Totonacan languages: Difference between revisions
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==Divisions== |
==Divisions== |
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Although the family is traditionally divided into two languages, Totonac and Tepehua, the various [[dialects]] thereof are not always [[mutually intelligible]] and thus Totonac and Tepehua are better characterized as coordinate branches of a language family. Of the two, Tepehua is generally considered to consist of three languages—Pisaflores, Huehuetla, and Tlachichilco—while the Totonac branch is considerably more diverse. Within Totonac, [[Misantla Totonac|Misantla]] is the most distinctive, and the remaining languages form a more closely related group.<ref>[[#Arana53|Arana Osnaya 1953]]</ref> Divisions amongst the latter group, which might be referred to as Central Totonac, are unclear, though most researchers agree that there is a three-way division between Northern, Southern/Sierra, and Lowland varieties.<ref>[[#Arana53|Arana Osnaya 1953]]</ref><ref>[[#Ichon69|Ichon 1969]]</ref> Recent efforts at reconstruction and evidence from lexical similarity further suggest that Southern/Sierra and Lowland group together against Northern,<ref>[[#Brownetal|Brown et al. 2011]]</ref> although this is still uncertain pending more exhaustive investigation. |
Although the family is traditionally divided into two languages, Totonac and Tepehua, the various [[dialects]] thereof are not always [[mutually intelligible]] and thus Totonac and [[Tepehua language| Tepehua]] are better characterized as coordinate branches of a language family. Of the two, [[Tepehua language| Tepehua]] is generally considered to consist of three languages—Pisaflores, Huehuetla, and Tlachichilco—while the Totonac branch is considerably more diverse. Within Totonac, [[Misantla Totonac|Misantla]] is the most distinctive, and the remaining languages form a more closely related group.<ref>[[#Arana53|Arana Osnaya 1953]]</ref> Divisions amongst the latter group, which might be referred to as Central Totonac, are unclear, though most researchers agree that there is a three-way division between Northern, Southern/Sierra, and Lowland varieties.<ref>[[#Arana53|Arana Osnaya 1953]]</ref><ref>[[#Ichon69|Ichon 1969]]</ref> Recent efforts at reconstruction and evidence from lexical similarity further suggest that Southern/Sierra and Lowland group together against Northern,<ref>[[#Brownetal|Brown et al. 2011]]</ref> although this is still uncertain pending more exhaustive investigation. |
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==Phonology== |
==Phonology== |
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Revision as of 06:32, 20 January 2012
| Totonacan | |
|---|---|
| Totonac–Tepehua | |
| Geographic distribution | Mexico |
| Linguistic classification | Totozoquean ?
|
| Subdivisions | |
The Totonacan languages are a family of closely related languages spoken by approximately 200,000 Totonac and Tepehua people in the states of Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo in Mexico. The Totonacan languages have only recently been compared to other families on the basis of historical-comparative linguistics, though they share numerous areal features with other languages of the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area, such as the Mayan languages and Nahuatl. Recent work suggests a possible genetic link to the Mixe–Zoque language family),[1] although this has yet to be firmly established.
Divisions
Although the family is traditionally divided into two languages, Totonac and Tepehua, the various dialects thereof are not always mutually intelligible and thus Totonac and Tepehua are better characterized as coordinate branches of a language family. Of the two, Tepehua is generally considered to consist of three languages—Pisaflores, Huehuetla, and Tlachichilco—while the Totonac branch is considerably more diverse. Within Totonac, Misantla is the most distinctive, and the remaining languages form a more closely related group.[2] Divisions amongst the latter group, which might be referred to as Central Totonac, are unclear, though most researchers agree that there is a three-way division between Northern, Southern/Sierra, and Lowland varieties.[3][4] Recent efforts at reconstruction and evidence from lexical similarity further suggest that Southern/Sierra and Lowland group together against Northern,[5] although this is still uncertain pending more exhaustive investigation.
Phonology
There is some variation between the phoneme inventories of the different varieties of Totonac and Tepehua, but the following phoeme inventory, which is reconstructed as proto-Totonacan by Arana (1953),[6] can be considered a typical Totonacan inventory.
