elotlah huan elohtla

[Jesse Lovegren]

What you are describing seems quite interesting from a phonological point of
view.  It looks like when you have a word (generally, ...VC) ending in a
non-continuant consonant suffixed with -ya,  you end up with ...VhCa.  Can
you come up with more examples?  Is this attested in other dialects?

Without knowing better, I would guess that the process might at some earlier
point been phonologically "natural," but has now become more abstract (maybe
at a time when /h/ was pronounced as a glottal stop, the first of two
identical stop consonants meeting at a word boundary got neutralized to [ʔ],
and then the sound change which changed the glottal stop to fricative [h]
affected this place too)

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 12:03 AM, John Sullivan <idiez at me.com> wrote:

> Listeros,
> Something interesting came up today at IDIEZ. We were working on defining
> the word "elotlah" (elo-tl, -tlah), "a field with many elotes." And the
> macehualmeh kept pronouncing it "elohtla." So we figured out that there is
> indeed the "elotlah" with the relational "-tlah," but there is also an
> "elohtla" that is made up of "elotl + ya." You linguists can explain this
> better, but it looks like the "y" is being turned into a "tl", and then the
> first "tl" in the sequence is being reduced to an "h" (aspiration).  This
> also happens when "ya" is added to a word ending in "c". So itztoc, "it is",
> + "ya" goes to "itztocca", "it now is," where the first "c" is pronounced
> like an "h" (aspiration).
> "Elohtla" means "There are elotes now"
> The "ye", "now, already" of Classical is "ya" in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl
> and it never appears independently, rather it's always suffixed to words.
> It's also interesting (I think I already talked about this on the list) that
> the "ya" can be suffixed to verbs and nouns. So.....
> 1. Nichoca, "I'm crying"
> 2. Nichocaya, "I'm crying now"
> 3. Nichocayaya, "I was crying"
> 4. Nichocayayaya, "I was already crying"
> 5. Nitetahtzin, "I'm an old man"
> 6. Nitetahtzinya, "I'm an old man now"
> 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
>
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>
> idiez at me.com
> www.macehualli.org
>
>
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>


-- 
Jesse Lovegren
Department of Linguistics
645 Baldy Hall
office +1 716 645 0136
cell +1 512 584 5468
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