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In this paper we provide a critical account of selected key linguistic and cultural revitalisation experiences in Mexico. For this aim, the project entitled Proyecto de Revitalización, Mantenimiento y Desarrollo Lingüístico y Cultural (Linguistic and Cultural Revitalisation, Maintenance and Development Project), which has been developed for over two decades, is briefly reviewed. We also analyse some recent youth musical creations, most notably hip hop and rock, and their dissemination via social media. Together with the collaborations that such initiatives have established with different actors in Mexico and around the world, a brief review of revitalisation methodologies and their outcomes is presented. We consider the specific contexts, achievements and challenges of these efforts, hoping to provide an overall evaluation of best practices for language revitalisation. Highlighting their impact in reversing language shift, as a critical reflection on crucial language revitalisation issues, this review also serves to evaluate our own recent efforts, especially in the blossoming realm of the arts and the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.)

The article highlights the description of Mexico history with different Indigenous Peoples that inhabit Mexican territory. It focuses on its speaking languages form linguistic families, which comprised by dialectal variants along with Mexico's population that registered as speakers of an Indigenous language; also discusses role of Indigenous language in primary school, and work in manual, low-skilled labor jobs.

De Lingua Othomitorum Dissertatio by Manuel de San Juan Crisóstomo Nájera was the first linguistic study of modern Mexico and it paved the way for the study of original languages both within the academy and within other state institutions. The text also marks the end of a three-century-long interaction between Latin, Ancient Greek and indigenous languages and reveals a time in which Latin had lost its prestige and was becoming a language deemed to be of philological and academic interest only. A case can be made that Nájera's Dissertatio foreshadows the epistemology currently used to explain linguistic politics in present-day Mexico City, which places not only an urbanised nation state at its core, but also continues to privilege Indo-European western languages over hundreds of living Mexican original languages. Focusing on the contact between Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek and Hñähñu, this paper will analyse the responsibility of contemporary classical scholars to engage with the original languages of Mexico and will argue that this engagement can also lead to the decolonisation of classical studies themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides evidence for a binary contrast in the deictic system of Mexican Spanish. The analysis is based on experimental data on how native speakers interpret the adverbial demonstratives aquí/acá/ahí/allí/allá in a 3D virtual reality video game. The tests crossed the variables of distance, person, and anaphora. The results revealed that (i) when contrasting degrees of distance and anaphoric reference, ahí primarily has an anaphoric function, while aquí/acá/allí/allá primarily have a deictic function; (ii) acá/aquí designate proximal distances and the domain of the speaker; (iii) ahí designates the domain of the hearer in a person-oriented deixis; and (iv) the meaning of allí and allá cannot be explained by the deictic parameters of distance and person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at broadening the interdisciplinary field of linguistic typology and dialectology, through diasystemic ecology, from the standpoint of inflectional morphology. Mazatec inflectional classes and intricate patterns of paradigm diversification are scrutinized through a survey of dialect taxonomies and an overall model describing main parameters, such as subconflation, inflectional class shifts and metatypes. This approach provides as efficient a grid to observe dialect divergence and convergence as traditional isoglosses, especially considering the high degree of regularity and systematicity of inflectional class processes in the Mazatec dialect network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how cellphone technology, specifically cellphilms – films of varying lengths made with cellphones by everyday people – are being taken up in the community of Union Hidalgo as a platform to foster an intergenerational dialogue between youth and Elders, with the specific goal of preserving the Zapotec language and ancestral practices. The study is rooted in two distinct but complementary methodologies. The first is an Indigenous Oaxacan methodology or practice known as comunalidad, a process rooted in a commitment to strengthening the future of communal lifeways. These lifeways reflect the values of the Zapotec ancestors, the community, and local Indigenous identity by asserting strategies that engage a cultural praxis that does not perceive education in terms of formal classroom curriculum. Rather, they engage the cultural process of learning, whether it is making tamales, planting corn crops, or “doing” other embodied ancestral Zapotec practices. This comunalidad methodology is merged with a participatory cellphilm method, in the form of a series of workshops adapting cellphone video, Web, and social-media technologies. The results included a dialogue about how new technologies can inform the transfer of Indigenous ancestral knowledge, language, and embodied practices