Some grammar doubts

[David Wright]

Michael's comment made me read over what I had written in my second post and
I see that the last part is a bit sloppy. Here it is again, in a more
comprehensible form (I hope).

What I really wanted to say is that the letter h in the sequence cuh is
probably superfluous. I suspect some colonial period authors added it
because uh was used for /w/, so adding the letter h to the digraph cu (for
/kw/) merely reinforced, in a redundant way, the roundness of the lips when
pronouncing /kw/. If in traditional Nahuatl spelling (derived from Spanish
spelling) c was used to represent /k/ before the vowels /a/, /o/, and /u/,
and uh was used for /w/ in syllable-final position, then cuh was a
reasonable way to write the phoneme that some modern linguists represent, in
a similar fashion, with /kw/ (superscript w). Thus cu, uc, and cuh all
represent the phoneme /kw/.

E-mail works faster then my mind.

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