pixcomitl

[IDIEZ]

Piyali notequixpoyohuan,
	I found s.t. really interesting today. In Modern Huastecan Nahuatl, a “pixcomitl” is a hooked tool, made from bamboo or metal used for harvesting and shucking corn.  Obviously the “pix-” would seem to come from “pixca,” but the rest of the word has puzzled me. Now I find out that a synonym is “pixconi.” This is “pixca” going to the passive “pixco” with the customary present “-ni” suffix. So “pixconi” would be an instrument for harvesting. This is interesting because this grammatical construction for naming instruments is not used in the Huasteca: in fact this is the first use of it that I have encountered. Perhaps it has been borrowed from another region where this construction is/was common. And perhaps to ease the bruised sensibilities of the Huastecan Nahuas to whom this word, “pixconi” didn’t quite feel like a noun, they cemented its nominalization by adding the absolutive “-tl” suffix, and changed the ’n” to “m” (after all, how many Nahuatl nouns can you think of that end in “-nitl”? Now think of how many nouns there are that end in “-mitl” and reduce to “-n” in the possessed form.)
	And this process (the first one) is used with preterite agentives in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl too. Whereas in Central variants you would have “tepahtih“ or “tepahtihqui” for “healer,” in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl we have “tepahtihquetl.”
	I know this is a lot of perhaps‘s, maybe‘s and if‘s.
John

John Sullivan, Ph.D.
Professor of Nahua Language and Culture
Zacatecas Institute for Teaching and Research in Ethnology
Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas
+52 (492) 925-3425 (office)
+52 1 (492) 103-0195 (mobile)
idiez at me.com
www.macehualli.org

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