Zapotec language map (Central Valley)

I came across a map from Thomas Smith Stark's classification of Zapotec languages recently.  (They were unfortunately not in the printed volume, but were a supplement...)

The following shows the grouping of Zapotec languages in the Central Valley east of the city of Oaxaca:

Tecticpac documents in the typology of Zapotec orthographies

In this previous post, I outlined two criteria that seem to distinguish different schools of Colonial Valley Zapotec orthography:
a.) spellings of /r/: in Mexicanist orthographies usually spelled , but in Oaxacanist orthographies usually spelled .
b.) use of doubled vowels : the Oaxacanist tradition uses them about twice as frequently as the Mexicanist tradition.

In this respect, a group of documents written in the town of Tecticpac between 1610-1626 are interesting.  The documents in question are

These documents seem like the earlier Mexicanist writing, in that use of doubled vowels is not common, but this group of documents is also fascinating since it shows variable use of .
(More details on t/r in Tecticpac in a following post.)

Rhyming poetry in Colonial Zapotec

There is a strong tradition of poetry for modern Zapotec.  See this essay for a nice over view of some important contemporary poets.

I was interested to find an example of rhyming poetry in Zapotec in a Rosary written in 1732 (republished in 1766) by Levanto.   Here is a sample:

==============================
Hay una tradicción muy fuerte de poesía en la lengua zapoteca contemporanea.  Hay un revista aquí (en inglés) del trabajo de unos poetas importantes.

Pero me interesaba a encontrar un ejemplo de poesía zapoteca de rimas en un rosario de 1732 (republicado en 1766) por Levanto.  Aquí es una muestra:

The rhyme scheme here is   |   El esquema de rima aquí es 

a

b

b

a

c

d

d

c

The Ticha project

Here is a video of me talking about the work that we are doing on the Ticha project

Ticha: A Digital Text Explorer for Colonial Zapotec


An overview of the project is at Ticha.

My talented collaborators on the project are Brook Lillehaugen, Michel Oudijk, Laurie Allen, and Enrique Valdivia.  And Haverford undergrad May Plumb has been doing a fabulous job as a student assistant.

Orthographic variants in Colonial Valley Zapotec

Continuing on the thread from yesterday, I'm working on identifying other words in Colonial Valley Zapotec whose spelling varies in some notable way from text to text.

One such word is bitoo ~ bitao 'God'.  In Feria (1567) and Cordova (1578), this is consistently spelled with a single in the first syllable.  In Aguero (1666) and Levanto (1732) the spelling has shifted to biitoo.

Different orthographic traditions in Colonial Valley Zapotec

I've been using our FLEx database recently to correlate an intuition I have had after looking at lots of Colonial Valley Zapotec texts -- that there are some patterns in the spelling that are indicative of at least two different orthographic traditions.

I've labeled the two traditions the Mexicanist and the Oaxacanist traditions.  Important texts in the Mexicanist tradition include Feria's (1567) Doctrina and Cordova's (1578) Vocabulario and Arte.  The oldest texts in Zapotec are in the Mexicanist orthography.

Important texts in the Oaxacanist tradition include Aguero's (1666) Miscelanea Espiritual and Levanto's (1736/1776) Cathecismo


I've found two main diagnostics so far:
  vs

1. The Mexicanist orthography imitates the spelling of Nahuatl and avoids use of the letters , even though Colonial Valley Zapotec almost certainly had phonemes /b, d, g, r, u/.   One very frequent morpheme in CVZ is the aspect marker /r(i) ~ r-u-/.  (The two allomorphs are correlated with different verb classes, and the verb classes are correlated with transitivity.)   Texts in the Mexicanist tradition spell this aspect prefix as or .
2. The Oaxacanist orthography has begun to depart from the Mexicanist orthography in the spelling of /r/, and regularly uses and .

doubled vowels

1. Modern Valley Zapotec vowels have distinctions of stress, phonation type, and tone. (Interrelated in somewhat intricate ways.)  Colonial Valley Zapotec must have had at least stress and tone distinctions, though they are not marked in a very regular way in the orthography.  The Mexicanist orthography occasionally marks vowels with a grave or acute accent, and occasionally doubles a vowel.   However use of doubled vowels is relative unusual.  
2. The Oaxacanist orthography uses doubled vowels much more liberally than the Mexicanist orthography.  (At approximately twice the rate.)

The following chart shows the rates of as a portion of all in the four documents surveyed.