Hikʷɨyawa

PSUA *hikʷɨyawa "heart, breath, life force" is a stem, composed of two roots *hikʷɨ(s) probably meaning "breath" and the suffix *-yawa, which seems to have been used to derive abstract nouns referring to something like an essence or the "property of being X", something like the suffix -ness in English, or indeed the cognate suffix -yo:tl in Colonial Nahuatl (Launey 19????). The literal meaning of PSUA *hikʷɨyawa thus seems to have been something like "it's breathness" (inalienably possessed), referring to the life force of a living entity.