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Example
Classical Nahuatl interlinear gloss (word-by-word)
Vertical interlinear text for Nahuatl: segmented verb morphology (ni-, c-, chihui, -lia) aligned to English “I made my son a house”.
Example layout based on an example in the Wikipedia article Interlinear gloss (illustrative; Leipzig-style conventions).
What this example shows
Classical Nahuatl builds a verb from several stacked morphemes, and this example lines each one up against English “I made my son a house”. The clause ni-c-chihui-lia in no-piltzin ce calli reads piece by piece, so you can see where one Nahuatl word holds what English spreads across a whole phrase.
The verb, morpheme by morpheme
The single verb word ni-c-chihui-lia carries the subject, the object, the action, and a beneficiary:
- ni- 1SG.SUBJ
- First-person singular subject, “I”, as a prefix on the verb.
- c- 3SG.OBJ
- Third-person singular object marker.
- chihui make
- The verb stem, “make” or “do”.
- -lia APPL
- The applicative suffix, which adds a beneficiary to the verb, here “my son”.
The rest of the clause, no-piltzin (my son) and ce calli (a house), supplies the people and things the verb points to. no- is a possessive prefix meaning “my”.
Why the alignment looks uneven
English needs a separate word for the subject, the verb, and each object, while Nahuatl folds the subject, object, and a beneficiary into one verb. So a single Nahuatl box links to several English words, and the morpheme order inside the verb does not follow English word order. The vertical layout keeps each morpheme directly above its gloss.
Glossing conventions used here
Each morpheme is split with a hyphen and labeled either with a plain English word or with a Leipzig category tag such as APPL for the applicative. A period inside a tag, as in 1SG.SUBJ, joins several grammatical meanings that share one form.
For the category labels:
Recreate it in the editor
Open the example, set the morpheme boundary character under Settings → Tokens, and add a free-translation line if you want a smoother English rendering below the gloss. Export the diagram as PNG, SVG, or PDF for a fieldwork handout or a typology class.
See also
Related examples:
- Nahuatl with Leipzig abbreviations shows the same clause written in journal style.
- Avar interlinear gloss shows another verb that maps to several English words.
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