Jaime de Angulo’s Chatino Texts: Part 1 – The Tonal

Since 2015 I’ve been tinkering with the few older sources of written Chatino that I’ve found. One source is a few pages of Jaime de Angulo’s notes from his stay in Oaxaca. The texts are short, the transcription dubious, and the language is a variety of Eastern Chatino I don’t know particularly well. Therefore, an edition of de Angulo’s Chatino texts probably won’t make it into an academic journal, but they’re fine blog post material. This post covers the first of three texts.

Jaime de Angulo is perhaps best known in linguistics for his work with the Indigenous languages of northern California, but he also worked for a while in Oaxaca on a few Otomanguean languages. He mostly spent his time working on Zapotec and Chinantec languages, but he also worked a bit with one (as far as I can tell) unidentified speaker of Panixtlahuaca Chatino, and even wrote down three very brief texts in that language. Working with these texts is difficult since de Angulo didn’t have a particularly good ear for Chatino sounds, and many of the words he transcribed are only sorta recognizable as Chatino words.

I transcribed these texts from a microfilm given to me by Rosemary Beam de Azcona. That microfilm is in a drawer at my desk at work that I haven’t been to in a year, so I’ll have to get back to y’all on the citation of the archival assets. I believe they’re held by the American Philosophical Society.

Angulo’s transcription is given in italics, followed by my interpretation and analysis of his transcription. This interpetation is pretty much phonological forms in Quiahije Chatino (another variety of Eastern Chatino I have more experience with and more complete resources for) and could use the attention of a Panixtlahuaca Chatino specialist. The orthography here uses superscript capital letters to indicate the etymological tone set each word belongs to, represents glottal stop with <q> and indicates nasal vowels by <Vn>. I’m not very confident about how there categories map onto the actual tones of Panixtlahuaca Chatino. I’ve left off any tone set marking for words I’m unsure about. A translation of each line into Spanish follows each line. Some notes and comments on the text appear between the blocks of text.

Panixtlahuaca Chatino, uniquely within Chatino languages, has a complex vowel register system that interacts with tone, glottal stop, and two degrees of nasalization (Kingston and Woodbury 2014). One effect of this system is that Panixtlahuaca Chatino has vowel qualities not heard elsewhere in Chatino /ɔ, ɛ/, and sometimes a Panixtlahuaca Chatino word has a different vowel than its Eastern Chatino cognates. De Angulo’s transcriptions at times reflects this vowel register system, but given the quality of the evidence and my unfamiliarity with Panixtlahuaca Chatino itself, I can’t say too much for sure.

The Tonal

ská yù’yú nd-ckàte̍-yú k-ną́-yù tcà-gà ‘ní g’ą́ snè-yu̍

ska^A yu^A kiqyu^E nxka-te^C-yu^A kan^H-yu^A chaq^F nga^A qni^A ngqan^C sneq^A-yu^A

one 3M man like-essence-3M search-3M what PROG.be animal tonal son-3M

‘A man wanted[?] to look for what animal was his son’s tonal.’

• De Angulo writes //yu’yu// throughout his texts for ‘man’. This word in most other Chatino languages has a velar initial consonant (cf. Quiahije Chatino kiqyu^E). I’m not sure if De Angulo’s //yu’yu// is simply an error or if the narrator elided a phrase like yu^A kiqyu^E which would be ‘man’ preceded by a class term for male humans. Other class terms in Chatino languages include //ya// for trees and things made of wood (cf. Proto-Chatino *yaka ‘tree’). I call them “class terms” since they appear far more lexicalized in the Chatino languages than the noun classifiers found in many other languages.
• Nxka-te^C-yu^A is the first of two “essence predicates” (Cruz & Stump 2018) found in de Angulo’s texts, though he doesn’t call any special attention to them. These essence predicates are formed of an initial verbal component (here nxka) followed by a noun referring to an emotional center (here te^C). The emotional center noun is followed by a pronoun (here yu^A ‘third-person masculine human’) which syntactically is its possessor and semantically indicates the experiencer of the action of the predicate, here ‘want’.
• The term <g’ą́> ngqan^C ‘tonal’ will probably need some explanation. In some Mesoamerican cultures, there is a belief that each person has a special link to a specific animal (their tonal), and that their fates are intertwined. Thus, the father in this story is setting out to find the animal his son is spiritually tied to. Curiously, the identity of the animal is never mentioned in this brief text.