Consonants
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| central | lateral | ||||||
| Nasal | *m | *n | |||||
| Plosive | *p | *t | *k | *q | (*ʔ) | ||
| Affricate | *t͡s | *t͡ɬ | *t͡ʃ | ||||
| Fricative | *s | *ɬ | *ʃ | *x | *h | ||
| Approximant | *l | *j | *w | ||||
Glottal stop is not attested directly, but posited for morphological correspondences.
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| creaky | plain | creaky | plain | creaky | plain | |
| Close | *ḭ *ḭː | *i *iː | *ṵ *ṵː | *u *uː | ||
| Open | *a̰ *a̰ː | *a *aː | ||||
Tepehua has ejective consonants where Totonac has creaky vowels.
Grammatical traits
From a typological perspective, the Totonac-Tepehua family presents a fairly consistent profile, and exhibit many features of the Mesoamerican areal type, such as a preference for verb-initial order, head-marking[7], and extensive use of body part roots in metaphorical and locative constructions.[8] The Totonacan languages are highly agglutinative and polysynthetic with nominative/accusative alignment and a flexible constituent order governed by information structure. Syntactic relations between the verb and its arguments are marked by agreement with the subject and one or sometimes two objects. There is no morphological case on nouns and many languages in the family lack prepositions, making use instead of a rich system of causatives, applicatives, and partonymic prefixes. Possession is marked on the possessed noun, the head of the NP. Otherwise, nouns are inflected, number being an optional category and grammatical gender being absent from the languages. Numerals quantifying nouns bear classificatory prefixes, something that is unusual cross-linguistically as affixal classifiers tend heavily to be suffixes.[9]Totonacan languages are also known for their use of sound-symbolism.
The comitative construction
Languages of the family have a comitative construction in which both an actor and a co-actor of a verb are specified. For instance, a verb such as 'go' can take a comitative prefix to form a verb meaning 'go with someone', someone being the co-actor. In some of the languages of the family, these constructions specify the co-actor as an object:
- Upper Necaxa Totonac
- ikta:a'na:n
- ik–ta:–a'n–a:–n
- 1sg.sub–COM–go–IMPF–2obj
- ‘I go with you’
In Misantla Totonac, the co-actor can be inflected as a second subject. For example, a verb "run" may be inflected with both 1st person and 2nd person subject affixes simultaneously to give a sentence meaning "You and I run", "You run with me", or "I run with you".
- Iklaatsaa'layaa'n
- Ik-laa-tsaa'la-yaa-'-na
- 1s-COM-run-imperf-2s-COM
- ‘You and I run.’
Body-part prefixation
The Totonacan languages exhibit a phenomenon similar to noun incorporation whereby special prefixing combining forms of body-parts may be incorporated.[10] When these prefixes are added, they generally serve to delimit the verb's locus of affect; that is, they indicate which part of the subject or object is affected by the action.
- Ikintsuu'ksaan
- Ik-kin-tsuu'ks-yaa-na
- 1s-nose-kiss-imperf-2o
- ‘I kiss your nose.’ (lit. ‘I nose-kiss you.’)
- Tuuxqatka'n
- tuu-xqat-kan-'
- foot-wash-REFL-2s
- ‘You wash your foot/feet’ (lit. ‘You foot-wash yourself.’)
It is worthwhile to note that the prefixation does not decrease the valency of the verb and that independent bodypart words in many Totonacan languages can be analyzed as consisting of the bodypart prefix attached to a partonymic base,[11] differentiating this process from true noun incorporation as the term is usually understood.[12]
Sound symbolism
A prominent feature of Totonacan languages is the presence of sound symbolism (see Bishop 1984; Levy 1987:115–30; McQuown 1990:66; MacKay 1997:113–14; Smythe Kung 2006; McFarland 2006; Beck 2008). The most common (but by no means only) sound-symbolic pattern in Totonacan involves fricative alterations, typically /s/ ~ /š/ ~ /ɬ/ and occasionally /ts/ ~ /č/ ~ /š/ correlated either with increasingly more energetic or forceful action or with the size of an event participant,[13] as in the following examples from Upper Necaxa Totonac:
| laŋs ‘hand striking hard’ laŋš ‘blow striking with force’ laŋɬ ‘blow striking with great force’ |
spipispipi ‘small person or animal trembling’ špipišpipi ‘person or animal shivering or shaking slightly’ ɬpipiɬpipi ‘person or animal shaking or having convulsions’ |
Comparative as well as language-internal evidence suggests that the pattern of consonantal alternations may have their origins in affixes indicating grade—s- ‘diminutive‘, š- ‘medium’, ɬ- ‘augmentative’).[14][15][16] In general, the productivity of the sound-symbolic alternations is highly variable within and across languages of the family, and many languages preserve for a given stem only one of a set of two or three alternates that can be reconstructed for proto-Totonacan.[17]
Media
Totonacan-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XECTZ-AM, broadcasting from Cuetzalan, Puebla.
