unified grammatical categories

[John Sullivan]

Piyali notequixpoyohuan,
	IDIEZ is going to be working for the next five years with the U of Warsaw and the U of Sevilla on a project to document language change in Nahuatl from the contact to the present (no big deal!). Anyway, since we are going to use a unified database to record material for many variants across space and time, I find myself in the position of having to decide on a single set of grammatical categories for the language as a whole. And I figured there might be one or two people on the list that might have something to say about this.
	Personally, I don't have trouble with the categories of verb (tlachihualiztlahtolli) or relational word (tlapantiliztlahtolli). Everything else is kind of a haze. Perhaps I'll start with nouns. There are two kinds of nouns that pop into my head. Those that have an absolutive suffix (cihuatl, pahtli, macehualli, michin, chichi [Ø]; and those that are formed from verbs and pretty much conserve their verbal form (tlahcuiloh, tecuani, topileh, tequihuah, xochiyoh, -chicahuaca, etc.). Some people say that in Nahuatl all of these are nouns. But actually they can take on multiple functions. "Cuauhtli" can work as a noun, an adjective "cuauhpilli",  or an adverb, "cuauhtemoc". Now I'm going to make up some words, and I hope they are acceptable. "Teopixqui", "priest" (not made up), could also be an adjective "teopixcatequitl" or an adverb, "teopixcanehnemi".
	And then, in Huastecan Nahuatl, "teopixqui" would be "teopixquetl". This is also hypothetical, since "priest" in the Huasteca es "totahtzin". But the principle of taking these agentive nouns and adding the absolutive suffix is standard practice. 
	What I am thinking now is that there is a category of words that can function as nouns, adjectives and adverbs, depending mostly on predictable variations in their endings (presence or absence of the absolutive suffix; cycling between -ca, -que, -qui, -c, -Ø, etc.). For this reason it doesn't make much sense to me to talk about separate categories of noun, adjective, adverb. Or is it possible to combine these three functions into one? I sure would like to come up with something rational,( i.e., that doesn't haphazardly combine criteria of form and function), that would aid native speakers (and especially young students) in understanding how their language works.
	And we still have "particles" to discuss.
John
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