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.

Adverb positions in Triqui 1

My friend Christian in his blog post here, asks a question about adverbs that intervene between the verb and the 1st person clitic subject.   That prompted me to start searching my corpus for examples of adverbs that appear between the verb and the subject.  (I don't have 1st person examples for all these, so I need to verify with a speaker that the 1st person appears in the same place as other subjects.)

Here's my first example, with the adverb uun 'just, only':

The next is yuve 'secretly':

More examples to come in future posts, but the logic of this argument is to look at a full range of items that appear in this position, and to ask whether it is sensible to think of all such adverbs as incorporated.