[Nahuat-l] Understanding of a folk etymology

Fri Apr 24 09:22:44 CDT 2009

Dear all,

Yes, 360 x 52 = 72 x 260. The five days wwere without signs, if I remember,
hence the ne:n 'in vain' (more or less). Victor Castillo had an article in
Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl a long time ago i which he talks about the problem
of a "leap year" to keep the calendar in tune / time with agricultural cycles
and how this could be done. He suggested a 48-hour day during the ne:nonte:mi.

Best, jonathan

Quoting Galen Brokaw <brokaw at buffalo.edu>:

> Evidently, my message last night, or early this morning rather, went
> through garbled. Here it is again.
> Galen
>
> Joe,
> Your explanation sounds very familiar. So I'm sure that you did answer this
> question several years ago when I originally asked, perhaps not on the list,
> which would explain why I couldn’t find it in the archive. I should have
> remembered this. I wish I could blame it on age. :-)
> In any case, before someone else points it out, I also wanted to clarify
> something in my previous message. I mispoke, or I guess mis-wrote, which is
> worse, in saying that the five day differential at the end of the year is
> produced by the difference between the solar year and the 360-day cycle
> produced
> by the combination of the 20 days signs and 13 numbers. Of course, this
> combination produces a cycle of 260 days, not 360. The 360 cycle is
> produced by
> the series of 18 months of twenty days each, which comes to 360 days
> with the
> five days of nemontemi left over to complete the solar year of 365 days.
>
> Galen
>
>
>
> Campbell, R. Joe wrote:
>> I'd like to second Galen's judgement of "good question". "nemontemi"
>> certainly gets the linguistic cogs turning in more frenzy than the
>> analysis of some other problems. I'll give here what is a short form
>> of what I think is a possible solution and come back later with more
>> material.
>>
>> I think the initial element of "nemontemi" is the particle "ne:m" and
>> the rest of the "phrase" is "on-te:mi". "ne:m" means "useless, in
>> vain, fruitless" and usually shows up as "nen", since it appears more
>> often before consonants than before vowels (e.g., "ninenquiza (I fail
>> to have success), nentlacatl (worthless person, nentlachiuhtli
>> (unnecessary thing), etc.).
>>
>> I think the sense of "nemontemi" (or perhaps earlier, as a phrase,
>> "nen ontemi": it uselessly fills (those empty five days)
>>
>> Mary finds in the vocabulario anonimo (Ayer ms. 1478):
>>
>> nenontemi Bissiesto
>>
>> ilhuitl nenontemi entrepuesto dia
>>
>> I'll be back later,
>>
>> Joe
>>
>>
>> Quoting Galen Brokaw <brokaw at buffalo.edu>:
>>
>>> This is a good question. I'd be interested in any responses as well. I
>>> puzzled over this for quite a while at one time. I seem to remember
>>> posting this same question to the list a number of years ago, but I
>>> couldn't find it in the archive. In my possibly false memory of that
>>> query, I don't think I got any response.
>>> I've seen several different interpretations of the morphology of this
>>> word, all of which seemed to be based on merely identifying certain
>>> elements as morphemes without explaining grammatically how they work
>>> together. And they also often fail to account for all of the morphology.
>>> I think the rationale behind claiming that it means "what has been
>>> lived, to complete" is based on the fact that the beginning of the word
>>> is 'nem' which calls to mind 'nemi' (to live) and the last part is
>>> 'temi' which means 'to fill up.' But the grammatical implication of this
>>> morphological interpretation is that you have a verb-verb compound
>>> ostensibly joined by the directional particle 'on.' The problem is that
>>> I don't think we have any other examples of this kind of structure.
>>> Having said that, interpreting the 'temi' part as 'to fill up' is
>>> particularly attractive. As I'm sure you know, the word refers to the
>>> five day period in the calendar at the end of the solar year between the
>>> end of the 360-cycle of 20 day signs and 13 numbers and the beginning of
>>> the new solar year. So 'temi' makes a certain sort of sense in that the
>>> period to which 'nemontemi' refers could be conceived of as the five-day
>>> remainder left over from the completion of the calendrical cycle
>>> involving the combination of the 20 day signs and 13 numbers, which is
>>> used to "fill up" the difference between that 360-day cycle and the
>>> 365-day solar year. I won't bore you with all of my other speculative
>>> attempts to make sense of the other elements. They are probably fairly
>>> obvious anyway. In the end, though, I couldn't figure out a way to
>>> account for all of the elements of the word in a way that would also be
>>> grammatically consistent. I may be missing something obvious here,
>>> though. If I'm not, then we have to keep in mind that the calendar had a
>>> very long tradition, and the Nahuas inherited it from other groups. So
>>> the term may even have originally derived from some other language.
>>> There are a good number of other morphological puzzles sort of like this
>>> in Nahuatl, but my impression is that relatively speaking they are few.
>>> This has always been sort of surprising to me. I have a theory about why
>>> this is the case, but I won't subject you to it at this point.
>>>
>>> Galen Brokaw
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> micc2 wrote:
>>>> In a yahoo group dedicated to Aztec dancers, I saw this:
>>>> *[ConsejoQuetzalcoat l] NEMONTEMI means "what has been lived, to
>>>> complete"
>>>>
>>>> *
>>>>
>>>> *can anyone tell me what the generally accepted meaning of this word
>>>> is, and how a definitition of the end of the yeara could be seen as
>>>> **"what has been lived, to complete"?
>>>> *
>>>>
>>>> *
>>>> Thanks in advanced!***
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>>
>>>> I live for reasoned, enlightened spirituality:
>>>>
>>>> "Tlacecelilli", tranquilidad, paz
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Mario E. Aguilar, PhD
>>>> www.mexicayotl.org
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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-- 
Jonathan D. Amith
Director: Mexico-North Program on Indigenous Languages
Research Affiliate: Gettysburg College; Yale University; University of Chicago
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