[Nahuat-l] bodily excretions in personal names

[Michael McCafferty]

Wimmer's _Dictionnaire de la langue nahuatl classique_, citing W. 
Lehmann 1938,
marks the first a of Cuitla:huac as long. Cuitlatl has short /a/.


Now, you do get long /a:/ when cuitlatl is compounded with terms that 
start with long /a:/, such as cuitla:zcatl.

Locative terms that could be represented by the spelling "Cuitlahuac" could be

*cuitla:huac  'at the excrement oak tree' < cuitlatl + a:huatl + -c

or

*cuitla:hua:c 'at the excrement wooly caterpillar < cuitlatl + a:hua:tl + -c



Michael






Quoting Frances Karttunen <karttu at nantucket.net>:

>>
> Just a reminder that BOTH possessor suffixes (-eh for stems ending in
>  a consonant and -huah for stems ending in a vowel) themselves end in
>  saltillo.  They are -eh and -huah, not -eh and -hua.
>
> This has bearing on attempts to analyze the words spelled cuitlahua
> and cuitlahuac.  If the second form is a locative derived from the
> first, and if "cuitlahua" is in fact a form made with the possessor
> suffix -huah, then the derived form would need to have the -co form
> of the locative.
>
> This is why the whole issue is so maddeningly opaque.
>
>
>
>> Thirdly while the best translation of -eh/-hua suffixes into
>> english would be "owner of" that doesn't necessarily mean that that
>> is an exact translation. For example we know that in words such as
>> tentzoneh "beard owner", michhua "fisherman/fishowner", calpuleh
>> "calpulli leader" the meaning doesn't fit exactly 1:1 with the
>> english notion of "owner of".
>
>