in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mexican Spanish is generally recognized as a conservative variety that maintains syllablefinal /s/, while Puerto Rican Spanish consistently weakens it. To explore what social properties are indexed by coda /s/ variants and whether these variants alone can alter evaluations of speaker origin, 75 Mexican listeners participated in a matched-guise test. They listened to recordings of five Mexican and Puerto Rican Spanish speakers spliced to include only coda [s] or coda [h], evaluating speakers on a scale of social properties and identifying their perceived place of origin. Mixed effects models fitted to 6,750 evaluations demonstrate that [s] is associated with various measures of status, including intelligence, work ethic, confidence, and snobbishness. However, these evaluations are conditioned by listeners’ stereotypes and regional expectations, as Mexicans were evaluated as speaking better Spanish when presented with [s] and Puerto Ricans as speaking better Spanish with [h]. Finally, listeners evaluated Puerto Rican voices as significantly more Mexican given coda [s] and Mexican voices as significantly more Caribbean given coda [h], with the most drastic shift for Mexican speakers. The paper concludes that manipulating a single salient variable (/s/) is sufficient to override other linguistic features, which play a much more limited role in social identification and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although indigenous languages elsewhere in the Americas declined during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in eighteenth-century Yucatan fluency and literacy in Yucatec Maya became more common among castas and creoles. During the later colonial period, interpreters were readily available, with an upsurge in literacy in Maya among criollo clergymen, merchants, militia officers, and provincial administrators. They in turn observed that almost as many mestizo and Afro-Yucatecan subjects and parishioners spoke only Yucatec Maya as their indigenous counterparts. In criminal cases, indigenous, casta, and even creole witnesses and suspects required interpreters to translate their statements. This article builds on earlier research into indigenous-language documentation but shifts its emphasis to mundane genres produced by non-Mayas, demonstrating that the linguistic persistence of Yucatec Maya should be viewed not only as an instance of effective cultural preservation but also as an example of multidirectional transculturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of negation in Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ) based on a corpus of texts written in Valley Zapotec between 1565 and 1808. There are four negative markers in CVZ, two bound ( ya=, qui=) and two free ( aca, yaca). Standard negation employs a negative word and an optional clitic, =ti. Understanding the syntax of an historical form of Valley Zapotec allows us to make some observations about related forms in modern Valley Zapotec languages, in particular San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec (SLQZ). For example, the morpheme =ti, which is required in clausal negation in SLQZ, is not obligatory in any negative constructions in CVZ until around 1800. In Vellon 1808, the youngest text in the corpus, we observe =ti required in one type of clausal negation. This allows us to observe details of the development of the modern Valley Zapotec negation system, including the fact that the remaining changes leading to obligatory =ti in clausal negation in SLQZ must have occurred within the last 200 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Belmar (1902) contains a word list of Teojomulco Chatino forms which is the only extant data from this language. I show that Teojomulco Chatino is the most divergent Chatino language, a sister to the most recent reconstructions of Proto-Chatino (Campbell 2013), and that it has traits not found elsewhere in Chatino, including Zapotec-like stem-initial prominence, nasalization of penultimate vowels, and a unique analogue of the Proto-Zapotecan *kwe= proclitic. Lexical evidence suggests that Teojomulco Chatino has undergone significant contact with Zapotec languages. Based on this data, I propose a revised picture of the historical development of the Chatino branch of the Zapotecan languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applicative and registration constructions (Norman 1978, Aissen 1990, and Zavala 2000) have very similar forms and discourse functions. Registration constructions index- or cross-reference- an extra-thematic (i.e., non-core, non-term, peripheral) participant on the verb under certain discourse conditions, namely, extraction, focalization, or discourse continuity of said extra-thematic participant. They sometimes change the semantic role of the extra-thematic participant in the clause. Unlike applicatives, registration constructions do not promote the indexed participant, as it does not acquire Object morphosyntactic properties. Promotion is a core property of applicative constructions. Therefore, registration constructions have been neglected in typological accounts of applicatives, as they fail to promote the phrases they refer to. Closer inspection of the discourse functions of registration, like the one presented in this paper with data from Otomi (Otomanguean, Otopamean), suggests the existence of a larger family of constructions containing both applicative constructions and registration constructions. This would allow a wider, more comprehensive view of both phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.)

