-oa

[John Sullivan]

Mis estimados,
	Supposedly there is a verbing suffix -oa, which creates intransitive verbs from nouns. Some examples would be:
1. tlaxcalli + -oa = tlaxcaloa. nitlaxcaloa, “I am making tortillas.”
2.marchar (incorporated into Nahuatl as a noun) + -oa = marcharoa. nimarcharoa, “I am marching.”
	Now -oa doesn’t look to me much like a morpheme, considering what morphemes look like in náhuatl. Having the two vowels together is kind of strange. And along with the fact that the a drops off for many tenses, and is replaced by h in the preterite stem (suggesting that we are dealing with an older morpheme, -ta or -tla), I would prefer to think that the a is actually a causative suffix working on an impersonal verb, made up of the noun and a verbing suffix, maybe -hui or -hua, which then collapses down into o when the a is added.
	So it would look something like this:
1. tlaxcalli + -hui = tlaxcalhui, “tortillas are made” (not attested anywhere that I am aware of)
2. tlaxcalhui > tlaxcalo + a = tlaxcaloa, “to cause tortillas to be made”
	Unmerciful criticism is welcome.
John
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