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Copyright of Revista Espanola de Antropologia Americana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Espanola de Antropologia Americana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses the linguistic analysis of proto-languages, with a particular focus on the Zapotec indigenous group of Mexico. The author comments on the efforts of linguists to study and recreate these historical proto-languages. He also considers the evolution of phonemes in the proto-Zapotec and contemporary Zapotec languages.

Copyright of Revista de Investigación is the property of Universidad Pedagogica Experimental Libertador and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Mexico is a country with very rich culture and languages, however, indigenous languages are at risk of disappearing due to certain factors that cause that cause their replacement by the Spanish language. In recent times (2003) it was published the General Law of Linguistics Rights of Indigenous Peoples (LGDLPI by its Spanish acronym) which aims to preserve and develop the indigenous languages. This paper analyzes the situation of indigenous languages in their social context: on the one hand, there is a law in their favor and the other, a reality where their speakers are discriminated. The study confronts that which is established by the law and the specific situation of the speakers, which has caused the loss and replacement of their language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a Seri narrative text that contains the description of a route by boat to a bay that is on the way to Baja California from Haxöl Iihom (El Desemboque del Río San Ignacio), one of two Seri villages located along the coast of the Gulf of California. The narrator of the text, Francisco Morales Herrera, also provides his audience with a description of the origin of the place name of the bay that is the destination of the trip, An Iquitj Quih An Him Ipácatx 'Where The Pants Were Thrown'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The verbal periphrasis is one of the more complex and debated topics in the grammatical tradition. The current descriptions proposed by the main reference grammars as well as by most of the works dedicated to the verbal periphrasis explain three main values: temporal, aspectual and modal. Gómez Torrego points that between these values is possible to add the stylistic one. The purpose of this article is to describe the use of the infinite and gerundive verbal periphrasis in the mexican novel Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and its rhetorical and stylistic articulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo enfoca en la historia y la actualidad de la lengua y la cultura náhuatl. El autor hace referencia a la obra del fraile español del siglo 16 Bernardino de Sahagún como fuente para una aproximación sincrónica de la cultura náhuatl. También considera una aproximación diacrónica, que enfoca en el desarrollo histórico y geográfico de esta cultura.

The semantic associations between the lexicon of body parts and physical perception are almost universal. Within the domain of perception, it has been pointed out the supremacy of the 'eyes' and the 'visual' sense as metaphorical sources for other sensorial verbs ('see' > 'hear') as well as other cognitive domains (Viberg, 1984; Sweetser , 1990). In contrast, the 'ears' and the auditory modality are barely mentioned within these patterns of semantic changes (Evans and Wilkins, 2000). The present study explores the semantic extension of body parts and sensory verbs within the Yuto-Aztecan family. Rather than the vision, Yuto-Aztecan languages prefer the 'ears' and 'hearing', together to other vital body parts such as 'mind/heart' and 'blood', to develop physical, intellectual and emotional perception predicates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation and use of ICTs in rural areas little affected in the work of these communities because there are no computer systems in their native language which increases social exclusion and technology, coupled with this situation, this lack of financial resources . Alternatively, the paper proposes to focus efforts on the implementation of the free software distribution called OpenBiblio Nahuatl, which will automate all the activities that are conducted in a community library, this action to endow technology and manuals for administration. These actions will be complemented by the provision of other free software tools to support information management, returning to the library is a repository of data and a catalyst of ICTs to their community. In the first stage of the system will be available to be implemented in communities where they speak Nahuatl, the language spoken by 40 percent of Mexico's indigenous population. In addition, the library must consider certain technical requirements to operate which are statements in the trial. As the system is developed with free software can be freely shared and if necessary the user interface can be deployed in another language. Note that OpenBiblio works along the lines of Marc 21 bibliographic format to ensure compatibility with other systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

this is a corpus based comparative study on the language of touristic advertising focusing on the roles of the adjective in the slogans of destination marketing from various places, but the texts for the analysis are taken mainly from texas and mexico. the prevalence of the adjective, or lack thereof in these various advertisements, also include an investigation into its potential substitutes, its coordination with other parts of speech as well as other instruments used in this tri-objective based communication (inform, persuade and induce action). my study seeks to isolate various types of touristic advertising, focusing on the two major categories of "destinations" and "principals", which are then subdivided into more specific classes. this process was undertaken so as to have a very exact arena in which the transmitters of the advertising are selling the same type of service, to be able to compare and underline the functions of the adjective within similar contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Otomi text that Enrique Palancar presents here is from the variant of the language spoken in San Ildefonso Tultepec, Amealco de Bonfil, in the southern part of the state of Queretaro. The author notes that the variant belongs to the northwest Otomi dialect area, and is close to that of the Valley of the Mezquital. The story "The chameleon" was narrated spontaneously by Anastacia Cruz Vazquez, who was 59 years old at the time, and treats a theme that is both modern --that of a circus-- and yet reflects an old Otomi mythology regarding the Mexican reptile Phrynosomatidae, a kind of lizard somewhat like a miniature iguana. The reptile's mythical abilities to control all other animals are the point of departure for the narrative. Palancar also includes an explanation of the practical orthography and the conventions for the glossing and transcription of the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Se presentan los temas abordados en este número de la revista que incluyen textos sobre el idioma otomí, la familia mixezoqueana y tradiciones orales de la familia yutoazteca.