In this article, I consider competing notions of 'alphabetic authenticity' and indigenous authorship among Mexican indigenous authors and activists. Orthographies form a special focus, as choices about them entail envisioning particular kinds of texts and, hence, types of readers. I focus on the divergent strategies - all fundamentally semiotic - that people advocate in developing 'authentic indigenous writing' and in using various meta-semiotic processes to harness competing authenticities to language revitalization initiatives. I suggest that the friction between these conflicting models is both contentious and generative, producing new possibilities for engagement even as the interstices between them may hide possibilities not yet explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.)

It is generally assumed that Fray Bernardino de Sahagún translated the Nahuatl text of theFlorentine Codex(ca. 1577–1579) into Spanish. The surviving ‘Memoriales con escolios’ (Tlatelolco, ca. 1565), a three-column page draft comprising the Nahuatl-language source text, its translation into Spanish and explanatory notes for the clarification of relevant Nahuatl terminology, serves as a point of reference to argue that Sahagún's group of Nahua assistants were co-authors of the column containing the Spanish translation that was eventually transferred to theFlorentine Codex. In order to support this argument, this study portrays the learning experiences to which his Nahua assistants were exposed at the Imperial College of Tlatelolco, and which they applied to the creation of the ‘Memoriales con escolios’, and examines a passage from the manuscript that casts light on Sahagún and his assistants' working methods and on the translation techniques that they employed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Otomi (Oto-Pamean, Oto-Manguean) is a small group of languages spoken in Mexico which has emerged as a linguistic family in recent times. In this paper, I study relevant changes in the number system of the Otomi languages. These changes constitute an interesting object of study to gain a better understanding of two main phenomena: aspects of language change involving the loss of the dual number; and the constraints on number agreement restricted to conjoining structures. I show that changes in the number system in the Otomi family have different outcomes depending on the dialectal area. Such outcomes include the loss of dual morphology through a semantic rearrangement where the old dual forms have become exponents of either paucal or plural number. In some of the varieties, the old dual is still preserved, but it is relegated to male speech as a token of partnership and camaraderie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an updated version of a short text in the Seri language, about how the blue bottlefly sits on carrion and essentially is making smoke signals that then attract vultures. The text was one of two texts first published in E. Moser (1968). Discussion of the evolution of the text and its analysis is presented as well as a new detailed interlinearization that gives the morphological composition of the words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the practice of ordaining young men because of their personal language ability, a process referred to as an ordination a título de lengua. As a result of reforms codified by the Catholic Church in the Council of Trent, prospective priests were required to support themselves without assistance from the Church, a requirement called a title. This requirement was satisfied if an ordinand enjoyed a benefice or a chantry. Because of the need to have as many priests who knew native languages as possible, the crown ordered that the ability to speak a native language could be used in lieu of a title. Starting in the 1560s the bishops of Mexico began to keep track of clergy according to their ability to speak a native language. When the system of oposiciones (competitive placement exams) began in the 1580s, candidates for benefices would be tested on their language ability. This article traces the development of a bilingual secular clergy in order to evaluate whether royal officials responded to the widespread use of Nahuatl at the time of contact or whether those same officials encouraged the spread of Nahuatl through their policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue shows that Nahuatl was not a standard lingua franca spread across Mexico, but was used flexibly and spontaneously by people of many kinds for many different purposes, varying greatly according to the location, the ethnicity, and the social status of speakers and writers, as well as the passage of time. And the Nahuatl on the periphery showed archaic traits left over from the language's spread in preconquest times. The plasticity of Nahuatl is a key factor in its survival and success. [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]

Ayapaneco is an indigenous Mexican language that-according to a widely circulating story-is dying because its last two fluent speakers refuse to speak to each other. In 2006-07, their case was publicized by Mexico's National Indigenous Language Institute (INALI), picked up by several international news agencies, broadcast on television, and repeated in various media. In this article, I examine the circulation of the Ayapaneco story and its unexpected consequences for the two speakers and the town of Ayapa as well as for other interested parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the comic book series "Arandu, El Principe de la Selva," and the dynamics of the Mexican comics industry. "Arandu" reportedly mirror's the tendency of Mexico to serve theoretically natural markets linked by language affinity. The core of the comics' appeal is said to be rooted in its racialization of plot. The storyline allegedly condones a general racial order in which Causasians stand atop, mestizos follow, and native and black at the bottom.

