Morphology and sacred landscapes

[David Wright]

It's great to get back from the ICA in Mexico City (where I had the pleasure
to meet some Nahuat-l pen pals face to face for the first time) and find the
list buzzing with very interesting messages.

John: I agree with much of what you say in the message reproduced below. I
would just caution you to not get too attached to the hypothesis that you
imply will guide your study of toponyms in Morelos, namely your belief "that
Nahua place names allude directly to some aspect of Mesoamerican sacred
landscape, in other words, to some aspect of the migration process from
Aztlan to Chicomoztoc to Colhuahcan." It's usually best to have a few
alternative hypotheses on the table and to look for the weaknesses, more
that the strengths, of each hypothesis.

The Aztec migration story is just one native historical tradition (actually
a set of overlapping historical traditions), although it's one of the better
documented stories. The Nahua of central Mexico, whose language clearly
originated in western Mexico, inserted themselves in rather late (i.e.
post-Teotihuacan) times into a sacred landscape that developed over several
millenia among the original Otomanguean-speakers (including the Otopamean
family), whose roots in this region go back to the earliest agricultural
villages of the Protoneolithic period (ca. 5000-2500 d.C.). Central Mexican
toponyms, as I pointed out in my last post, are usually calques, or semantic
loans in which meaning is loaned without the sounds associated with that
meaning in the source language.

This is why many (although certainly not all) toponymical signs in the
central Mexican system of pictorial writing can be read in different
languages; they are semasiograms, communicating meaning without necessarily
being associated with the morphemes of a given language. Of course this
system also permits glottographic writing (both logographic and
phonographic) in any of the participating tongues, where homophonic or
cuasi-homophonic plays on words or morphemes are exploited, as in rebus
writing. The percentage of glottograms in any given text varies through time
and space, from practically nothing (e.g. the five codices of the Borgia
group) to very abundant (e.g. post-Conquest codices from the Texcoco
region).

It's hard to reconstruct the pre-Nahua linguistic landscape of the Valley of
Morelos, since the Nahuas in this region form part of a linguistic band that
slices the Otomanguean territory in two, with the Otopameans to the north
(specifically the Otomi, Mazahua, Matlatzinca, and Ocuiltec) and the
Mixtecans and Popolocans to the south. Thus a network of interrelated
languages derived from a common, ancestral tongue spoken thousands of years
earlier (Proto-Otomanguean) was severed, at least in a spatial sense, when
the Nahuas appeared on the scene. Given this situation, it would probably be
useful to search these neighboring languages for toponyms refering to places
in Morelos.

You're quite right about the importance of going beyond purely linguistic
analyses of toponyms if we want to arrive at a deeper understanding of their
significance.

Saludos,

David

********************************
Listeros,
	I would like to explain how I think Nahua place names work. There
have been many poorly written compilations of Nahua place names. Poor, for
two reasons. First, because their authors generally do not have a good
understanding of Nahua morphology. And second, because while they provide
translations of the noun (simple or agentive) or verb (Magnus, you are
absolutely right. What I meant to say is that passive/impersonal verbs are
not linked to -can) to which the relational ending is suffixed, they do not
explain WHY these nouns and verbs were chosen in the first place. I believe
that Nahua place names allude directly to some aspect of Mesoamerican sacred
landscape, in other words, to some aspect of the migration process from
Aztlan to Chicomoztoc to Colhuahcan. This may include physical aspects of
the landscape, animals, plants, actions and deities. A well written work on
Nahua place names will explain the morphology of each name, as well as how
it ties into the universe of sacred landscape. This is something I plan to
do in the future with María Elena Bernal García and Angel García Zambrano
from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos.
John


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