Showing posts with label positional verb. Show all posts
Showing posts with label positional verb. Show all posts

Thursday, March 28, 2013

New instances of progressive aspect in Colonial Valley Zapotec

I was very pleased to find some more instances of the progressive aspect marker in Colonial Valley Zapotec texts this morning, since it is not generally known that this morpheme was present in the language at this stage.  Smith Stark (2008), for example, doesn't include any mention of it in an otherwise comprehensive overview of the Colonial Valley Zapotec aspect morphology.

These new examples involve the verb 'do' and 'be sitting'.  It's interesting that with the first verb, the form in the text is

ca-g-oni

where the /g/ looks like a reflex of the potential aspect.  Thom Smith Stark argued in a (2004) paper that the progressive evolved from a construction that involved a verb of position followed by a verb in the potential.


Sunday, March 3, 2013

An expression of judgment with chiba in Colonial Zapotec

The following is my best guess at the analysis of a passage from Feria's Doctrina in Colonial Valley Zapotec.  What is of some interest is trying to work out the right analysis of the word chiba here.  It probably is related to the word 'put', which is a causative of 'sit':


The word that follows is xihui, which means 'sin'.  So the whole phrase, we know from the translation, means 'condemned by Pontius Pilate'.  But what is the literal Zapotec? Chiba xihui seems like 'place sin', so is 'condemn' = 'place sin', with =ni serving as the subject of this verb?

Still, it's hard to understand the syntax of the part that follows this... justicia ni pettogo xihui xitichani Iuez nila Poncio Pylato.   From looking at other examples of 'judge'  it seems that the verb  ttogo is always followed by a form of ticha 'word', so that this is a quasi-idiomatic expression.  (The possessor of the word seems to be the person who is judged.)  "Judge a person's sins" seems to involve putting the word  xihui between these two parts.