Some photos of San Dionisio Ocotepec

And for a break from linguistics, some photos of San Dionisio Ocotepec which I stumbled across on the web.

Town hall in San Dionisio, Entrance to the town, entrance to the church

More "perfect" plus habitual in Colonial Zapotec

The following passage from Feria shows another instance of the so-called "perfect" hua~oa- before the habitual aspect marker <t>.

The semantic function in this case seems to be what the aspect theorists call the 'universal perfect' (See a nice explanation of the different kinds of perfect in this paper by Paul Kiparsky).

'Because very numerous are the sins the devil always teaches us; the are uncountable; the wants to make us sin in the face, the hear, the ear, the mouth...'

The notable thing is the occurence of oa-ti- before the verb 'desire'. Since the devil's desires are eternal, it is presumably appropriate to use the universal perfect here. 

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.

Central Zapotec languages

The tree below is the current version of something that I am working on.  It's intended to show major branches of Central Zapotec (according to the classification of Smith Stark 2007), and it also shows (in brackets and italics) where we currently have Colonial Valley Zapotec documents in our FLEx corpus.

I know that there are many other Colonial Valley Zapotec documents out there, so the tree will get 'bushier' over time, but I found this a useful graphic view of where the documents come from in terms of distribution.

The function of hua- in Colonial Valley Zapotec

In Colonial Valley Zapotec texts, we often see an aspect marker that is spelled something like hue or hua before the verb.  The function of this marker is a bit uncertain, and in the modern Valley Zapotec languages that I am most familiar with, it is no longer in use.

The following passages, from an 1823 Catechism, however, seem to show that hua is not strictly speaking an aspect marker, but another kind of morpheme that precedes the aspect prefix /r-/.  

In modern Valley Zapotec /r-/ is habitual, but in Colonial Valley Zapotec, /r-/ had a wider range of uses.  Perhaps at this point in the 19th century, the combination huari was the normal way to indicate repeated actions?

Contrast the following where the /r-/ appears without the hua.  Here we seem to have more of an eternal 'gnomic' style reading of the clauses:

A verb of position as a diachronic source for continuous aspect in Zapotec?

This morning I was reading a bit of


Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca (1994). The Evolution of Grammar. Tense,
Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World, Chicago: The University of Chicago.

where she discusses the evolution of progressive aspect in languages around the world.  In many languages, it originates in some construction that involves a locative expression, either with a verb of position or something like 'be in X'.

This got me to wondering about the Continuous aspect in modern Valley Zapotec languages.   This is not a well-attested aspect in Colonial Valley Zapotec, but I find some examples of incipient grammaticalization, all in the construction 'I say', where the verb nni is used with a preceding ca- prefix that looks very much like the continuous aspect ca- found in modern Valley Zapotec.

A possible connection to a verb of position is the word cáá 'hang, be located (in a high place)'.  The lexical entry for this word in San Dionisio Ocotepec Zapotec in the current draft of my own dictionary looks like the following:

In the Colonial Valley Zapotec examples that I have, only 'I speak' is used with a preceding ca:

It is probably also significant that both of these examples are accompanied by the adverb anna 'now', as would be appropriate for a continous aspect marker.   

But I do want to emphasize that continous aspect marking is incipient in Colonial Valley Zapotec, and I haven't identified any other examples in the texts.  In modern Valley Zapotec languages, you can use continous for a wide range of verbs; in CVZ only the verb 'say' is attested so far.

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.

More examples of regular expressions in FLEx

This regular expression is used to help me separate out the right allomorph of the habitual prefix of the Colonial Valley Zapotec verb.  The habitual aspect comes in a few allomorphic variants, which are orthographically usually written <te, to, ti>.  I want to strip this from the citation form and put it in a separate field called Cordoba habitual form.

The procedure is to copy the whole citation form to the Cordova habitual form, then use a regular expression in bulk edit to remove everything except the prefix.   The following search and replace comes fairly close to what I want:

This bulk replace operation looks for the beginning of the record (^), then any number of characters (.*), then t followed by one character (\w).   I put the sequence t & one character inside the capturing parentheses, because I want to be able to refer to it in the Replace operation on the next line.

After the parenthesis, I have any number of characters (.*) and the end of the record ($).

This is replaced by t, whatever the letter that was captured in the previous parenthesis was ($1) and a hyphen.

So if the first line finds   blah blah ti+capaya blah blah  it will be replaced by ti-.