nd-yà nécę̀ nd-ckwà e̍ ‘ní g’ą́ snè-yu̍

ndya^A neq^C kxenq^C nxkwa qin^A qni^A ngqan sneq^A-yu^A

COMPL.go belly brush meet NSUBJ animal tonal son-3M

‘He went into the brush [and] met the animal [who is] his son’s tonal’

• Neq^C means both ‘belly’ and ‘inside’ in the Chatino languages. Meronymic body part expressions are widely used throughout the Chatino languages (and Mesoamerica more broadly) to indicate spatial relationships.
• The <e̍> is presumably the cognate of Quiahije Chatino qin^A, which would make this an atypical instance of a preposition used to mark a non-human object in Chatino’s differential object marking system. Perhaps in Panixtlahauca Chatino, non-humans who are important characters can receive the differential object marking associated with humans? Panixtlahuaca Chatino /ʔẽ/ is cognate of Quiahije /ʔĩ/ if the Panixtlahuaca word has a tone sequence that requires the use of the lower vowel register. If it does have one of these tones, this is evidence that the vowel register system was in place in De Angulo’s time.

ó íh-kwè-yù l’o̍

qo^E ykweq^A-yu^A loqo^E

and COMPL.speak-3M with(.3)

‘And he spoke to him.’

• When the object of a preposition, an argument of a verb, or the possessor of a noun is not overtly expressed, it is usually some topical third-person entity. Here, loqo^E, ‘with’ (one of the few spatial prepositions that is not a meronymic body part term) appears without an overt object, so the object is interpreted as some topical third-person entity. Since yu^A already refers to the father, the animal is the only object available. ‘Talk’ is also an unusual verb in Chatino languages since it marks its objects with this ‘with’ preposition rather than marking its object with the non-subject marker qin^A. In Tataltepec Chatino, using the cognate of qin^A instead of loqo^E changes the interpretation of an utterance like ykweq^A-yu^A loqo^E from ‘he talked to (someone)’ to ‘he scolded (someone)’.
• In Chatino languages, initial clusters of glides followed by stops are realized with the spirantization of the glide, so /jk^weʔ/ –> [çk^weʔ], which De Angulo heard as [ihk^we].

nd-kwi̍ ‘ní

ntkwiq-qni^A

speak-3animal

‘The animal speaks’

• Qni^A is a pronoun for animals. In all Chatino languages, this pronoun is homophonous with the noun ‘animal’ or else is clearly a phonological reduction of it.

ką́ tcà-kwì l-kà ‘ní g’ą́ sné

kan chaq^F kwi lka qni^A ngqan^C sneq^G

be.1SG what ? be animal tonal son.2SG

‘I am the one who is your son’s tonal.’

• A subset of nouns and all verbs can be inflected for first-person singular subject or possessor. This inflection can have two exponents: changes in the stem’s final vowel (high vowels become non-high and oral vowels become nasal) and may also be accompanied by a tone change. Unlike what we’ll see for second-person singular inflection, some first-person-singular inflected stems have the same tone as their uninflected counterparts. Thus, if the third-person form of a verb stem is //ka//, then the same verb stem inflected for the first-person singular will be //kã//.
• A subset of nouns and all verbs can be tonally inflected for second person singular, which is evident in ‘son’ here. Note the different diacritics for ‘son’ when inflected (<sné>, ‘your son’) versus when it is followed by a pronoun (<snè-yu̍> ‘his son’).