Some grammar doubts

Michael McCafferty mmccaffe at indiana.edu
Thu Aug 20 22:22:37 UTC 2009


Quoting David Wright <dcwright at prodigy.net.mx>:

> 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/,

Listeros:

This is actually /te:kwtli/. Long /e:/.

Terms that appear between / and / are *phonemic* spellings and 
necessitate the indicating of vowel lengths.

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/.

/te:kw-/

> Examples of this are Moteuczoma /motekwsoma/,

/mote:kwso:ma:/

the name of two tenochca
> lords, and Tlalteuctli /tlaltekwtli/

/tla:lte:kwtli/


Michael

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