Totonacan languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Totonacan | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Mexico: Puebla, Veracruz, Hidalgo | |
| Total speakers: | over 250 thousand | |
| Language family: | American Totonacan |
|
| Official status | ||
| Official language of: | none | |
| Regulated by: | Secretaría de Educación Pública | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | — | |
| ISO 639-3: | — | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
The Totonacan Languages are a family of closely-related languages spoken by approximately 200,000 Totonac people in the states of Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo in Mexico. The Totonacan languages are not demonstrably related to any other languages, although they share numerous areal features with other languages of the Mesoamerican sprachbund such as the Mayan languages and Nahuatl.
Contents |
[edit] Language Status
Although the family is traditionally divided into two languages, Totonac and Tepehua, the various dialects thereof are not mutually intelligible and thus Totonac and Tepehua are better characterized as families in themselves. The following classification is the one made by the Ethnologue - although some of these groups can probably be seen as forming subgroups of their own. Standard terminology is used for the dialects that the Ethnologue names differently from published scholarly works e.g. "Upper Necaxa Totonac" instead of "Totonac of Patla-Chicontla".
| Language | ISO-Code | Where spoken | Number of speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Totonac of Coyutla | toc | Coyutla, Puebla | 48,062 (2000 WCD) |
| Totonac of Filomena Mata-Coahuitlán | tlp | the Town of Filomena-Mata, Highland Veracruz, surronded by Highland Totonac | 15,108 (2000 WCD) |
| Highland Totonac | tos | Around Zacatlán Puebla and Veracruz | 120,000 |
| Totonac of Ozumatlán | tqt | Northern Puebla: Ozumatlán, Tepetzintla, Tlapehuala, San Agustín | 4,000 (1990 census). |
| Papantla Totonac | top | Around Papantla, central lowland Veracruz | 80,000 (1982 SIL). |
| Upper Necaxa Totonac | tot | Northeastern Puebla, Patla, Chicontla, Tecpatlán | 6,000 (1990 census) |
| Totonac de Xicotepec | too | In 30 Villages around Xicotepec de Juárez northern sierra de Puebla and Veracruz | 3,000 |
| Misantla Totonac | tlc | Yecuatla and Misantla in southern Veracruz | <500 |
| Language | ISO-Code | Where spoken | Number of speakers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tepehua of Huehuetla | tee | Northeastern Hidalgo, Huehuetla, and half the town of Mecapalapa in Puebla. | 3,000 (1982 SIL) |
| Tepehua of Pisaflores | tpp | Around the town of Pisaflores Veracruz | 4,000 (1990 census). |
| Tepehua of Tlachichilco | tpt | Tlachichilco, Vera Cruz | 3,000 (1990 SIL). |
This classification will likely evolve as more reconstructive work is done on the family.
Like many indigenous languages of Mexico, these languages are slowly giving way to Spanish. Of them, however, only Misantla Totonac is in immediate danger of extinction; the rest appear to be spoken in viable language communities.
[edit] Phonology of Totonacan languages
There is some variation between the phoneme inventories of the different dialects of Totonac and Tepehua, but the following phonome inventory which is reconstructed as proto-Totonacan by Arana (1953) can be considered a prototypical totonacan inventory.
[edit] Consonants
Table of Totonacan consonants
| Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | |
| Stops | p | t | k | q | ||
| Fricatives | s | ʃ | x | h | ||
| Affricates | tɬ / ts | tʃ | ||||
| Approximants | w | j | ||||
| Nasals | m | n | ||||
| liquids | l / ɬ |
[edit] Vowels
Table of Totonacan vowels
| front | central | back | ||||
| creaky | plain | creaky | plain | creaky | plain | |
| high | ḭ | i | ṵ | u | ||
| low | a̰ | a | ||||
[edit] Totonacan grammatical traits
Like many American Indian languages, the Totonacan languages are highly agglutinative and polysynthetic. Furthermore, they exhibit many features of the Mesoamerican areal type, such as a preference for verb-initial order, head-marking, and extensive use of body part roots in metaphorical and locative constructions.
Two features distinctive of Totonacan are worth mentioning in further detail: first, the comitative construction, and secondly body-part incorporation. Most of the examples that follow are taken from Misantla Totonac, but illustrate processes found in all the Totonacan languages.
[edit] The Comitative Construction
Languages of the family in have a comitative construction in which both an actor and a co-actor of a verb are specified. For instance, a verb like '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 other languages, 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".
[edit] Body-Part Incorporation
The Totonacan languages exhibit noun incorporation, but only special prefixing combing forms of body-part roots may be incorporated. When these roots are incorporated, they serve to delimit the verb's the 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".)
A body-part root acting as a non-agentive subject may also be incorporated.
- Ikaa'ka'tsan.
- Ik-kaa'k-ka'tsan
- 1s-head-hurt
- "My head hurts." (Lit: "I head-hurt".)
It is worthwhile to note that Totonacan noun incorporation never decreases the valency of the verb, making Totonacan very typologically unusual. The lack of valency-reducing noun incorporation, which is the cross-linguistically the most common type, may well be due to the very tight semantic restrictions on incorporable nouns.
[edit] Sound Symbolism
A prominent feature of Totonacan languages is the presence of sound symbolism. Through this trait the meaning of words can be altered slightly by substituting a consonant for another, e.g. indicating intensification or size.
[edit] References
- Anonymous. Arte Totonaca. Facsimile edited by Norman McQuown. UNAM, Mexico.
- Arana Osnaya, Evangelina (1953). Reconstruccion del protototonaco. Revista Mexicana de estudios Antropologicos 13:1-10
- Aschman, H.P. (1946). Totonaco phonemes. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 12.1:34-43
- Beck, David (2004). Upper Necaxa Totonac. Munich: Lincom GmbH
- de Léon, Lourdes & Levinson, Stephen C. (1992). Spatial Description in Mesoamerican Languages (Introduction). Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 45.6:527-29
- Levy, Paulette (1987). Fonologia del Totonaco de Papantla. Mexico: UNAM
- Levy, Paulette (1992). "Body Part Prefixes in Papantla Totonac" in Léon, de Lourdes and Stephen C. Levinson (Eds.) Spatial Description in Mesoamerican Languages (pp. 530-542)
- MacKay, Carolyn (1999). A Grammar of Misantla Totonac. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press
- McQuown, Norman (1983(1940)). Gramatica lengua totonaca (coatepec, sierra norte de puebla). Mexico: UNAM
- Reid, A.A. & Bishop, Ruth G. (1974). Diccionario de Totonaco de Xicotepec de Juarez, Puebla. Mexico D.F.: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano (ILV)
