Re:A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon
by bane on Friday June 17, 2022 @09:19AM
(#31777708)
I'm wondering if anybody can shed light on the prevalence of 'TL' in so many Aztec language words? IIR it's a latinized way of representing a single unique consonant, but it's fascinating that it's in nearly every name and in so many other Aztec words I've seen.
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Re:A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon
by sudenmorsian on Friday June 17, 2022 @10:54AM
(#31779098)
In Classical Nahuatl, non-possessed nouns would take the absolutive case with -tl for nouns ending in vowels, and -tli for nouns ending in consonants. [0] Here, as you mentioned, <tl> marks a single consonant: the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate /tɬ/ [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Nahuatl_grammar#Noun...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_aff...
There is some limited discussion here[0] which doesn't fully explain the prevalence of "tl" but suggests the word "atl" meaning "water" was very common and often combined with other words to create new words metaphorically.
I've read that 'tl' was similar to the welsh 'll' sound (a kind of hissy L sound, though not really, youtube will have some spoken examples) but when I've heard 'tl' spoken it usually sounds like a 'tl', as in 'little'.
Re:A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon
by sudenmorsian on Friday June 17, 2022 @12:36PM
(#31780748)
Yes, it’s a very similar sound. The Welsh <ll> is the voiceless lateral fricative /ɬ/, which is effectively <tl> without the initial ‘t’ at the start of the phoneme.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
Re:A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon
by craigbaker on Friday June 17, 2022 @12:48PM
(#31780920)
It is a common noun-forming suffix in Nahuatl. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-tl