tlanemilizamoxtli

[Campbell, R. Joe]

Nocnihuan,

   I'm not sure whether I should be feeling *good* today about
having solved a problem in the morphology of one Nahuatl word or
*bad* (read: embarrassed) at the time that it took me to see the
light.

The problem word: tlanemilizamoxtli, which Molina glosses as
especulatiua arte.

   It looks simple enough:

     tla  -  nemi  -  liz  -  amoxtli

BUT!!  nemi is an intransitive verb and therefore can't take the
object tla- .

   I finally considered the "benefactive" form of nemi (referred
to by some as the "applicative"), which would require increasing the
number of object arguments from zero to one, or to put it another
way, would require the use of the object "tla-".  That corresponded
to the occurrence of the following item from Molina's
dictionaries:

  nemilia , nitla.
   considerar trazando lo que se ha de hazer o dezir {55m-3}   p11-p51-nemi-ben
   acordar o deliberar algo {71m1-1a}   p11-p51-nemi-ben
   ymaginar {71m1-13}   p11-p51-nemi-ben
   pensar, o deliberar algo {71m2-12}   p11-p51-nemi-ben


The argument against my idea is that this would result in the form:

   tlanemililiztli, not tlanemiliztli


But it turns out that "tlanemiliztli" is exactly the result that
one would expect when the relatively common (in Nahuatl) phenomenon
of 'haplology' occurs.  Haplology is the deletion of one of two
identical or similar consecutive syllables.  It occurs in
"probly" (a variant of "probably") in English.  Although many
English dictionary makers might not take note of it, Molina
recorded many haplologized and non-haplologized forms in his
dictionaries (tlanemililiztli does, in fact, occur).



So, to sum up, the analysis of Nahuatl morphology does not permit
us to take into account only the collated surface forms -- we
must consider *all* of the possible subtle operations that might
be involved.  The very ‘li(a)’ that allows the object ‘tla-‘ to be
prefixed to the verb is not literally present.  However, its *implicit*
presence is evidenced by:

a.	the finite verb form which is the logical base for ‘tlanemiliztli’ is
‘tlanemilia’.
b.	the alternation between the semantically equivalent forms 
‘tlanemiliztli’,‘tlanemililiztli’.


I am left with the minor task of finding a label for this particular 
haplological (or haplogical) operation in Nahuatl morphology.  In view 
of
the –ya deletion process (xoco(-tl) > xoco-ya > xoco (-ya) –c > xococ), which
is now widely referred to as ‘delya’, it is tempting to call it ‘del-li’.

Itayomeh

Joe









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