Two things you should listen to with attention

In this bit of the Feria doctrina, I was interested in the verb /zoba..tiyaga/, which means 'listen'.  The first part is 'set', and the second part is 'ear'.  I think these function together as a single (complex) root in modern Zapotec.  The evidence is that the subject agreement follows 'ear' only.  Since modern Valley Zapotec languages are not generally pro-drop, that's good evidence that the pronoun after 'ear' is the subject of the preceding.

So it is not 'you set your ear'  but the equivalent of 'you ear-set'.  (Zapotec-like equivalents:
Not Set=you ear=you but set-ear=you).

We could call this a kind of incorporation in modern Valley Zapotec (though confined to a small set of V + N combinations).

But in this colonial document, the two parts are separated by an adverbial element chahui.  That seems to imply that the two parts were less lexicalized as a compound 500 years ago.

I remember that Pam Munro, John Foreman, (and Aaron Sonnenschein?) talked about something like this in the colonial Valley Zapotec documents at a SSILA meeting some number of years ago.

Working with Thom Smith Stark's material on colonial Zapotec

I've undertaken the task of seeing whether it is possible to incorporate into our project the enormous work that Thom Smith Stark and his group put into creating an electronic and searchable version of the massive Cordova (1567) dictionary of Colonial Valley Zapotec.  The big problem for modern researchers is that the Cordova dictionary is only Spanish - Zapotec, so it cannot be used to read documents.

There is tremendous potential here, but one initial challenge is figuring out the various notes, abbreviations, conventions, and file formats involved.

For example, I have one set of Word documents which are a reversal of the Cordova, now alphabetized Zapotec to Spanish.   Here is an image of part of one of them:

Here are my guesses about what some of the mark-up means.   In the Spanish column, I think the asterisk must indicate a word for which a new entry ought to be created.  So for the second word, I think this means make an entry for this Zapotec word under 'dar cuenta o razon'  and also under 'razon, dar cuenta o'.

In the Zapotec, I think the | after /ti/ is showing that this is a prefix.  I don't know exactly why there is also a + symbol at this point.   The ÷ precedes a clitic /=a/.  (Cordova's convention was to list all the verbs in the 1st person habitual.)

In Cordova's dictionary, at the entry for a verb he lists the prefixes that are used for the preterite (or completive).  So when we see prt>  in TSS, that means that the completive prefix is what follows.  Sometimes the completive attaches to a different form of the root.

For example, with ti-bee=a quij 'fuego sacar con yslabon o assi', the prt> co+lè means that the completive is co-lèe=a quij

For comparison, here is Cordova's entry for this verb

Although Córdova writes this all as one word tibèeaquij, Thom's morphological analysis is that the /=a/ is the 1st person.  So the verb must end after this, and quij is a separate word.  Thus - in Thom's dictionary seems to mean 'the following is a separate word'.

Proceedings of CILLA V

The proceedings of the

Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America-V

are now available at http://www.ailla.utexas.org/site/cilla5_toc.html

They include my paper on Negation as raising, as well as many other interesting papers!

More on comparatives in Triqui

In previous posts 1 and 2, I discussed comparatives in Copala Triqui.  The following sentence shows a comparative-like structure that I haven't noticed before, which uses síj 'reach, arrive' before another verb:

I don't see or can't find another example like this in my corpus, so I will want to check with our language consultant for his thoughts.

Orthography worries in San Dionisio Zapotec

Unfortunately, the meetings in Oaxaca left me less certain, rather than more certain, about what the best practical orthography to use in Zapotec is.  I have been using an orthography which is essentially the same as that used in Isthmus and Mitla Zapotec, but the meeting made it fairly clear to me that no one agrees on what to use, especially including speakers of the various kinds of Valley Zapotec.

In my current dictionary database, I've got too many spellings floating around, possibly confusing me.  The old one that I used is the top one given, but I've now added an Americanist style phonetic field just to avoid too much confusion.

The citation field was initially composed from the old practical, but deleting tones, vowel length, and breathiness, along the lines used in the Cali chiu simplified orthography for San Lucas Quiavini Zapotec (Munro and Lillehaugen).  The other puzzling/difficult question is how to represent the difference between plain vowels and diphthongs in the practical orthography.

Finally, the difference between ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, and dʒ is a plague.  <ch> for /tʃ/ is the only simple solution.  But every other way of writing these seems to cause reading problems.  Currently, I am leaning toward a solution where /ʃ/ is <x>, /ʒ/ is /zh/, and /dʒ/ is <dx>.

I am getting indications from my speaker that she is finding the simplified orthography too simplified in some areas (the diphthong issue being a prominent difficulty in her reading).  I still don't know how to solve this issue.

Negative focus in Colonial Zapotec

The following example shows an interesting case of a preverbal negative focus in Colonial Valley Zapotec.  This is very much like what would occur in San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec in the same context.

Look at the part about 'no one can rise', where we get aca ru-ti benni zoaca chapi...

Here in SDOZ, we would have ru-te'ca biiny 'no person', where the /ru-/ prefix on the negative matches the animacy of the noun that follows.

