The following dialogue was stolen from the thrower_request list. To join this excellent email list, follow the instructions at the bottom of the Primitive Technology web page. Many thanx to Chris Smith and Ben Pressley for all of their research efforts.
I don't know if everyone got a look at this or not, so I'm posting it for everyone. Chris Smith came up with some great info on the origins of the word, ATLATL. He actually located a homepage on the Aztec language and corresponded with them. I really found it fascinating and it cleared up a mystery for me. Thanks to Chris! ---Benjamin (benjamin@perigee.net)
 
HERE'S THE INFO. :
Benjamin,
 
This may be over the top, but it's come to my attention that the language of the Aztec was and still is Nahuatl. There is a Nahuatl list for teaching and preservation of the language. Your answer to the meaning of the word "atlatl" may be there on that list ("The list may also be used to answer questions about Nahuatl translations."). English and Spanish are the joint languages of that list. I have written to the Nahuatl FAQ's unmoderators, Victor Mendoza-Grado for his take on the words meaning, but have not received an answer yet. The subscription information to the list,
NAHUAT-L, follows.
 
Chris
 
http://www.indians.org/welker/nahuatl.htm
 
Here's an awful lot of definative derivation and meaning of the Nahuatl "word" atlatl. I subscribed to the NAHUAT-L, the list for propagation and discussion of the Nahuatl language, as I mentioned we might yesterday and the academic outpouring was awesome.
Subject: Atlatl Date:Mon, 9 Dec 1996 10:49:22 -0700 From: fkarttunen@mail.utexas.edu (Frances Karttunen) Reply-To: nahuat-l@server.umt.edu
 
Concerning atlatl, it is only the spelling that makes it look like atl-atl. In fact, the Nahuatl stem is ahtla- with a saltillo in the first syllable. When you add the absolutive suffix -tl, you get ahtla-tl.
Because Spanish speakers had a hard time hearing saltillo (glottal stop), they almost never wrote it. When they did, they used an "h" or a diacritical mark over the preceding vowel. The Jesuit grammarian Horacio Carochi was very thorough about explaining and notating saltillo with diacritics, but the practice never caught on. Nahuatl speakers generally didn't bother writing saltillos, because they KNEW where they were. The only people really in the dark about it are those of us who try to learn Nahuatl from incomplete sources. So the Nahuatl word for a spear thrower has nothing to do with water: (a:-tl, where the stem vowel is long, and the -tl is the absolutive suffix). In fact, the stem ahtla- just seems to mean 'spear thrower' and can't be analyzed into smaller constituent parts. Also, it's not pronounced atl-atl in Nahuatl, although it certainly is by anthropologists and throwing enthusiasts.
 
Frances Karttunen
Subject: Atlatl Date: Mon, 9 Dec 1996 07:34:23 -0700 From: Ian.Robertson@asu.edu
Reply-To: nahuat-l@server.umt.edu
Re: post inquiring into the meaning of 'atlatl':
 
Chris,
Francis Karttunen can give you a more authorative answer than I can, and what I know about your question I am sure I learned from her dictionary. "Atlatl" has nothing to do with water, but I guess you will be interested to learn that it has something to do with slings. A sling in Nahuatl is 'tlatl'; a throwing board is 'ahtlatl' (normally written without the 'h'). The word is formed by the negative particle 'ah' and the word for sling - i.e., something that is not a sling. [N.B. You should check all of this in Karttunen's dictionary - I am working purely from memory:
Karttunen, F. 1992 An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.
 
Best, Ian Robertson
Ian G. Robertson
Department of Anthropology
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-2402
Ian.Robertson@asu.edu
Subject: Atlatl Date: Mon, 09 Dec 1996 08:26:54 -0600 (CST) From: Alec Christensen <christaf@ctrvax.Vanderbilt.Edu> To: Chris Smith <chriss@rand.nidlink.com>
 
ah-tlatl : atlatl
ma:-tlatl: sling
h indicates glottal stop, : lengthening of the preceding vowel. The "ah-" prefix means "not", while "ma:-itl" means hand. Thus, an ah-tlatl is a "not tlatl" while a sling is a "hand tlatl". I cannot recall the derivation I once learned for tlatl, and it's not in the dictionary, but I think something along the lines of "twisted string", or something to that effect, might be appropriate. Thus a sling is a string used with the hand, and an atlatl is not a string. Yes, "atl" also means water, but that word bears no relation to atlatl.
 
ALec Christensen
Department of Anthropology
Vanderbilt University
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 1996 11:07:04 -0700 From: fkarttunen@mail.utexas.edu (Frances Karttunen)
Reply To: nahuat-l@server.umt.edu
 
Actually, the word for 'sling' is ma:tla-tl, so ahtla-tl doesn't appear to be the negation of 'sling.' (That would have to be *ahma:tla-tl).
Now one could make the argument that ma:tla-tl can be analyzed as 'hand-sling' from ma:- 'hand/arm' and tla-tl, but there would have to be some sleight of hand to explain how, if the word is a compound, the stem-final vowel of ma:tla- drops off in the possssed form. ('My sling' is noma:tl, not *noma:tla.)
If one is undaunted by this little problem, one could go on to analyze ma:xtla-tl 'breechclout' as meaning 'crotch sling' by compounding maxac- 'crotch' with -tla-tl. But here you run into a discrepancy of vowel length (ma:x- versus maxac-) as well as needing to get rid of a syllable.
While these are fun to play around with, neither 'hand-sling' nor 'crotch-sling' stands up to scrutiny. :)
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