This mostly works -- except that the way the original Cordova entries came to me, there are sometime several Zapotec verbs listed together in a single entry; possibly with differential potential prefixes.  So I have to give the results a visual inspection to make sure nothing has gone wrong before hitting the Apply button in Bulk Edit.  If there is a record where this will give the wrong result, I can just uncheck it, and edit it manually.

The counter part to this regular expression is the one that takes the citation form, strips off the habitual prefix and returns just the portion minus that prefix.   The search and replace that will do that is the following:

The Find expression looks for a t followed by one word-forming character and a literal (+) at the beginning of a record (^).  It starts to capture everything from here to the end of the record ($) and stores it in the variable $1.   When this search and replace is applied, the effect is to take a word like

ti+capaya

and replace it with capaya.

More sophisticated regular expression searching in the Cordova

I am not a computational linguist, by any means, but I have slowly been learning enough about regular expressions to be able to do some useful things with FLEx.  One aspect just learned is how to use regular expressions in search and replace operations in FLEx.  (The FLEx help menus are not really very explicit on this.)

In a FLEx search and replace function — in Bulk Edit, for example — each thing that is enclosed in parentheses will return some set of results, called a capture.  You can refer to this capture with the variable $.  So the material in the first set of parentheses is $1.  The material in the second capture is $2, and so on.   Here is an example of how I used this information in the Colonial Valley Zapotec database.

Córdova normally cites a verb in the 1st person habitual.  Depending on the allomorph of the verb, the habitual of the verb might be /ti, to, te/.  The verb root will usually be four to eight letters long.  And the first person will end in /a/.

So if the form cited is tichapa, I would like it to be segmented ti+chap-a.

The "Find what" on the first line sets up a first capture group, which is the prefix, made up of t plus either e, i, or o. (Elements between square brackets are options.)  Because this whole first unit is between parentheses, it is capture group one, which I can refer to as $1 in the "Replace With" line below.

I want to replace it with the same thing, followed by a + to show the boundary.

The next capture group is a group of letters (shown by \w — meaning any wordforming character), and I have shown the number as between 4 and 8.  (On second thought, perhaps the lower number should have been three…)

Since this is the second capture group, I can refer to it by $2, in the "Replace With" line, and this time I replace it with the same thing, followed by a hyphen.

This is a first attempt at using the regular expressions with FLEx, but I think I can already see how they are going to make it possible to accomplish more sophisticated data manipulation as we try to get the Córdova diccionario into a format that we can understand.

The worst religious metaphor ever

I think the following passage from the Feria Doctrina (in Colonial Valley Zapotec, 1567) may be one of the worst extended religious metaphors ever.  God is a like an abusive husband -- he beats us to punish us for our sins, but won't leave us so long as we are faithful.

The beni niguio [ni=ti-gapa __ ][ ni=ti-bibe __ loo lechela=ni]] 'man who beats and thrashes his wife' is an interesting example.  It shows what Pam Munro, John Foreman, Aaron Sonnenschein, and Heriberto Avelino have called the Covert Subject Construction -- here across apparent conjoined relative clauses.  'His wife' ought to be the object of both clauses, so this is also an example of Right Node Raising, and the possessor pronoun on 'his wife' is somehow responsible for licensing the omission of  the subjects of both preceding verbs.

'Goody goody' in Trique

One of my favorite lexical entries in a while is the difficult to translate interjection arsínj, said when a bad person, or a person who has rejected your good advice, gets into trouble.  The closest we could come up with in English was 'Goody! Goody!'

Here is an English expression of the same sentiment.

Orange oil in darkness — A poetic view of two ways of doing linguistics

Orange oil in darkness

The useful part
of things is elegance --
in mathematics, bridges.

Even in hedges
of ripe persimmons
or mandarin oranges,

elegance solves
for the minimum possible
then dissolves.

The art is what's extra:
a fragrance penciled in,
or long division's inescapable reminder.

Not quite unplanned for,
more the unexpected, impractical gift.
Not the figures traced

in the bridge's stanchions,
but the small
and lovely sounds they make in the wind.

Who drew that in?
Who could have?
...

-- Jane Hirshfield "The Lives of the Heart"

This poem sums up about as well as anything the aesthetic that I've come to after three decades in linguistics.   I am profoundly moved by the elegance of language, and it is something that I try to convey to my students and in my writing.  But I'm also delighted by the quirky art of language -- the delicate curlicues, impractical extravagances, and intensely detailed categorizations of the world.   I seem to only be happy in linguistics when I'm able to be both moved and delighted!