This article offers a treatment of the linguistic category ‘adjective’ that appears in two colonial sources, both written by Fray Juan de Córdova, O.P. in 1578: the Arte del idioma zapoteco and the Vocabulario en lengua çapoteca. Juan de Córdova was a Dominican friar, born in Córdoba, Spain in probably 1501. In 1543, Juan de Córdova was ordained at the Convento Imperial de México and later was sent to the Dominican Monastery of Oaxaca. He served as Province Minister for two years — from 1568 to 1570 — and later he continued to be a missionary among the Zapotec, when he wrote his great work on their language. Toward the end of his life, Juan de Córdova returned to Oaxaca and died in the Dominican Monastery of Old Antequera in 1595.
Based on the description of the category of the adjective, as proposed by Córdova and the analysis of the language as is currently spoken, particularly in the area of Santa Ana del Valle, Oaxaca, the author will show that the grammatical class proposed by Córdova was not actually formed as such during the period he describes. It will be shown, based on the analysis of two colonial texts — the testamentos by Gabriel Luis (1610) and Juan López (1618) — that the words that Cordova calls adjectives not only occur with very low-frequency but, more crucially, their categorization as adjectives has been due to their role in the Spanish translations more than to their grammatical characteristics. These two testaments had been compiled, with other testaments and documents of several kinds, namely as documents in a legal suit concerning a site named Gueguecahui. It is relevant to mention that testaments are not very reliable kind of document for a syntactic analysis of the language, since they have a very rigid structure that apparently mimics the schema used in testaments written in Spanish. Nevertheless, they can show that the attributive modification function is seldom used, and the cases found do not support that these expressions really pertain to the syntactic category of adjectives.
Furthermore, the analysis of adjectives as currently used in the Zapotec of Santa Ana del Valle shows that, more often than not, they do not correspond to adjectives but indeed verbs in Cordova’s Vocabulario. This affirmation is based on a comparative analysis of some adjectives in modern Zapotec of Santa Ana del Valle with related words given adjectival meanings in Cordova´s Vocabulario. In conclusion there is not enough evidence of the existence of adjective category in 16th-century Zapotec. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1756 Joseph Zepherino Botello Movellán (1734–c.1785) wrote the Cathecismo breve en lengua tarasca (“Brief catechism in the Tarascan language”). It was written in Purepecha or Tarascan, an indigenous language spoken in the northwestern part of the state of Michoacan, Mexico, by about 100,000 people. This is the only known 18th-century religious document written in this language, thus its great importance. Botello includes four word lists in his catechism which give us a small vocabulary. The word lists clearly do not have the extensive coverage or the lexicographic importance of the dictionaries of the 16th century; however, the value of this hand-written vocabulary lies in the fact that there is nothing else comparable from the 18th century. The composition and content of Botello’s catechism, produced by a typical member of the illustrious Creole class, it has features characteristic of the end of the century.
In this paper, I describe the principal characteristics of Botello’s catechism with its four lexical lists, in particular that of body parts. A point of reference for my analysis is the list of body parts in the Arte y Diccionario: con otras obras en lengua Michoacana by Juan Bautista de Lagunas, OFM (fl.1539–1574, d.1604) of 1574. The Catechism gives us a good idea of Purepecha in the 18th century and its historical development. The language in the document shows it to be closer to that of the 16th century than it is to modern Purepecha. It suggests that Spanish prepositions were possibly introduced in the 18th century. Botello’s catechism contains much interesting information on a variety of topics, such as orthography, dialectal variations, derivational processes, loan words and semantic relations. The language in this document documents the grammaticalization of the plural markers. Some data for the Spanish of the 18th century are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present essay is the result of the author's research on phonetic reduction in Yucatec Maya language. in the first place, two phenomena of this kind that are most common in speech are explained: elision and contraction, mentioning as well how other researchers have studied it. Specifically, are studied three-syllabic words' vowel elision. At this work is analyzed the way in which this process develops in the morphophonemics of Yucatec Maya as well as in the formation of syllables. After that it is exposed the manner in which it is recorded in our data, analyzing the frequency with which the (native) speakers use it. Finally, an explanation is submitted as to how this process has contributed to phonetic and grammatical change of some verbs since the 16th century until the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo discute la escritura zapoteca que tiene, indiscutiblemente, la historia más larga de Mesoamérica. Esta forma de comunicación empezó aproximadamente en 500 A.C. pero ha cambiado tras los siglos. La escritura, desde su comienzo, era un símbolo de poder del Estado y los gobernantes de la época.

The languages of the southern frontier are practically unknown to Mexican linguists and anthropologists, and very little research has been carried out in that area. When the frontier between Mexico and Guatemala was drawn, it separated speakers of five Mayan groups, and after the Mexican Revolution the situation became more and more difficult for the people who had thus been separated. The historical aspects of the present-day situation have to be reconstructed from oral reports obtained with difficulty because speakers of Mayan languages have been intimidated all along and accused of not being Mexican when heard speaking supposedly alien Guatemalan tongues. As recently as 1967 old women wearing traditional costume would go to jail if they had no proof of citizenship. Since the 1980s the legal situation has improved, but in practice speakers of Mayan languages are given a hard time by the authorities, who do not try to improve the hostile attitude of the Indians created by previous policies. Examples are given of what goes on in the so-called bilingual-bicultural education programs.

El artículo informa sobre el descubrimiento de cinco nuevas lenguas en México, entre ellas q'eqchí, ki'che, y mochós. Según Carlos Zolla Luque de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), el aumento de lenguas, detectado por censos poblacionales, se debe a la presencia de emigrantes de Guatemala en las zonas fronterizas de México.