External links
- Notes
- ^ Brown et al. 2011
- ^ Arana Osnaya 1953
- ^ Arana Osnaya 1953
- ^ Ichon 1969
- ^ Brown et al. 2011
- ^ Arana Osnaya 1953
- ^ Nichols (1986)
- ^ Levy 1992
- ^ Aikhenvald (2003)
- ^ Levy 1999
- ^ Beck 2004
- ^ Mithun (1984)
- ^ Beck 2008:8
- ^ McQuown 1990
- ^ Beck 2008
- ^ Brown et al. 2011
- ^ Brown et al. 2011
- References
- Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2003). Classifiers: A typology of noun categorization devices. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Anonymous, McQuown, Norman (ed.), Arte Totonaca, Mexico: UNAM (Facsimile).
- Arana Osnaya, Evangelina (1953). "Reconstruccion del protototonaco". Revista Mexicana de estudios Antropologicos. 13 (2, 3): 1–10.
- Aschman, H.P. (1946). "Totonaco phonemes". International Journal of Applied Linguistics. 12 (1): 34–43.
- Beck, David (2004). Upper Necaxa Totonac. Languages of the World/Materials 429. Munich: Lincom GmbH. ISBN 3-89586-821-3.
{{cite book}}: External link in|publisher= - Beck, David (2008). "Ideophones, adverbs, and predicate qualification in Upper Necaxa Totonac". International Journal of American Linguistics. 74 (1): 1–46.
- Beck, David (2011). "Upper Necaxa Totonac Dictionary". Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - Bishop, Ruth G. (1984). "Consonant play in lexical sets in Northern Totonac". Summer Institute of Linguistics Mexico Workpapers. 5: 24–31.
- Brown, Cecil H.; Beck, David; Kondrak, Grzegorz; Watters, James K.; Wichmann, Søren. "Totozoquean". International Journal of American Linguistics.
- de Léon, Lourdes; Levinson, Stephen C. "Spatial Description in Mesoamerican Languages (Introduction)". Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung. 45 (6): 527–29.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|yyar=ignored (help) - Ichon, Alain (1969). La religión de los totonacos de la sierra. Mexico D.F.: Instituto acional Indigenísta.
- Kung-Smythe, Susan (2006). "Simbolismo sonoro y lenguaje expresivo en el tepehua de Huehuetla [Sound symbolism and expressive language in Huehuetla Tepehua]". In Morúa, María del Carmen (ed.). Memorias del VIII Encuentro Internacional de Lingüística en el Noroeste, tomo 3. Hermosillo: Editorial UniSon. pp. 331–354.
- Lam, Yvonne (2009). "The straw that broke the language's back: Language shift in the Upper Necaxa Valley of Mexico". International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 195: 219–233.
- Levy, Paulette (1987). Fonologia del Totonaco de Papantla. Mexico: UNAM.
- Levy, Paulette (1992). "Body Part Prefixes in Papantla Totonac.". In Léon; Levinson, Stephen C. (eds.). Spatial Description in Mesoamerican Languages. pp. 530–542.
- Levy, Paulette (1999). "From "part" to "shape": Incorporation in Totonac and the issue of classification by verbs". International Journal of American Linguistics. 65: 127–175.
- MacKay, Carolyn (1999). A Grammar of Misantla Totonac. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ISBN 0-87480-455-8.
- McQuown, Norman (1990) [1940]. Gramatica lengua totonaca (coatepec, sierra norte de puebla). Mexico: UNAM.
- Mithun, Marianne. (1984) "The Evolution of Noun Incorporation," Language 60: 847-94.
- Nichols, Johanna. 1986. "Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar." Language 62, 56–119.
- Reid, A.A.; Bishop, Ruth G. (1974). Diccionario de Totonaco de Xicotepec de Juarez, Puebla. Mexico D.F.: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano (ILV).