
provided a similar example from contemporary Huastecan Nahuatl, if I
remember correctly. Karttunen suggested on this list that these forms may be
"spelling pronunciations" influenced by traditional conventions in written
texts, but as far as I could see the matter was not resolved to everybody's
satisfaction.

What I really wanted to say is that the letter h in the sequence cuh is
probably superfluous. I suspect colonial authors added it because uh was
used for /w/, so adding it to the digraph cu (for /kw/) merely reinforced,
in a redundant way, the roundness of the lips when pronouncing /kw/, in
addition to making it clear that cuh was not to be read as the syllable cu
(that is, writing cu for /co/ and thinking of the allophone [u] for the
phoneme /o/).

Sorry for being a bit pedantic; I had envisioned a simpler comment when I
started writing this post.

_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl