REPLY: Scatter shot questions

[John F. Schwaller]

> From: Gordon Whittaker <gwhitta4 at gmail.com>
> Date: 28 June 2013 22:57:06 CEST
> To: "nahuatl at lists.famsi.org" <nahuatl at lists.famsi.org>
> Subject: Re: scatter-shot questions: Moctezuma and co., malinalli, and
Chimalma(n)
>

> Dear Ben,
>
> Thanks for your questions (and David, Michael and John, for your
comments). Here
are a few reflections of my own, for what they're worth:
>
> 1)  What's the correct spelling of the name behind the horrendously garbled
"Montezuma" / "Moctezuma" variants?
>
> As has already been suggested by my colleagues, the name is construed
from a verb
with embedded noun. The verb is indeed mo-zo:ma (o: here is equivalent to the
vowel o with a macron over it for length) "to frown with severity,
displeasure, or
anger; be (or grow) angry". The embedded noun is most frequently written
either
te:cuh- (my favorite) or te:uc- (more common these days) "lord", spelling
conventions which, unfortunately, often cause beginners to mispronounce the
sequence as te-ku and te-uk, respectively! The combination of verb with
embedded
noun yields a so-called sentence name "He is (or Was) Severe Like a Lord",
which
is less a character statement with regard to two Aztec emperors and a
migration-period lord than to the sun, which was aptly so named at its midday
zenith. One can still debate on the question as to whether the name is
formed on
the present (in which case it would be Mote:cuhzo:ma and the like) or
preterite
tense (Mote:cuhzo:ma' with a final glottal stop written either ' or h, when
written at all).
>
> 2) The plural of malinalli?
>
> It's the same, whether singular or plural in meaning. Inanimate nouns
are left in
the singular in 16th-century Nahuatl. These days, however, they are often
pluralized on the analogy of Spanish.
>
> 3) The meaning of Chimalma vs. Chimalman?
>
> These usually refer to one of two legendary persons, the mother of Nacxitl
Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl or a female migration-period leader of the Mexitin,
so one
form probably underlies both spellings. In alphabetic texts,
syllable-final n can
be left off where required and added where not, similar (and related) to the
pattern in Nahuatl glyphic writing. Thus, the name can be analyzed in a
number of
ways, depending on the phonetic shape of the original. If Chimalman, then
it can
be one of three sentence names (of the "(He) Dances With Wolves" type):
>     Chi:mal-ma "She Captures Shields" (or Chi:mal-ma' "She Has Captured
Shields"),
>     Chi:mal-man "She Has Laid Out Shields" (if from mana), or
>     Chi:mal-man "She Has Spread Out Like a Shield" (if from mani).
>
> Alternatively, if a noun compound, the name can be construed as
>     Chi:mal-ma "Shield Hand".
> The nominal suffix can be left off on names: cf. Acamapich(tli) and
Axayaca(tl).
So a form Chimalmaitl is unnecessary.
>
> When writing these forms outside of a Nahuatl text (e.g. in an English
novel) you
can drop the macrons (here the colons) and the glo'l stops, as many Nahua
have
done and still do.
>
> I hope this helps.
>
> Best wishes,
> Gordon
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Gordon Whittaker
> Professor of Anthropology and Indigenous American Studies
> Dept. of Romance Philology / Institute of Ethnology
> University of Goettingen
> Germany
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>

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