maxtlatl etymology

[Michael McCafferty]

Sorry that I have taken such a long time to get back to this.

It's good to remember, I think, that language is an expression of a 
biological, organic entity, and necessarily exhibits the traits of a 
biological organism. In other words, it doesn’t work like a machine, 
not in the way and to the extent that grammarians and morphologists 
would like for it to.

And it doesn’t evolve like a machine, regardless of the many 
regularities that we can observe within it. It’s not metal or plastic; 
it’s more like a plant than a food processor.

I think this relates to something Joe Campbell told me, something 
Frances Karttunen had told him and John Sullivan once—-that our 
theories about morphology and grammar are always going to be like cloth 
that is a little frayed around the edges, not cloth that has a finely 
stitched edge perfectly aligned.

A little fraying of the edges is precisely, I think, what is going on 
in the case of tepe:ma:xtlatl, and nothing more.

Richard Andrews’ analysis of ma:xtlatl, which appears on page 282 of 
the second edition of his grammar, is notable:

“(ma:xa)-tl, “crotch, bifurcation” + (tla)-tl, “strip of cloth, 
leather” = (ma:x-tla)-tl “breechcloth” [The loss of the embed’s tem’s 
ephemeral /a/ is irregular. Compare (ma:xa-c)-tli-
]”

Although there are times when you can scratch your head reading 
Andrews’ grammar, I do trust the depth of his morphology sensibilities.

His analysis thus indicates that  tepe:ma:xtlatl  ‘fox’ is literally 
“mountain-breechcloth”. (Tom has told me off-list that fox skins were 
used for breechcloths. Not really that bad a name for the fox 
considering that in Northern Iroquoian the animal is called “bad-skin”.)

(But there still is a tiny part of me (the machine-oriented part, I 
fear) that keeps drawing me back to the irregular and virtually 
inalienably possessed form of ma:xatl, which is -ma:xtli, as in 
noma:xtli, moma:xtli, amomax:tli, etc., and the popularized modern term 
“maxtli”.

That tiny part keeps saying that the possessed form's final -tli (which 
Joe has pointed out to me has the same final -i as in the possessed 
form -co:zqui of co:zcatl) could have been reanalyzed by native 
speakers as the absolutive suffix -tli, and thus was dropped to give us 
the ma:x- form of the root that we see  ma:x-tlatl.  But I’m willing to 
drop that idea. :-)

Michael


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