Ottomangues languages

The Oto-Manguean languages —also called Oto-Manguean, Oto-Manguean or Oto-Manguean— constitute an extensive Linguistic family that includes various groups of native languages spoken between central Mexico and northern Costa Rica, although only the Otomanguean languages spoken in Mexican territory survive. The largest number of speakers of this family is located in the state of Oaxaca, the speakers of Zapotec and Mixtec add up together to close to one million people. The total number of speakers of all varieties together exceeds two million.

In the Altiplano, the Oto-Pamean languages belonging to this family have an important presence in states such as Hidalgo, Querétaro, México, San Luis Potosí, Tlaxcala, Puebla and Guanajuato, where there are important Otomi and Mazahua-speaking communities, as well as small nuclei that preserve other languages of this branch, including Jonaz, Tlahuica, Matlatzinca and Pame.

Several Ottomanguean languages are in danger of extinction, including the last four mentioned in the previous paragraph. As an example, Ixcatec and Matlatzinca have a few hundred speakers. Entire groups, like the Manguean, have disappeared.

History

The Oto-Manguean language family has been present in southern Mexico since at least 2000 BC. C., although this presence probably extends several millennia into the past. Using the controversial glottochronological method, it has been proposed that the approximate date of the breakup of the protootomangue occurred around the year 4400 BC. It has been suggested that the Otomanguean urheimat is from the Tehuacán Valley (southeast of Puebla, Mexico), so it may have been related to some of the oldest Neolithic cultures in Mesoamerica.

Although there is some controversy regarding the location of the Otomanguean urheimat, there seems to be a consensus that the Tehuacán culture, which developed between 5000 and 2300 B.C. C., is an archaeological expression of Otomanguean-speaking peoples. The analysis of the vocabulary associated with agriculture also indicates that the peoples who spoke Protoomanguean had a relevant participation in the domestication of corn and other crops, along with the speakers of protomixezoque and protomaya.

The long history of the Otomanguean family has resulted in a notable linguistic divergence among its component groups. Terrence Kaufman compares the level of differentiation that exists between the branches of the Otomanguean stem with that observed between the main groups of Indo-European languages. Furthermore, he proposes that the Otomanguean languages may be the origin of several linguistic features that occur in the languages of the Mesoamerican linguistic area.

Classification

History of Otomanguean language studies

The Otomanguean family is made up of eight branches: Amuzga, Mixtec, Popolocan, Zapotec, Chinantec, Oto-Pamean, Tlapaneca-Subtiaba, and Manguean, now extinct. The elaboration of the description of this family has been a great achievement of comparative and historical linguistics. The grouping of these seven branches into groups that encompass several branches, including the attempt represented in the table below, does not have much agreement. In fact, various authors have presented intermediate reconstructions based on 2 or 3 branches, but it is not clear, for example, that there would have been an Eastern Proto-Otomanguean versus a Western Proto-Otomanguese. The reconstruction of the phonological system of Proto-Otomangue from the seven families and without trying to reconstruct all the intermediate groups was carried out by Rensh (1966).

Localization of the Ottoman languages spoken today.

In the 19th century Orozco y Berra (1864) had proposed the relationship of the Zapotec languages and the Mixtec languages, including in this proposal the cuicateco, the chocho and the amuzgo. This same author found a relationship between the Otomí and the Mazahua. Shortly after, Pimentel (1865, 1874) added Mazatec, Popoloca, Chatino, and Chinantec to Zapotec-Mixtec and related Pame to Otomi-Mazahua. Daniel Brinton (1891) suggested that Chichimeca-Jonaz and Pame would be related to Otomi-Mazahua. Thus, at the beginning of the XX century, two related groups had been recognized: the Otopame group and the Zapotec-Mixtec-Amuzgo-Popoloca group.

At the beginning of the XX century, Lehman (1920) added the Chiapas-Manguean group and reorganized the internal kinships of Otomanguean Oriental. Jacques Soustelle (1935) systematically studied the Otopame group and examined internal clustering. In 1926 Schmidt tentatively linked Chiapas-Mangue and Oto-Pame and coined the term Otomi-Mangue for the family. However, Sapir (1929) was the first author who definitively related the Oto-Pame-Chiapaneco and the Mixtec-Zapotec-Amuzgo-Popoloca, in a way comparable to the modern grouping. Except for the fact that Suárez's (1977) work on Tlapanec (Me'phaa) and Subtiaba proved that these languages were related to the rest of Otomanguean and rather than to the Hokan languages as Sapir had proposed. Swadesh included Huave as an Ottomanguean language, which is now considered an isolate.

From 1950 the reconstructive work began. Proto-Otopame was reconstructed by Doris Bartholomew, Proto-Zapotec by Morris Swadesh, and Proto-Chiapaneco-Mangue by Fernández de Miranda and Roberto Weitlaner. The first proposal for the reconstructed Proto-Ottomanguean is by Longacre (1957), and it was later revised by himself and Rensch.

Internal sorting

Possible languages

Mascorro was a language spoken by the Mascorros who inhabited a region near Rioverde in San Luis Potosí, the language they spoke was related to the current Otomi, however it is also believed that the members of that town spoke Naolán.

Common features

All Otomanguean languages are tonal, and in many of them nasalization has a phonemic role. Morphologically, the noun is relatively simple, with the verb being the most complex part of the sentence.

Phonology

The phonological system of Proto-Tomanguean as reconstructed by Rensch is relatively simple. It would consist of 9 consonants, 4 vowels and 4 tones. The following table summarizes the phonemes of Proto-Otomangue:

Notable is the absence of labial consonants. In many branches the derived phoneme /*p/ derives from the labiovelar /*kʷ/. It is also worth noting the absence of opposition between voiceless and voiced phonemes, which was developed secondarily in other Otomanguean languages (sometimes from nasal + plosive sequences, sometimes from other sources). The following table summarizes some of the main phonetic changes that characterize the different branches of Otomangue:

Morphology

Ottomanguean languages do not have inflection in the noun, although they admit possessive and clitic prefixes to indicate the plural. In some languages the form of the pronouns distinguishes between person, animal or thing; this can be considered a semantically determined grammatical gender distinction.

There are few derivative suffixes, composition being the most common morphological procedure for forming new words.

Regarding the morphosyntactic alignment, there is no coherence throughout the family. Some languages show an ergative-absolutive type (Chinanteco and Tlapaneco), others an active-inactive type (Chocho, Matlatzinca and probably Chiapas) and others do not show clear evidence (Mixtec, Zapotec) There are no clear cases of nominative-accusative alignment.

Syntax

Syntactically, most also have the basic VSO phrase order. Connected with the above is the fact that in a good number of them the modifier follows the modifier and that the syntactic complement follows the kernel that requires it.

Lexical comparison

Several authors have built lists of cognates for hundreds of terms. However, many of these lists, although they contain some regular correspondences, are riddled with irregularities, prefixed increments and suffixes that make the correspondences quite inaccurate. Therefore, the current state of the Otomanguean languages must be considered as a tentative macrofamily. The following numerals show the divergence of the lexicon:

Widely used cognates include *rini 'blood, raw meat' (Otomi ngɨ 'meat', Matlatzinca ríní 'meat', Chatino tnẽ²¹ 'sangre', Zapotec rini 'blood', Mixtec ñɨñɨ 'blood').