maxtlatl etymology

Mon Feb 28 06:58:01 UTC 2011

My thanks again to Michael McCafferty, Magnus Hansen et. al. for their help in my pursuit of the tepemaxtla and its murky etymology. 

I’d like to clarify a couple of points.  First, the tepemaxtla is quite definitely a cacomistle (Bassariscus sp.) in Tepoztlán as attested to by the drawings of the animal on the comparsa banners of the Santa Cruz barrio (who call themselves tepemaxtlame) as well as my conversations and observations with the local villagers over the past four decades.  According to the Nomenclatura Zoológica de las Américas, the animal goes by a lot of names.  Here’s the entry:

Bassariscus astutus = Bassaris astuta = babisuri, basarisco, basaride mexicano, basáride, cacomiscle, cacomistel, cacomixtle, cacomizcle, cacomiztli, cacomiztle, cuapiote, gato ardilla, gato de cola anillada, mico de noche, tepamaxtlaton, tepechichi, tepemaxtla, uayuc. (In English it is called the civet cat, miner’s cat, ring-tailed cat, and it is the state animal of Arizona).

The same volume unfortunately has no mention of the tepemaxtla under the Vulpini tribe – the foxes. That entry - “as a species of fox” - originally appears in Francisco Hernandez’s Plantas y animales de la Nueva España (1615), and was used later by Clavijero in his Reglas (1780), and by Remi Simeon (1885) who used Hernandez as his source.   

The animal is easily confused with the fox.  The genus was first described by biologist Elliott Coues in 1887 who proposed the word "bassarisk" as the English term for animals in this genus.  The etymology of Bassariscus comes from the Greek bassár (a) fox + Neo-Latin -iscus diminutive suffix < Greek –iskos.  

Please let me clear up a second point mentioned by Michael and attributed to me in his last posting; the Hoopa, Yurok and perhaps other northwest California/southern Oregon peoples use the cacomistle/ring-tailed cat/tepemaxtla pelt with its distinctive raccoon-like tail to make an ritual apron – not a breechclout – and it is used in their White Deer Dance/World Renewal Ceremony.

 Again, thanks to all of the participating listeros,

Tom

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--- On Thu, 2/24/11, Michael McCafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu> wrote:

From: Michael McCafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] maxtlatl etymology
To: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
Date: Thursday, February 24, 2011, 11:54 PM

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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