A decade ago innovative efforts were undertaken by a group of native and non-native professionals to safeguard and promote the cultural and linguistic heritage of a number of indigenous groups in Mexico. The initial focus was directed to the Nahua people, dwelling in the Balsas river basin in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. In this region roughly 40 thousand people still speak Mexicano as their native tongue. This article reviews the results and ongoing efforts of that decade-long initiative, in particular the effect of successful popular opposition to the construction of a long-planned hydroelectric dam in the indigenous speakers' region and the effect of developing and commercializing a series of indigenous crafts that reinforce the ethnolinguistic awareness of Balsas Nahuas. Other recent initiatives in different indigenous groups such as the Maya are also touched upon. More briefly discussed, from a critical perspective, are general theoretical, methodological, and political strategies for reversing language shift, especially although not exclusively in Mexico. [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 article offers information about the native language Isthmus Zapotec. It states that Isthmus Zapotec is the common name of the language used by Zapotec spoken on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico. It indicates that it is the first language of several inhabitants of various cities and towns, smaller communities with lexical, syntactic, and phonetic variation between towns only a few kilometers apart.

This article presents data showing that the syntax of the Nahuati dialect spoken in Hueyapan, Morelos, Mexico has traits of nonconfigurationality: free word order and free pro-drop, with predicate-initial word order being pragmatically neutral. It permits discontinuous noun phrases arid has no naturally occurring true quantifiers, suggesting that noun phrases in Hueyapan Nahuatl are adjuncts rather than actual arguments. These findings are contrasted with those of an earlier study by Jeffrey MacSwan, who concludes that Nahuati syntax has relatively fixed subject-verb-object word order. It is suggested that the differences observed between the two Nahuatl varieties may be a result of methodological problems in MacSwan's collection of data, skewing it in the direction of a more rigid syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents research into the learning of indigenous languages among Spanish colonists in 16th and early 17th century New Spain. The author focuses on evidence of oral language acquisition and cites written accounts of the Conquest such as "Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva España" by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (ca. 1568) and "Crónica de la Nueva España" by Cervantes de Salazar (ca. 1560). She discusses bilingualism and the learning of the Nahuatl language and describes official language policies and local economic incentives for Spanish colonists to learn indigenous languages.

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]

In Chontal Mayan, a maximum of two arguments are referenced on the verb. An applicative suffix -be indicates that a third argument has been raised to the status of a core argument with the corresponding downgrading of a previous verbally-marked argument. The existing descriptions of the language contain examples of this suffix but do not discuss alternative constructions. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to better describe the Chontal applicative from a cross-linguistic perspective; second, to establish the situations in which either an applicative construction or a non-applicative construction is possible. In the literature it is assumed that such alternations do not exist, but a study of my own data as well as other sources reveals that alternative constructions do occur in the form of oblique phrases and noun possession. The data suggest that Chontal is a primary object language with applicative constructions sensitive to factors of person and animacy. This paper concludes with a discussion of Pylkkänen's (2008) recent work on applicatives and the proposal that transitives in Chontal he classified as low applicatives or high/low applicatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of a ten-month ethnography of a Rarámuri school and community, this article contributes to the understanding of the role of sociolinguistic and socioeconomic contexts in creating Indigenous-language maintenance programs. Employing concepts of micro- and macrolevel variables in language endangerment and language vitality scales, it provides an example of how these variables should inform language and literacy planning (LLP). It also discusses how LLP for Indigenous communities needs to embrace a biocultural diversity perspective. [Rarámuri, Tarahumara, language maintenance and shift, language policy and planning, bilingual education, indigenous education, Mexico] [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]

Following a functionalist approach, the goal of this study was to determine whether iconicity/position of the subordinate clause (in our case, non-past concessive clauses) played a role in mood alternation in Mexican Spanish. Initially, it was hypothesized that speakers of this variety of Spanish would favor the placement of the concessive clause with the verb in the subjunctive before the main clause; this was related to a more iconic value of the subordinate construction when the concessive clause is preposed, together with Lunn's concept of (lack of) 'relevance'/evaluative function of the subjunctive. Two sets of data were analyzed: speakers' judgments of grammatical concessive clauses, and the informal oral production of concessive structures in an interview setting. Results support our original prediction differently depending on the type of instrument and data set analyzed. [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]

