tezcatlipoca

Michael McCafferty mmccaffe at indiana.edu
Tue Nov 22 21:55:12 UTC 2011


John:

I looked through the archives and figured finally that it was 
"Teotihuacan" not "Tezcatlipoca" that was discussed. Sorry for the 
mistaken reference.

Tezozomoc's explanation is found in Karttunen's dictionary. I'm not 
entranced by it.

Here's what I think is happening with "Tezcatlipoca". (If Joe cringes, 
I will be able to feel it from afar.)

I think the name is Proto-Nahuatl. In other words, I think it's a very 
old name, and this evidenced by the noun form for "mirror," *te:zcatli, 
which would be an older form of te:zcatl.

The modern verb meaning 'smoke' is of course popo:ca, but it seems to 
me that that form is inherently an old reduplicated form, po- being the 
reduplicate suffix, and that at the Proto-Nahuatl level, there was 
probably a verb in the form *po:ca.

If this is correct, then the straight translation would be 'mirror-it 
smokes', which is pretty much what everyone has always said the name 
meant, 'smoking mirror'.


Michael




Quoting John Sullivan <idiez at me.com>:

> Piyali Tezo huan ne cequin listeros,
> 	Are there many intransitive/transitive pairs in -ca/-tza besides the
> reduplicatives?
> John
>
> On Nov 22, 2011, at 12:45 PM, Mr Tezozomoc wrote:
>
>> Tezca-tl(i): Mirror
>> *ihpoca: to burp
>> Intransitive ihpoca is only attested in Tezcatlihpoca.  It's meaning
>> is taken from what would be it's transitive pair, Ihpotza.
>> The reason  why it's 1. it''s glyph, 2. ihpoca is similar to popoca:
>> to smoke 3. a possible extened meaning burp/ belch/ puff
>>
>> this analysis was given to me by Huitzilmazatzin....
>>
>> Tezozomoc.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 7:37 AM, John Sullivan <idiez at me.com> wrote:
>> Listeros,
>>        How about some morphology for tezcatlipoca?
>> John
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>
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