N-ti verbs (again-5/5)

[M Launey]

Dear listeros

One last message about N-ti verbs and Mary’s examples (ah-)hueliti (5) and pahti (6). After that, my plan is to keep silent unless new elements pop up in the list (I mean, new elements for discussion, not just assertive statements that « have » will be « have » and that there is no reason for analyzing what « have » stands for).

(5) (ah-)hueliti (I see no occurrence of hueliti without negation in my notes, but it may be omission from me, or casual lack in the corpus). The word hueli has a very specific behavior, its status is unclear, adverb or noun (« possible » or « possibly », I can give examples if you like). But –ti also appears with clearly adverbial roots, like mōztlati « arrive to tomorrow », teohtlacti (usually impersonal) « it’s getting late », nēnti (Carochi : ōnēntic in nociyahuiz « my efforts were vain »), immanti (FC VI,131 Immantiz in cāhuitl… « The day will come [when…] »), so hueli-ti is plausible with a meaning like « realize a possibility ».

(6) pahti, clearly related to pahtli « medicine » (of all kinds : drinkable, eatable, plaster, splint or maybe magic). Pahti is usually translated by « recover, cure, heal » (intransitive) and from there we have the transitive pahtia « cure (s.o.) ». Since it nipahti cannot be glossed by « I am/become/am used as medicine », Mary and other colleagues suggest the glosss « I have medicine ».

I’m not a native speaker of English, but it seems to me that this gloss doesn’t work very well. In French at least « J’ai un médicament/des médicaments » describes a stative, aspectless situation, e.g. « I have some medicine in my purse/closet », not « I am healed/recovering », and two native English speakers I asked agree with that interpretation. Of course things are a little better if you admit that « have » stands for an abstract relation : if X « has » Y, that means that Y has some kind of relation (spatial, possessive…) to X which is used as its « localizer », if this word exists, so in this particular case a better gloss would be something like « a medicine is related to me ». But even so, we miss the most important point, namely : N-ti describes a dynamic event, which is expressed through verbal categories of Tense, Aspect and Mood. But I admit that my usual gloss « make N » is not pretty good either (this word does not mean « I make some medicine »). So we are in a quandary.

But there is a way out, and I thank Michael Swanton for that. In a personal mail, he pointed out that some nouns are ambiguous, referring both to a general, abstract notion, and to a specific entity that contributes to the realization of this notion. The most striking one, for the present issue, is yāōtl, which sometimes means « war » and sometimes « enemy ». This means (or is the consequence of ?) that yāōti can be accounted for in both semantic subtypes of N-ti : either « I realize war, wage war » (as an external process), or « I behave like an enemy » (and for this reason I am an enemy).

Things are admittedly different with pahtli, but if pahtli also can mean « cure » in general (and remember that it applies to all kinds of medicines and healings), then « I realize a cure » is a good gloss and fits in the general interpretation I suggested.

Thanks for your attention

Michel Launey
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