Re: Uto-Aztecan [was: What is an IE language]

Dirk wrote:

> * absolutive suffixes: The Uto-Aztecan absolutive is not a case suffix; it
is a suffix (or more typically a group of suffixes) which appears on a noun
in citation form but may drop when a noun is subjected to various
morphological processes, such as affixation (possession, postpositions),
compounding, or reduplication. (The characteristic -tl of Nahuatl is an
absolutive with allomorphs -tli and -lli.)

Mh... now I understand why the incorporation of _nacatl_ "meat" yields
_-naca-_. My textbook gives two Nahuatl sample sentences (I hope to remember
them correctly; the book is offhand) to show how incorporating languages
work: "nicqua in nacatl" (I eat meat) and "ninacaqua" (lit.: I meat-eat). No
interlinear was given, and I supposed -tl was a morph conveying some case
mark (accusative or absolutive, but I had no idea about UA syntactic
structures). I tried to parse the two sentences and this is what I got:

nic-qua in nacatl
1s-eat * meat

(where * is some sort of object mark or a determiner, perhaps) and:

ni-naca-qua
1s-meat-eat

Makes sense?


Luca

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