Nahuatl Digest, Vol 251, Issue 4

[Michael McCafferty]

Quoting Magnus Pharao Hansen <magnuspharao at gmail.com>:

> Listeros
>
> You should all take a look at Una Canger's Five Studies of Nahuatl Verbs in
> -Oa, because in this book she goes into quite some detail about the
> histories of the different verbal endings such as -ca,-ni, -wa, -wi, -tza.
> It is clear from her account that it is not the case that we can simply
> postulate historical verbs with the ending -qui or -ca to account for the
> -ctli ending because the different endings create different kinds of verbs.
>
> What is the grain of this is that we have a morphonphonetic alternation
> between /k/ and /w/  in certain words, I am quite convinced that this is a
> significant historical phenomenon that can be addressed only by a detailed
> study of the Nahuan and Uto-Aztecan historical phonemics. I did some
> research on this in 2009 and am in the process of writing up the results.

I've been thinking exactly along these lines, Magnus. These are good points.

Michael

>
> What got me interested is that in many dialects the alternation is not
> twofold between /k/ and /w/ but threefodl between /k/, /w/ and /n/. Where n
> is the reflex in word final position after long vowel, k is the reflex
> syllable finally before *t and w is the reflex between vowels. This
> actually gets to a proposal studied by R. Joe Campbell in IJAL in 1976, and
> also proposed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in his Milpa Alta sketch in which he
> suggests that Proto-Nahuatl had a phoneme  /?w/ with a nasal reflex in
> Tepoztlan Nahuatl. Dakin and Ryesky notes is also the case for all the
> dialects of Morelos, and which is in fact also the case for many Zongolica
> dialects, at least historically.Then my hunch, which I haven't yet fully
> made into an argument is that the k/w/n  alternation can be reconstructed
> back to the same phoneme that gives an alternatione between g/n/m/w/mw in
> general Uto-Aztecan (sometimes reconstructed as a nasal final feature,
> sometimes as a lenis nasal, and sometimes as an ?w).
>
> I am still working on this, but I'll be presenting some of my data at the
> Northeastern conference in New Haven in May.
>
> best,
> Magnus
>
>
> On 1 March 2012 13:00, <nahuatl-request at lists.famsi.org> wrote:
>
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>> Today's Topics:
>>
>>   1. Re: tlacoyoctli, tlacotoctli /and/ /coyoctli/ (Michael McCafferty)
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Michael McCafferty <mmccaffe at indiana.edu>
>> To: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
>> Cc:
>> Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2012 12:51:51 -0500
>> Subject: Re: [Nahuat-l] tlacoyoctli, tlacotoctli /and/ /coyoctli/
>> On the same page, he also adds:
>>
>> "Nouns meaning "a thing of such-and-such a color" are created by this
>> means from incorporated-noun-as-adverb compounds formed on the matric
>> e:hua, 'to arise':
>>
>> (ti:c-e-c)-tli = a chalk-colored thing [ < (ti:c-e:-hua) < (ti:za)tl +
>> e:hua)]"
>>
>>
>> (Note occepa that la voyelle shortens.)
>>
>>
>> Michael
>>
>>
>>
> --
> Magnus Pharao Hansen
> PhD. student
> Department of Anthropology
>
> Brown University
> 128 Hope St.
> Providence, RI 02906
>
> *magnus_pharao_hansen at brown.edu*
> US: 001 401 651 8413
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