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.)

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.

Clarification on older practical orthography for tone in Copala Triqui

In an earlier post, I was uncertain about the right interpretation of the tone orthography used in Hollenbach's (1977) versions of the Sun and Moon myth.  Barbara Hollenbach was kind enough to clarify for me that in this previous version of the practical orthography " The three lower patterns (1, 2, 13) were written with a single macron on the final vowel."

So cacaā could represent /kakaa¹, kakaa², kakaa¹³/.  The particular line that worried me in the previous post contained the word <cacaā>.  In the current orthographic practice, macron is replaced with underscore, so that would translate to cacaa̱ , and <aa̱> = /aa³¹/.  However, in the orthography of the 1977 texts, cacaā had a different interpretation, and in this text, the right interpretation is /kakaa²/.

Another way in which it is easy to get confused by the 1977 texts is that 31 tone is not indicated in any special way in that orthography.  (It is marked by aa̱ in the current practice, as just mentioned.)

The differences can (I think be summed up this way) for long vowels:

Tone     Current Orthog    Previous Orthog (1977)

3                   aa                          aa
32                 aa                          aa
31                 aa̱                          aa
4                   aá                          aá
5                   áá                          aá
1                   a̱a̱                          aā
2                   a̱a̱                          aā
13                 a̱a                          aā

The previous orthography thus makes only three distinctions — <a, ā, á> — while the current orthography makes six <aa, aa̱, a̱a, a̱a̱, aá, áá> for long vowels.

This does create a practical problem for entering in the 1977 texts in the FLEx database — at one level, it seems desirable to preserve the original orthography of these texts.  On the other hand, it is strongly at variance with the majority of the material, which uses the more recent orthography.   I can't necessarily predict the modern orthography of the word from the older orthography without looking it up in the dictionary and understanding the morphology, so there is no way to do it automatically.

More on causative in Copala Triqui

I wrote a bit about the odd causative construction in Copala Triqui in this post.  To recap, the normal syntax is

[VSO] cause SUBJ.

In the examples cited there, the aspect of the verb 'make' ('yaj) seems to match the aspect of the verb in the complement.  The following example -- if I am interpreting it correctly, seems to show a failure of aspect-matching:

One slight uncertainty -- this text comes from Hollenbach's (1977) version of these texts, published in Tlalocan.  The orthography uses a macron over the vowel to represent low register tone, rather than a line under the vowel.  So the original form of the word that I've retranscribed as cacaa̱ was written cacaā.  

In the usual form of the practical orthography for Triqui tone, cacaa̱ represents only cacaa³¹,  while
cacaa is either cacaa³ or cacaa³².  So as the text is written, it would normally correspond to c-acaa³¹. However, the word for 'burn' in Triqui is acaa³² (practical orthography acaa) and its potential is c-acaa² (c-aca̱a̱).

I'm tentatively guessing that this represents an earlier version of the practical orthography where perhaps both 31 and 32 tones were written vv̱…

If my interpretation is correct, then the two instances of the verb 'burn' are completive, while 'will make' qui'ya̱j is potential.

Update  11/23/2012

Barbara Hollenbach has kindly clarified for me by email the way the older practical orthography for tone worked.  I've tried to summarize my understanding in this post.  That means that my analysis in the earlier post is incorrect in identifying the instances of the verb <cacaā> as cacaa³².  Instead, it is an older way of writing c-acaa², which is the potential aspect form of 'burn'.  Thus the aspect of make (potential)' does match the aspect of the potential, and I don't have a counterexample to the tentative generalization that the two always match.  (A counterexample might still be found, but this doesn't turn out to be a valid counterexample.)

The new analysis of this passage is shown below:

Pop quiz on Dari spelling

To make sure that the students are learning the orthography, I'm giving them some pop quizzes like the following, where the task is to match spelling and phonetics.

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.

Choctaw dictionary in FLEx and orthographic choices

My friend Jack is working with Oklahoma Choctaws to produce an audio dictionary that will use their preferred spelling system.   I'm working this morning on a quick review of the entries.  Here is a screenshot:

One big regret of my own work with Choctaw is that I didn't use the traditional orthography enough, which alienates some Choctaw communities who are attached to it.

In my defense I have to say -- the traditional orthography is terrible.  Choctaw has a vowel length distinction not present in the traditional orthography, and the orthography also uses two different symbols for each of the three phonemic vowels /a, i, o/, which are written according to how the 19th century missionaries perceived the vowel quality.  Instances of /a/ that sounded more like schwa were written with the symbol <ʋ>.

But something I understand now that I did not understand as well when I was a grad student is that orthographies don't have to be good to be useful to native speakers.  I would think that my advice to someone starting to work with a community is that if there is any orthography which speakers can use, you should stick with it.

Simplified orthography for Zapotec

I'm trying a fairly radically simplified practical orthography for San Dionisio Zapotec, which doesn't show tone, vowel length, or phonation contrasts other than checked.

The following FLEx screen shows the options, where Lexeme Form is the full phonemic spelling and Citation Form is the practical spelling.