Progressive aspect as an innovation in Central Zapotec

An updated version of my paper about the evolution of progressive aspect in Central Zapotec languages has just been posted on my page at Academic.edu.

My essential argument is that progressive aspect marking with ca- is innovation in Central Zapotec, and you can still see the early stages of this in Colonial Valley Zapotec.  In the 16th century texts, ca- isn't yet an obligatory marker of progressive (as it is in modern languages in this group).

The Central Zapotec languages include the ones shown in this tree (some branches omitted for visibility), using the classification of Thom Smith Stark (2007):

The send/receive feature in FLEx 8

The send/receive feature in Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) 8 has just made collaboration on language projects much easier, and my colleague and I have finally got one of projects up and running under the new system.

Download is available at SIL Fieldworks Download.   A few comments on things that we learned in the process:

• You need an account at languagedepot.org where the joint files will be kept.  Each member will need an account.  If you previously had an account and files there, the account was probably set up for some other kind of synchronization capability (LIFT, which is lexicon only), and you'll need help from the staff to reset your account to the new standard (FLExBridge).
• After you get the account set up there, one member of the current team (call this person manager1) sends a complete copy of the project.  To send the project, you use the menu option in FLEx that says Send/Receive

•  The wrench icon is where you enter your information from languagedepot about your account information.  Here you need the project ID they assigned you, your login, and password.
• After you and your colleagues on the project are sure that you're ready and that a complete version is on the languagedepot site, everyone who is not manager1 should delete their own copy of the project from their computer, then go to FLEx and use the menu item Send/Receive --> Get Project from Colleague.  This will download a fresh copy that will (hopefully) be set up for synchronization with others.
• The way we tested this was for the two of us to be online with the database and a gmail chat window.  We separately modified a text and a lexical entry, then pressed the "Send/Receive" button afterward to check that the project was updating and merging properly.
• This feature is still in beta.  Occasionally the merge was slow or produced warning messages such as "operation timed out; retrying", however it ultimately always succeeded.
• If the operation detects a conflict, it flips up a separate window with the conflicting entries/texts.  You can't send/receive until you look at these and click a box that says "resolved".  You may not notice that this window is present, but if it is there, the ordinary FLEx window acts oddly and you can't do ordinary editing.

Some photos of San Dionisio Ocotepec

And for a break from linguistics, some photos of San Dionisio Ocotepec which I stumbled across on the web.

Town hall in San Dionisio, Entrance to the town, entrance to the church

More "perfect" plus habitual in Colonial Zapotec

The following passage from Feria shows another instance of the so-called "perfect" hua~oa- before the habitual aspect marker <t>.

The semantic function in this case seems to be what the aspect theorists call the 'universal perfect' (See a nice explanation of the different kinds of perfect in this paper by Paul Kiparsky).

'Because very numerous are the sins the devil always teaches us; the are uncountable; the wants to make us sin in the face, the hear, the ear, the mouth...'

The notable thing is the occurence of oa-ti- before the verb 'desire'. Since the devil's desires are eternal, it is presumably appropriate to use the universal perfect here.