Tloc, nahuac, tech, tlan

[David Wright]

Estimado Michael:

Thanks for expanding on my minimal quote from Andrews. I agree with you
about Andrews' approach but I hesitate to use it with my students, who are
undergrad history students with little linguistic training beyond high
school grammar. I use postposition ("posposición") because I think (or hope)
they will catch the basic idea without getting a mental hernia, relating
these morphemes to what are called "preposiciones" in their mother tongue,
since both sets have a similar semantic function, while the pre-/post-
contrast emphasizes their usual place within words.

I was just checking to see what Michel Launey calls these morphemes, since I
had excluded him from the list terms used by prominent grammarians through
the centuries. On page 226 of his Introduction à la langue et à la
littérature aztèques (1979), he calls them "suffixes locatifs" and adds that
"sont en réalité une sorte de noms un peu particuliers, qui peuvent se
mettre à la forme possédée, et qui, suffixés à des radicaux nominaux,
forment des noms composés [...]." I haven't checked his thesis of 1986 yet
to see if he maintained that terminology.

Saludos,

David

-----Mensaje original-----
De: nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org [mailto:nahuatl-bounces at lists.famsi.org]
En nombre de Michael McCafferty
Enviado el: martes, 10 de noviembre de 2009 05:18 p.m.
Para: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
Asunto: Re: [Nahuat-l] Tloc, nahuac, tech, tlan

[...]

It's a convenience to refer to such entities as "postpositions".
However, Andrews demonstrates that such a view is, as it puts it,
"ethnocentric (or 'linguicentric')".

This is of course one of Andrews' fortes, explaining Nahuatl from
within rather from without (i.e., from a European language point of
view. English grammar has suffered a somewhat similar fate in having
been analyzed in the past through the lens of Latin grammar.)

As Andrews explains, what we like to term "postpositions" for
convenience sake are in truth noun stems "used to form adverbialized
NNCs." This is not to say that we can't continue to call them
"postpositions," but they are truly not postpositions.

Michael


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