maxtlatl etymology

[Michael McCafferty]

Tom:

It certainly is an interesting linguistic ride.

And thanks for keeping me honest about traipsing off into biological 
and ethnological fantasy.
:-)

Michael




Quoting grigsby tom <tom_grigsby at yahoo.com>:

> 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
>
> G.S. Rakovski St., No.79
> Boboshevo, 2660 Bulgaria
> GSM: 359 0899 784 081
>
> --- 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>
>
>
>



_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl