hu/n>c

[John Sullivan]

Joe,
1. I firmly believe (sounds like the beginning of the creed or an act of contrition) that -huia is indeed an applicative suffix, built on an unattested base of the -oa intransitive verber. Y es más, I think that when -oa looses the final -a and and goes into its combining form, the -o collapses into the -hu that it probably originated as in the first place, and then all we do is add the normal -ia applicative suffix (Amen). 
2. As far as the intransitive -oa goes, I think it also can be broken down, although I haven’t thought it through. The -o or -hu(i) was probably an impersonal verber, and the -a is a valence adder (I think that pretty much all transitive verbs ending in a, including causatives and benefactives, use this -a), which in this case adds a subject. 
3. And I think that -ia consists of two morphemes, but that’s another topic.
John

> On Sep 22, 2014, at 12:49 AM, Campbell, R. Joe <campbel at indiana.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hey John and listeros,
> 
>  When I read that Nahuatl verbing suffixes create only intransitive verbs,
> I noticed that my mouth opened and I think my heart-rate increased.  So
> I went through some word lists and came up with some examples of one type of verbing:
> 
> acalli              nin[o]acalhuia      I ride in a boat for pleasure
> 
> ahhuatl             nechahhuahuia       he scratches me with a thorn
> 
> ahmolli             nin[o]ahmolhuia     I soap myself
> 
> amatl               nicamahuia          I wrap it with paper
> 
> amochitl            nicamochihuia       I cover it with tin
> 
> camanalli           nitecacamanalhuia   I tell jests to someone
> 
> ciyacatl            nitlaciyacahuia     I hold something under my arm
> 
> eztli               nin[o]ezhuia        I bleed
> 
> huictli             nitlahuichuia       I hoe
> 
> ixtli               nitlaixhuia         I level something
> 
> nenepilli           nitlaixnenepilhuia  I lick the surface of something
> 
> izhuatl             nitlaizhuahuia      I rub something with leaves
> 
> iztatl              nitlaiztahuia       I salt something
> 
> mahpilli            nitemahpilhuia      I point at someone
> 
> matlatl             nicmatlahuia        I catch it with a net
> 
> metztli             mometzhuia          she has her monthly period
> 
> molicpitl           temolicpihuia       he elbows someone
> 
> nexayotl            quinexayohuia       he treats it with ashes and water
> 
> octli               mochuia             he gets drunk
> 
>  Is there a better way to look at words like these?
> 
> Joe
> 
> 
> 
> Quoting John Sullivan <idiez at me.com>:
> 
>> Mis estimados listeros,
>> 	A problem we have all had is accepting the fact that, for example
>> coyo:ni goes to coyoctli, then coyoctic; and chicahui/chicahua goes
>> to chicactic. In other words, why does hu or n sometimes change to c?
>> I have seen some explanations that point to historical phonological
>> processes, but I think there may be a simpler explanation. We know
>> that Nahuatl, as an agglutinating language has a smaller amount of
>> word roots than other languages, and it uses derivational affixes to
>> multiply versions of those word roots that can carry meaning.
>> Probably the most basic and important derivational process in Nahuatl
> 
>> is verbing. A Nahuatl verbing suffix creates intransitive verbs only.
> 
>> Some look like they create transitive verbs, but it's just because we
>> are skipping over a step. Anyway, I think there is a verbing suffix
>> that is not talked much about. It is -ca. This is the same -ca that
>> has, for many centuries been supposedly immune to reduction, for
>> example in cho:ca, even though we see now cho:cqui in Modern
>> variants. This is also the same -ca that we see in all of those
>> beautiful reduplications that go like this: coyo:ni, cocoyoca,
>> coyo:nia:, cocoyotza. I think this verber, for some reason (maybe
>> somebody can help with this), had two forms, -qui and -ca (this is
>> where we get hua:qui and hua:tza, although I still don't understand
>> that process well), the same way that we have a -hui/-hua verber.
>> Anyway, getting back to the argument, I have seen many examples now
>> of derivations that don't seem to make much sense. For example, how
>> come the applicative of cocoyotza is cocoyotzhuilia, when we know
>> that the -hu probably came from an o. The answer is that this
>> applicative is built on an unattested parallel version of cocoyotza,
>> cocoyotzoa (It is unattested for this verb, but in many other forms,
>> the two versions coexist). I went off on a tangent again. So what I
>> think is that when coyo:ni is transformed into a patientive noun,
>> what is actually happening is that an alternative, unattested version
>> of coyo:ni, coyoca is used as the base for that transformation. The
>> same goes for chica:hui/chica:hua, etc.
>> John
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>> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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