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:

Then he ordered the opossum

I think the syntax of the following line in a Triqui folktale is pretty interesting for its lack of anything like PRO or Condition B effects:

Literally, 'He ordered the opossum (that) it will lower it in the water'.  The verb tanij is in the potential aspect, as is normal for the complement of a verb like 'order'.  But nothing seems to signal the coreference between the main clause object 'opossum' and the two pronouns coreferent to it in the embedded clause.

Phrase-book material in a lexicon

Native speakers or learners of a language often find it useful to have a set of common phrases in the language.  But do these go in the dictionary?

It seems awkward to have entries like the following:

But an alternative is to use the Publications field in FLEx to define a separate Phrasebook.  You configure this via Lists | Publications and add a new Publication called Phrasebook. The default publication is Main Dictionary, so if you haven't changed anything, that is where all the entries will appear.

The default seems to be that all entries are in all publications.   I used the Bulk Edit commands to remove Phrasebook from the Publication lists of all the entry, then went back in and selected the entries I wanted for the Phrasebook.

For this entry, this means adjusting the Publications field to say only Phrasebook and not Main Dictionary.  After changing the field, it now looks like this:

In the lexicon pane, we can pick which dictionary to display.  The default will be the main dictionary:

From the pull-down arrow next to the words Main Dictionary Entries, we can also select other publications, such as the Phrasebook.  The following screen shows a partially populated Phrasebook:

On the trail of accusative in Itunyoso Triqui

Copala Triqui makes very frequent use of man  as an accusative marker.  But does Itunyoso Triqui have an accusative or not?

The Itunyoso Triqui cognate seems to be man'an.  In some uses it seems very much like an accusative:

Mark 1:36

But compare the next sentence in this passage, where man'an does not precede the object pronoun:

Mark 1:37

There is apparently an interesting difference between Itunyoso and Copala in this respect, since in Copala man would be obligatory before the object pronoun.

Compare the same passage in Copala Triqui:

 they said to him 'everyone is looking for you' " Mark 1:37"

inflected light verb in the psych complement construction

This terrific example from Copala Triqui shows that the light verb ne'en which appears before certain psych complements can even inflect for aspect:

Philemon 1:17

In this example, we get two sequences of uun rá...ne'en 'love, regard ... psych complement'.  The first instance is in the completive, so ne'en is also completive.  But the second instance is guun rá, the potential aspect, so the verb ne'en is in its potential aspect form (quene'en) as well.

Psych complements with ne'e(n) again

Another example of the verb ne'e(n) serving as a marker of a psych complement, from 2 Corinthians 6:11-13

2 Cor 6:13

The literal translation is something like "Thus as one loves one's child, that is how I love you, and that is why I say to you that as we have done to you, you should do also to us, and have confidence in us."

Some interesting points to note -- the typical syntax after the psych complement marker is ne'e(n) SUBJ man OBJ.   The accusative marker is typical because the NP towards which one has an attitude is typically a specific human, and specific human objects are very likely have overt accusative.  But notice that in this passage, the object is a generic 'one's child', and is not preceded by the accusative.

Also interesting that uun rá 'love' triggers the psych complement marker, but nucuaj rá 'have confidence in' doesn't, at least in this passage.

Here is another passage that uses both ne'e(n) and ni'yaj.  I am not sure if there is some difference implied by the choice of psych complement introducer:

Col 1:2

Update on Copala Triqui pysch verbs with ne'e as light verb

We spent some time today working with our Triqui speaker on the psych verbs that use ni'yaj as a light verb to introduce a complement.  (Discussed here, here, here, here, and here).

I was delighted to find out that while our speaker accepts and uses ni'yaj, he more frequently suggests ne'e  as the marker of psych complement.  The connection is that the other sense of ni'yaj is 'look at; mirar', while ne'e also means 'see; ver'.  Thus two different verbs of perception are used to introduce the psych complement.

Here's an example in the entry for the verb 'be jealous':

And here is the entry for one of the verbs that means 'like':

A particularly interesting example is 'I like the music very much'.  This shows the degree to which ne'e  is grammaticized here, since one does not literally see the music.

Here is an example from the New Testament with ne'e(n):