Help with the Florentine Codex

Campbell, R. Joe campbel at indiana.edu
Thu Mar 21 21:00:11 UTC 2013


Nocnihuan,

   I have another problem.  No, it's not that I'm getting bad gas mileage in
my car -- and my dogs aren't sick.  It's a word or maybe a phrase of Nahuatl
in the Florentine Codex.

   Book 2, page 59 (twenty-second chapter) of the Dibble and Anderson edition:

... yn aic omaltique, qujnmuchiquacmaltia, mamoujia:
D&A's English translation: they washed the heads of all; they soaped
themselves.

My problem is that for the "-maltia" portion to be logical, the 'm' needs to
represent a reflexive object prefix "m(o)-".  When you look at the
corresponding section of the facsimile of the Florentine, there is a very
small blank space before "-maltia", but that is not crucial to the problem.
It simply seems that from the morphological point of view, "maltia" must be a
separate word.

That leaves: qujnmuchiquac = quinmochicuac.  Molina gives "quin icuac"
('quin ihcuac') as 'entonces'.  If 'moch' can be interpolated in this
phrase, the problem is solved.

quin moch ihcuac maltia  = then everyone bathes

What do y'all think?

I would appreciate some help.

Joe


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