zompist bboard

Just to make a note that the first ZBB fieldtrip has now officially commenced with my self and Rory doing fieldwork on Acazulco Otomí in Central Mexico. We met sunday in Mexico city and started work in Acazulco yesterday - we are already finding lots of interesting stuff in this strange languages. Well be working untill the twentyfifth and we´ll update this thread as often as possible with ourfindings and experiences and hopefully with pictures and and interesting spectrograms.

Very cool. I'll be watching this thread with interest.

Awesome. I look forward to reading about what you find.

Same here

Same here too.

pfff

Have fun and work hard!

siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh................

I was going to go study Makah resources at Neah Bay, but the Makah cultural museum never replied to my E-mail. I think next time I'll try the Lummi, and this time I'll just take the train up there and surprise them.

Also, why Otomi? It has ~20,000 speakers.

Cockroach wrote:Also, why Otomi? It has ~20,000 speakers.

(1)There's lots of "dialects" of Otomi (divergent dialects or closely-related languages, take your pick). This is one of the very under-described ones.

(2) Besides, I don't at all see how the number of speakers has much bearing on whether a language is deserving of having fieldwork done on it. I mean, yes, languages with fewer speakers, and thus (probably) more likely to become extinct sooner, should be aggressively documented, but that doesn't mean that documenting a language with more speakers should be met with the question of "why?". That's a stupid attitude.

(3) I don't even know where you got your figure; it's off by at least something like a factor of ten. Wikipedia reports around 240,000 speakers of the various Otomi varieties.

Man, I really wanted to be there. Money just got in the way.

Have fun!

Cockroach wrote:
Also, why Otomi? It has ~20,000 speakers.

You forgot a zero there, Otomi has around 200,000 when you combine all varieties. Never the less those 200,000 speakers comprise five to ten mutually unintelligible varieties. The particular variety we are studying is almost completely unstudied hitherto and has less than 500 speakers. It is a conservative dialect and is likely to provide important information about the historical linguistics of otomian languages as a whole. Also after a week we are now sure that among the interesting features of the language is a four way contrast in basic stops voiced, unvoiced, aspirated and glottalized - it also has a system of consonant mutations and utilizes this four way contrast for grammatical purposes. It also has singular, dual and plural number categories, and inflect verbs for epistemic status, location, movement and up to three participants. Basically its about as interesting a language as they come.

Radagast wrote:

Cockroach wrote:
Also, why Otomi? It has ~20,000 speakers.

You forgot a zero there, Otomi has around 200,000 when you combine all varieties. Never the less those 200,000 speakers comprise five to ten mutually unintelligible varieties. The particular variety we are studying is almost completely unstudied hitherto and has less than 500 speakers. It is a conservative dialect and is likely to provide important information about the historical linguistics of otomian languages as a whole. Also after a week we are now sure that among the interesting features of the language is a four way contrast in basic stops voiced, unvoiced, aspirated and glottalized - it also has a system of consonant mutations and utilizes this four way contrast for grammatical purposes. It also has singular, dual and plural number categories, and inflect verbs for epistemic status, location, movement and up to three participants. Basically its about as interesting a language as they come.

Ooh, can you go into this in more detail?

I probably wouldn't try learning it, but that is an interesting language. I might have to use the stop distinction or a similar one in my current project.

Radagast wrote:Also after a week we are now sure that among the interesting features of the language is a four way contrast in basic stops voiced, unvoiced, aspirated and glottalized - it also has a system of consonant mutations and utilizes this four way contrast for grammatical purposes. It also has singular, dual and plural number categories, and inflect verbs for epistemic status, location, movement and up to three participants. Basically its about as interesting a language as they come.

Oh my god I just got hard.
You must share as much here about this language as you can.

Wait, Otomi is Oto Manguean right? Doesn't that mean besides all those contrasts it also has a few tones?

Yes - High, low and rising. More details to come.

Ooooh, an excursion? YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

Me need to hear 'bout your trip.

Actually awhile ago I posted my notes from my first fieldtrip in this thread http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.p ... t=acazulco You could browse that while we keep gathering and processing more info.

Can you know anything about the diachronic origin of the four stop series? Do they go back to the protolanguage, or have one or more series evolved since then? Presumably, since you remarked on it, other languages in the same family have fewer series.

It is one of the things that we will be lokking into,ç when we get back. The last revision of protootomian phonology is from 1965. I am sure that all of the new information uncovered since then can tell us something new about that.

The previous consensus is that proto otomi had a fortis lenis contrast and clusters of stops with h and glottal stop. However only one dialect group has conserved the plain unvoiced stops and this dialect is a part of that group.

We are also finding funny things with the tone - the "rising tone" seems to actually correlate better phonetically with a slightly longer duration and a kind of glottalization. We are considering that it may have evolved into a phonation contrast. Has that been attested anywhere else for to your knowledge?

Latest reports indicate that rising tone is not correlated with vowel glottalization. I'm not actually sure what's going on with the glottalization, it's very odd.

Something Radagast didn't mention is that as well as all the crazy stop and tone contrasts, there is also an unusual stress system, which, although it doesn't look to be contrastive, is somewhat unpredictable. At first we thought that stress fell on the first high tone of a word - but now we've seen words that appear to be stressed on the first syllable, despite having a Low-High tone structure. Yeah, crazy shit.

We're also getting lots of fun ethnographic traditional stories - like a baby mermaid they found in a local lake (in 2004, apparently), and a tale of two huge serpents who live up in a nearby mountain and eat errant travelers.

Oh, another thing that Radagast didn't mention is that this is a moribund dialect. All the speakers are over 60. The other morning I woke up and realized that this language would be dead before I was. That's a sobering thought, and that's what linguistics truly is.

Anyway, if any of you have any specific questions, please ask, and we'll try and answer as best (and as timely-ly) as we can.

Wow, it almost sounds kitchen-sinky (well, minus the "designed by a twelve year old" part).

And, forgive me if this is an ignorant question but how do you communicate with the Otomí? Do you know the language enough to converse, or do they speak English, or are there interpreters, or do they know Spanish...?

Speaking of Spanish, how has it influenced this language? What kinds of loanwords did it take? Did it adopt some foreign phonemes too?

Mbwa wrote:And, forgive me if this is an ignorant question but how do you communicate with the Otomí? Do you know the language enough to converse, or do they speak English, or are there interpreters, or do they know Spanish...?

They're all bilingual in Spanish. There are no monolinguals in Acazulco Otomi; it's well on the way to language deat.

FinalZera wrote:Speaking of Spanish, how has it influenced this language? What kinds of loanwords did it take? Did it adopt some foreign phonemes too?

Well, it's taken loanwords for the things the spaniards brought! So cow is /baka/ in Spanish, and was loaned into Otomi as /mbaga/. The days of the week are all loaned, as are many kinds of food - hang on, let me consult my database...

sugar, Spanish /asukar/ Otomi /azuga/
lime, Spanish /limon/ Otomi /li~mu~/
garlic, Spanish /aSo/ (at the time of the conquest), Otomi /aSo/

There are definitely some interesting patterns with loanword adaptation, but I don't really have enough data on it to give a grand pronouncement. Anyway, we're in Mexico City now, and we'll be going our separate ways soon. I expect Radagast to come here sometime and post a neat summary of all that we've achieved.