campotic, campohtic

[John Sullivan]

Notequixpoyohuan,
	There is a set of synonymous words, campotic and campohtic, in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl, that mean, “a person with big cheeks”. The first part, from “ca:ntli”, “cheek” [Molina 12v] is not a problem, but Iʻm not sure about the first element of the second part “-po-tic” / “poh-tic”. Here are some possibilities:
1.  It could be a shortened version of “potz”, for there is a “campopotztic” in Molina [12r], meaning “a person with big cheeks”. But in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl “campotztic” means “a person with cheeks stuffed with food”. And anyway, I donʻt think itʻs very likely that “tz” would be deleted or elided before “t” or changed into “h”.
2. Could it be the “poh” that Andrews (p. 124, new edition) discusses as a “Naturally Possessed Nounstem… denoting kinship and certain other human relations”? And could this “poh” be the missing d’Artagnan of the three preterite agentives, “-eh”, “-huah” and “-yoh”? And in the same way that these agentives come from the older verbs, “ea", hua(a)” and “yoa”, couldnʻt “poh” be the preterite agentive form of “poa”, and couldnʻt there be a patientive noun root “po-“? Both of these could combine with “tic”. At least in Modern Huastecan Nahuatl, these agentives donʻt always use “-ca” for the combing form (conehuah, “pregnant woman”. conehuahtiya, “to become pregnant”). The only real problem here would be getting from the normal meaning of “-poh”  as “kinship and other relations” to something more like “-yoh”, “covered with, full of”.
John
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