Tloc, nahuac, tech, tlan

[Michael McCafferty]

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

> Estimado Michael:


Good to hear from you, David.

>
> 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 understand what you're saying. Of course, I simply wanted to make 
sure that our listeros understand the actual syntactical situation for 
Nahuatl, for these "postpositions" are identified as such in quite 
respectable, modern books. This is fine, as you suggest, when it comes 
to teaching beginners. But for the many of the folks on this list who 
have advanced knowledge of the language, I think we need to use 
"postpositions" with a wink and a nod.



>
> 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.

It's difficult to know how far Launay saw into the language, in this 
particular regard, when he wrote his thesis or book. This is one reason 
I like to read Andrews, as he has been able to see deeply into the 
language. If one continues to chew on what Andrews says, one will come 
to realize that he's generally right in his analyses. His explication 
of "postpositions" is impressive.

I wonder if his book is readable on the web.


> Saludos,

si, a cambio.

Michael



>
> 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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