In an earlier article (Pharo 2007), the author investigated how Spanish ethnographer-missionaries and missionary-linguists of the Colonial period translated the concept of ‘religion’ into various indigenous Mesoamerican languages. In the present article, he concedes that “assorted Mesoamerican notions may well together, as a family of concepts, be subordinated to the abstract superior concept of ‘religion’. Other relevant modern Spanish concepts like ‘sagrado’, ‘creencia’, ‘ritual’ and ‘costumbre’ etc. can thus be studied in the dictionaries.” In particular ‘costumbre’ (“custom”, “habit”) proves to be a central word among present-day Mesoamericans, not only to circumscribe their own religious practice, but also to designate ‘religion’ as well. As a result, the author, this time, analyses Spanish concepts associated with religion — but not exclusively with Christianity, i.e., neutral religious notions are the object of the analysis — translated into Nahuatl and Yucatec as recorded in colonial period dictionaries. The general hypothesis is that the dictionaries, in particular the Vocabulario (1555 and 1571) by the Franciscan Alonso de Molina (1514–1585), constituted a pedagogical strategy of transculturation at this early stage of the mission, not a radical linguistic attempt at acculturation, in order to transmit the unfamiliar Christian notions (such as conversion) to the natives of Mesoamerica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work concerns structural outcomes of contact between Mexican Sign Language (LSM) and American Sign Language (ASL). A brief description of the social environment that leads to contact between LSM and ASL along the U.S.-Mexico border is provided, and two claims are advanced: (i) Contact between sign languages can exhibit characteristics of contact between spoken languages (e.g., interference), but there are also unique features of signed-language contact due to the ability to produce elements from a signed and spoken language simultaneously; and (ii) examples of interference from one sign language in the production of the other are sometimes systematic and predictable based on the signer's linguistic background, but cases of lack of interference also provide evidence that some signers are able to employ subtle articulatory differences, either consciously or not, when producing signs from the sign language that was learned after they acquired their first sign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the history of two terms from a same linguistic community along the variously permeable US-Mexican border, mano and vato. Exploring the history of mano and mana will provide useful insights for subsequently exploring the history of vato. [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]

This paper presents data on the Azoyú Tlapanec reference tracking system. The system is analyzed according to a procedure where default rules for how the system works are formulated and deviations are interpreted as being licensed by different levels of grammar organization along the lines of the local-global parameter proposed by Comrie (1989). The system is compared to its closest common typological congeners, obviation and switch-reference. Although it bears more resemblances to obviation, the system is neither clearly one of switch-reference, nor, indeed, of obviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a systematic account of the tone system of Peñoles Mixtec (PM). While /H/ and /L/ tones are unambiguously needed in underlying representations, we argue that the third tone is not /M/ but must rather be underspecified as /Ø/. Perhaps the most interesting of the several arguments presented is that strings of /Ø/ tone-bearing units are invisible to a process which deletes the second /L/ of a /L-Ø*-L/ sequence. We propose that all /L/ tones are underlying floating and that /L/ rather than /H/ is the marked tone in this three-value system. The surface mid and low-falling pitches in outputs are shown to derive by a small number of realizational rules, which also are responsible for producing successively upstepped H tones. The PM tone system is unusually interesting both from a general tonological perspective as well as for its relation to Dürr's (1987) Proto-Mixtec tones which have the inverted values in PM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the conquest of Michoacán, Mexico, in the mid-1500s, the Purépecha (Tarascan) people and language have experienced significant geographic contraction due to the encroachment of Spanish. Today Purépecha speakers are found chiefly in the Meseta Purépecha region, to the exclusion of other areas in Michoacán. While Spanish has become the dominant language in the larger commercial and administrative centers, the Purépecha language remains dominant in the countryside. This research examines Spanish and Purépecha use and maintenance relative to the degree of accessibility or isolation of various towns and to the principle function (commercial, governmental, agricultural, etc.) of these towns. In regard to language use and maintenance, three main types of towns emerge, which have been mapped to show the linguistic patterns of the Meseta Purépecha. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]