Some grammar doubts

[Michael McCafferty]

Ah..and now we have them. ;-)



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

> P.S. I carelessly hit the send button before adding the long vowel marks
> (:). They're not essential to the matter being discussed, but for the sake
> of accuracy here goes the message again with the (probable) long vowels
> marked.
>
> *************************************************
>
> 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 te:uctli in the enhanced traditional orthography used by Andrews,
> Karttunen, and Bierhorst, being the phonemic sequence /te:kwtli/, where the
> /kw/ is one phoneme as described above). This word, when used in compound
> nouns preceding other morphemes, is reduced to the root te:uc- /te:kw/.
> Examples of this are Mote:uczo:ma /mote:kwso:ma/, the name of two tenochca
> lords, and Tla:lte:uctli /tla:lte:kwtli/, 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 /te:kohtli/ (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.
>
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