Have you been a witch or sorcerer

From the text in Colonial Valley Zapotec that I am working on today.  This is from a ca. 1823 Confessionario.    (And I know that 1823 is a couple of years too late for the colonial period in Mexico, but the language is pretty similar!)

I don't know the meaning difference between the two Zapotec words used here.  They are both given as synonyms for brujo in Cordova.

And another question from the same document, a few lines earlier:

Experimenting with semantic domains

I have been playing around a bit with the Semantic Domain feature in FLEx today.  I have mostly found this fairly unwieldy, since the lists of semantic domains are in an elaborate hierarchy and it takes a long time to find the domain you want.

However, if there are only a few domains that you are interested in, you can also just add them as top-level domains (using the Lists  | Semantic Domains menu).  One that I am interested in is the psychological verbs that show up with ni'yaj  after them.

I added psych verbs as a top-level semantic domain, as follows

Then in the entry of a verb that licenses this marker, I select this as "Semantic Domain"  in the entry:

If I want to see all the verbs that have been identified for this semantic domain, I use the "Classified Dictionary"  option in the Lexicon pane, and it shows me the following:

another stranded accusative

The following example shows another stranded accusative in a relative clause context.  There is an interesting overlap with the funny syntax of the verb achiin 'need', which has the reverse linking relative to the English verb.  In Triqui, the subject of achiin is the thing which is needed and the person who needs it is the object of the verb, often preceded by accusative man.

Acts 4:34

Adjectives with the existential copula

Still wondering about the syntax of a couple of adjectival or verb psychological predicates that must appear with vaa 'exist'  or its potential aspect form gaa.  These seem rather like verbs, and can be transitive, but they don't vary for aspect, which is instead shown by the existential.

Several examples in this subsense of the word vaa:

Interlinear versions of some sample passages:

The 'free'  construction described in the previous blog entry also has the vaa before it.

'Tough' adjectives in Triqui

I've been wondering about a class of adjectives in Copala Triqui that seem in their syntax a bit like English  'It is tough for X to Y'.

One such adjective is ya'núj 'be free, be available'.  It shows up with a syntax like the following:

Exist ya'núj rihaan NP [V (pro)...]


meaning

NP is free to V


as in the following example:

The database for Colonial Valley Zapotec

Here is a link  to the paper that Brook Lillehaugen and I gave at the COLOV conference on languages of Oaxaca.

And here is an image of the title slide:

Presentation at the Coloquio

I'm at the Coloquio sobre lenguas otomangues y vecinas today.  Here's the title slide of the presentation I give this afternoon:

Here is a link to the whole thing on Academia.edu

We have concluded the creation of man

A passage I've been working on in Colonial Valley Zapotec.  The verb /zaloo/ is still unidentified for now.

Causatives in Colonial Valley Zapotec

Does the following passage from the Feria Doctrina (1567) show a /ko-/ or /go-/ causative prefix?  I don't think modern Valley Zapotec languages have this morpheme:

Male and female fetuses and 'ensoulment' in the Zapotec doctrina

According to the Zapotec doctrina (Feria 1567) that I am analysing, male and female fetuses develop for different amounts of time before they receive their souls. (Click the image to enlarge it.)

(I still don't have a lot of the grammar worked out in this section...)

This Wikipedia article says that this idea of 'ensoulment'  goes back to Aristotle, though the article there says 40 days for males and 90 days for females.  One consequence in the early church was that some considered the abortion of a fetus before 'ensoulment'  not to be murder, but some more minor offense. So it was permissible, in some views, to abort a female fetus at a later stage than a male fetus.  (Though how would someone in the early church be able to tell the sex of a fetus??)

More philosophical that the usual blog posts!

Stranded accusatives in Copala Triqui in negative fronting

In this previous post and this previous post, I discussed stranded accusative particles in relative clauses.  The following examples show the same stranding process in the negative fronting construction:

Thinking in Triqui, continued + ni'yaj puzzles

The following passage shows the funny interaction between the rá 'think' construction and the question particle, namely in a passage 'Do you think this is the man who used to sit and beg...?'  what is really being asked is something like [in your thoughts [is this the man who used to sit and beg?] ].  The Triqui order is
[This is the man who used to sit and beg][you think][question].  The 'thinking' construction is discussed here, here, and here

Another puzzle -- does ni'yaj mean 'look at' in this passage?  The passersby look at the formerly blind man, but when they look at him, they also have a particular thought/attitude of surprise toward him.

Ni'yaj psych complements again

In previous posts, I've discussed the unusual word ni'yaj, which is followed by an NP that has a psychological attitude toward the preceding clause.

The following shows a subtle use of the ni'yaj marker of psychological attitude.  Here there is literal seeing, but I believe the intention of the passive is that witnessing the resurrected Jesus eat caused the disciples to change their psychological state (i.e. believing that it was really him).

Timucua talk for Reno

Working today on the Powerpoint for my talk in Reno on Timucua texts.  Here is the cover slide