atzontzompantla

[John Sullivan]

Tom,
	You're right. This is a hard "altepenym", but let's go through and look at a few things we DO know.
1. The vast majority of altepenyms are composed of a noun stuck onto a locative root. Here there are two possibilities for the locative root. It is either a). -tlan, "town of the...." or b) -tlah, "town of abundant...." Since word final "n"s in multisyllable words are devoiced in Nahuatl, the "n" in -tlan is offen not included in spelling. And we know that "h", especially in the word final position is practically never written. So we really have no way of telling which of the endings is used for Atzontzompantla. But we know it's one of the two.
2. In the vast majority of cases, the embedded noun refers to some geophysical aspect of sacred landscape. In less cases it refers to a plant or an animal that plays a role in nahuatl spirituality. In even less cases it is a verb expressing an action related to a ceremony or myth/legend (which in turn is related to sprituality and sacred landscape). At times it can refer to a sacred instrument (used in a ceremony). And in a very small set of cases, the embedded noun is the name of a deity. So.... when in doubt, assume that your altepenym composed of a noun referring to sacred landscape or a sacred plant or animal, plus the locative root. In other words, if a town is named Tocatlan, from "tocatl", "spider" and -tlan, it doesn't mean that there are a lot of spiders in the area. Rather, it refers to the spider as an animal that plays a role in Mesoamerican spirituality. There has been some debate on nahuat-l about this, and many people don't agree with me, so take that into account.
	Michael has suggested that we are dealing with tzompamitl, "coral tree" or tzompantli, "scull-rack". Both of these are in line with what I say above.
 3. A big problem that I referred to before is the presence of the "n" on the first "tzon" if this is indeed is a reduplication of the second "tzon/tzom". Actually I have seen some attestations of reduplications that include a final consonant on a funny little database called "Alpha", but I don't think this kind of reduplication is explained in any of the classical grammars. I would prefer to think that the "atzon-" and "tzompantli/tzompamitl" are separate elements. So the question is, What is the "atzon-". The first thing we think of is that the "a-" corresponds to "water" and this is a good guess because water appears in a large number of altepenyms, and because of the explanation given by the townspeople. But there is another possibility: ahtzon- might mean "topless" ("ah-", "negative" plus "tzontli", "hair, and by extension, the head, top, end or culmination of something"). This would work morphologically, because when you prefix "ahtzon (the "h" disappears in everyday spelling)" to "tzompamitl/tzompantli" the final "n" wouldn't drop off. So the question is, Is there anything in Mesoamerican stories referring to a coral tree or a skull rack whose top has been cut off or removed?
John

John Sullivan, Ph.D.
Professor of Nahua language and culture
Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas
Zacatecas Institute of Teaching and Research in Ethnology
Tacuba 152, int. 43
Centro Histórico
Zacatecas, Zac. 98000
Mexico
Work: +52 (492) 925-3415
Fax: +1 (858) 724-3030 (U.S.A.)
Home: +52 (492) 768-6048
Mobile: +52 1 (492) 103-0195
idiez at me.com
www.macehualli.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/nahuat-l/attachments/20100828/ece50563/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl