Maybe Some Day

It seems like every trip to Oaxaca, some particular Zapotec word or phrase stands out and becomes the Official Word of the Trip.  In 2000, it was gwendi ‘a lot’ which can often be shifted to the front of the sentence.  In 2001, it was scanna, akin to rhetorical ‘pues’ and ‘then’, which hangs out at the end of the sentence.  In the winter of 2004-05 (I think), I picked up on eu?, a response my wife suddenly began saying when her name was called, and which I noticed others doing, too.  On that one, I’m not sure if it is a Zapotec or Spanish thing.

This trip there hasn’t been a clear-cut winner, but I have suddenly had several serendipitous encounters with =ttsa’, a clitic adverb meaning ‘sometime’.  For something I am currently working on, I asked one of my sisters-in-law to use the word eguittia ‘will play again’ in a sentence, and she came up with the following:

• Gwayu’uttsa’laasayà’ eguittiayà’.  

I was momentarily stumped.  Although I didn’t immediately realize it, I knew the verb gwayu’ulaasayà’ ‘I would like’, but  the =ttsa’ in the middle of it was throwing me off.  Then, she explained it to me: it’s ‘sometime’.  The sentence means ‘I would like to play again sometime.’ Ttsa’ is an adverb, and like other adverbs (=ru ‘more/still’, =ní ‘fast’, =gwa ‘also’, etc.) it follows the verb, before the subject pronoun (=yà’ ‘I’ in this case).  And when there is a compound verb, with an incorporated noun like laasa, which is something like ‘heart/self’, the adverb may, and often does, come before it, immediately after the verb root.  Yay!  Problem solved.

And just to prove the point, she turned around and used =ttsa’ a different way in her next sentence:

• Gwayu’uttsa’laasa’yà’ eyecchayà’ attsa’ tari’á. ‘I would like to return to the US another time.’

Here, =ttsa’ is attached to or fused with a- or attu, which means ‘another’.

Then, just last night, my other sister-in-law, hit me with another instance of =ttsa’ completely out of the blue (she hadn’t been there when we previously discussing it).  I told her xiaba ‘maybe’ in response to something, and she told me that if I wanted to make the possibility seem very remote, I could say xiattsa’ba!  I was ready this time.  That’s =ttsa’ attached to =xia ‘maybe’, itself another adverb, and before =ba, an emphatic element, required for xiaba to stand as an independent word, not attached to the verb.  And the combined xiattsa’ba would be something like ‘maybe sometime’ or perhaps even better in English would ‘maybe some day’, as in Xiattsa’ba iteeliintè’ ttu ttu tiisa’ què’ xtiisa’cayé, ‘Maybe some day I will understand every word of their language.’

zapoteco serrano, del oeste

I got my first look at the Catálogo de las Lenguas Indígenas Nacionales put out by INALI (Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas) in 2009, which attempts to list all of the native languages of Mexico.  (And I even found out my sister-in-law and her husband had participated in workshops for developing the catalog.)  Of course, I was interested to see how the catalog categorized MacZ.

The first question was whether they were low counters or high counters.  For some reason, exactly how many Zapotec languages there are is a rather contentious question among Zapotecanists, with low counters insisting the number is somewhere in the 4 to 10 range (EndangeredLanguages.com claims this is the view of most linguists), while others believe there are several times more–the Ethnologue lists 57 Zapotec languages.  I fall in the latter camp, as does the INALI catalog.  It lists, if I counted correctly, 64 varieties of Zapotec.

Despite the few extra varieties, it still groups Macuiltianguis with Atepec.  While I have certainly seen a great deal of intelligibility between the two towns, there are so many striking differences between them that I think it is better to treat them as separate languages.  And certainly for revitalization efforts, it helps to keep them separate.  Otherwise, there would be unending conflicts on the “right” way to say things.

There are, however, some surprising things in the Zapotec varieties listed for the Sierra.  I have (crudely) drawn the INALI Zapotec groupings for district of Ixtlán and some of the Villa Alta on the map below (map from García García, Angel (y colaboradores). n.d. [1995]. Oaxaca, distritos municipios, localidades y habitantes. Oaxaca, Mexico: A. García García):

Key:

Grey	zapoteco de San Miguel Aloápam	Dark Blue	zapoteco serrano, del sureste
Red	zapoteco serrano, del noroeste	Brown	zapoteco serrano, del sureste bajo
Orange	zapoteco serrano, del oeste	Pink	zapoteco serrano, del oeste medio
Yellow	zapoteco serrano, bajo	Lime Green	zapoteco serrano, del sureste medio
Green	zapoteco serrano, noroeste bajo	Purple	zapoteco de Santiago Laxopa
Light Blue	zapoteco serrano, del este

One thing I really like about the INALI catalog is that it explicitly lists all towns where the variety is spoken, something that sometimes has to be inferred in the Ethnologue.  (Caveat about the above:  I believe every town that is included in a circle is described by INALI as belonging to that variety; however, some towns may have accidentally been left out.)

The most surprising things on the map are the groups on the left side:  the grey, pink, and yellow groups, but especially the red and orange group, the latter of which contains Macuiltianguis.  The first three groups seem to line up pretty well with what is listed in the Ethnologue:  the grey group corresponds to the Ethnologue’s Aloápam Zapotec, the pink group with Yareni Zapotec (which the Ethnologue claims has an 80% intelligibility with Sierra Juárez Zapotec, their name for the group that includes MacZ), and the yellow with Southeastern Ixtlán Zapotec, a fairly new grouping in the Ethnologue (with 63% intelligibility with Sierra Juárez and 43% with Yareni).

The Ethnologue does not have anything corresponding to the red group, which encompasses the towns of Abejones and Jaltianguis.  This group on its surface is surprising since, as can be seen on the map, they are not the closest towns:  Atepec and Analco are both closer to each of these towns than they are to each other.  I don’t know if there was some historical connection between the two or exactly how this grouping was determined.

The other odd thing about the red group is that it bisects the orange group, the group containing Macuiltianguis.  The Ethnologue does not explicitly list which towns are included in its somewhat analogous Sierra de Juárez group; its membership has to be inferred from a not so detailed map (Sierra de Juárez is number 202 on the map).  I would guess from the Ethnologue map that they group the red group and northern orange group together and it looks as though the southern orange group is part of the yellow group (Southeastern Ixtlán Zapotec).  One final possibility that should be considered is that in some of these towns, Zapotec is no longer spoken and the connections between the varieties is a conjecture.

If nothing else, the groupings and map certainly pose a lot of interesting research questions.  Now, if only I can find the time to visit all of these towns.

Are They Brothers?

An enlightening conversation showing where Benjamin is in his (re)acquisition of Spanish:

Margarita:  ¿Son hermanos?

Benjamin:  No, because Chucho is a boy and Jaquelina is a girl.

Me:  Are they brother and sister?

Benjamin:  Yes.

Clearly, he understood the Spanish question, but filtered through an English mindset, where hermanos equals brothers but not the brother-sister relationship.

This got me to thinking about the Zapotec sibling terms and how in a way they are closer to the English than the Spanish.  In both English and Zapotec, distinctions are made between brothers, brother and sister, and sisters.  Spanish collapses the first two groups, as shown below:

	Zapotec	English	Spanish
male-male	¿Naacanà bettsi’?	Are they brothers?	¿Son hermanos?
male-female	¿Naacanà daana?	Are they brother and sister?	¿Son hermanos?
female-female	¿Naacanà yhiila?	Are they sisters?	¿Son hermanas?

Zapotec and English keep these three relationships distinct (in certain contexts).  But while English has to rely on the circumlocution brother and sister, Zapotec is more efficient using a single word, daana, to encode the brother-sister relationship.  And because it has that term, it generally keeps the brother-sister relationship distinct.  So a man may talk about ca bettsi’nì ‘his brothers’ and a woman about ca yhiilanì ‘her sisters’, but he talks about ca daananì ‘his sisters’, and she talks about ca daananì ‘her brothers’.

A Bug’s Life

Serendipity.  After posting about edible ant queens recently, edible insects seem to be wherever.  First, on Saturday here in Oaxaca I saw a whole book on edible insects.  I may have to go back and get.  And then today, Slate.com has an article on insects and kelp as the necessary future staples of a sustainable food source for an ever growing population.  Oaxaca, of course, gets a shout out.

On a less serendipitous, but still interesting note, in discussions on Facebook, I was reminded about the worms that come in bottles of mezcal.  While I’ve drank the mezcal, I’ve never been able to bring myself to eat the worm.  It seems like a joke to play on a drunk foreigner.  Maybe one of these days, I’ll drink enough mezcal to be up for the challenge.  I also learned about the jumil, an edible stink bug!  Apparently, it is common to eat these live and my friends report a sweet, licorice taste.

Obviously, I still have a lot more exploring to do if I want to consider myself a true bug-eating aficionado.

Dia de San Juan

Today is El Día de San Juan, the day commemorating the birth of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of both San Juan Luvina and San Juan Atepec, the two closest Zapotec speaking towns to Macuiltianguis.  I am sure there have been numerous festivities this weekend in both towns, celebrating the event.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to the towns this time.  But 12 years ago I did get to go, when a friend and I walked from Macuiltianguis to Luvina and then on to Atepec.

Luvina and Macuil are fairly close to one another.  A mountain sits between them, but if you are on the outskirts of Macuil, you can even see Luvina.  (You can see another town, Abejones, sitting on a mountain across from the river from Macuil.  As the crow flies, it might even be closer than Atepec, but not by walking.)  The trip into Luvina was fairly easy.  We took our time and I think I got various plant and insect names along the way. (I seem to recall trying to take a picture of a gwelluulu’ ye’e ‘dung beetle’–literally shit roller–on that trip.)  We got into town and met with the cabildo and saw some of the beginning festivities with fireworks.  The only tricky part was figuring out where to stay, but eventually my friend got us a place to stay with someone who I think might have known his father.

We set out fairly early the next morning with minimal provisions (maybe some bottled water and crackers) for Atepec.  That was a much bigger ordeal.  People still frequently travel between Macuil and Luvina (there’s even a dirt road between them now for cars that wasn’t there in 2000) and I think we even met a peddler selling net bags going between towns and I think some Chinantecs walking between them as well.  Walking between Luvina and Atepec seems less common.  And definitely was more of a challenge as we had to go up a mountain.  That was killer.

Unfortunately after we did get to the top, we made the mistake of going down the other side and ended up kind of lost.  We kept going around the next ridge expecting to see the town in the distance, but no such luck.  I’ve never felt so much in the middle of nowhere.  Nobody else was around–fewer and fewer people work in the fields, and even so, it was El Día de San Juan, so nobody was out anyway.  We did run across someone’s horse, but that was about it.  (I wondered if we could ride him into town, but it was probably for the best we didn’t even try.)  We ran out of our bottled water but found some from a spring to get.  It was delicious.  Finally, we figured out we needed to get back on top of the mountain and had to reascend, which was no easy feat for me.  Eventually, with a lot of help from my friend, we did it, and followed along the crest of the mountain, eating some diiga’ ‘berries’ along the way.  And at last, after about six or seven hours, we made it into town (it was supposed to have only taken us three hours or so).

We wondered into town and found a place serving food to finally get something real to eat.  (There was apparently some discussion between proprietors in Zapotec about whether they should serve us.  Of course, unbeknownst to them, my friend understood what they were saying.)  Luckily, at least we had a place to stay that night, since my friend’s aunt had in-laws in the town.  As part of the San Juan festivities, there was a dance that night, but I really felt out of place after I saw everyone dressed up there and I was still in the same muddy clothes from that day’s journey.  I’m a reluctant dancer anyway, and that didn’t help.

The next day was better.  There were horse races and various events in front of the municipio.  The band played, clowns and acrobats were entertaining the crowd, there was a greased pole climbing contest.  It reminded me somewhat of going to fairs and rodeos as a kid.  I think for our journey back, we eventually managed to hitch a ride with someone up to the main highway.  From there, I don’t remember how we find our way back to Macuil, which means it wasn’t half the adventure of getting to Atepec in the first place.

Beenya’ ttu etta.

I made my first tortilla.  My wife and sister-in-law were making tortillas, Macuil-style:  giant medium-pizza sized things made with blue corn.  They beat out the dough on a metate and cooked them on an open fire.  They let Benjamin and my nephew make a few little ones, so I thought I would try my hand at them, too.  I wasn’t given enough dough for a full sized one, so it was more a personal pizza size.  I learned that one trick is to keep your hand a little wet as you tap out the dough to keep it from sticking to your hand.  The edges of mine ended up a little irregular instead of a perfect circle, but I was complimented when my tortilla puffed up on the fire.  Apparently, that is a sign of a well-made tortilla, which I hadn’t known before either.  The results were definitely tasty.

EndangeredLanguages.com

The LinguistList just announced that a site is up which hopes to serve as a repository for material on endangered languages:  EndangeredLanguages.com.  It looks really promising, kind of a beefed up Ethnologue, to which scholars and community members will be able to make contributions, posting documents, photos, videos, audio files, etc.  It sounds exciting.  I have been in contact with them about getting MacZ on the map (literally).  If we can get over that initial hump, I hope lots of exciting things will be posted up by the community (and yours truly).

A New Flavor of Bug

I found out about chapulines, edible grasshoppers, right away when I started my work on Zapotec and probably even ate them first in the US.  (Can’t say I much cared for what I got there–seemed like stale popcorn with legs that had a bad habit of getting caught in your throat.)  Somehow, though, the existence of another edible insect in Oaxaca–chicatanas–had escaped my notice for more than 14 years. Thankfully, this gap in my knowledge has now been remedied.

My sister-in-law brought a bag of 20 or so of them home the other day, still alive.  They are leaf cutter ant queens, which appear in number during the rainy summer to fly off and start a new colony.  Wikipedia describes the process thusly:

Once a year, a colony, consisting of one queen and many thousands of workers, produces reproductive individuals called alates which have a different morphology, including wings for flight. After these individuals leave the nest of the parent colony, mating occurs high in the air with each female mating with between three and eight males (Wirth, et al., 2003). Colonies in close proximity conduct nuptial flights at close to the same time, increasing outbreeding. Males die after the mating flight. The queens then store the sperm acquired from the males in spermathecae, which they will use to found a new colony. Mortality for queens during mating is estimated to be as high as 52% (Wirth, et al., 2003).

After a few days, the ants had died.  My sister-in-law removed the abdomens from the ants, the rest of the ant body apparently having too strong a taste to eat.  (A little unsettling to think what may make the abdomens more palatable in light of the above description.)  Then, she toasted the abdomens and ground up with some chiles to make a salsa.  The ants infused the salsa with their strong, earthy taste (edit 6/22/12: the MacZ word for an earthy taste is idiá’).  Not bad really.  I see there are other ways to eat them–a whole taco full?–I wouldn’t mind trying it.  Might be a bit expensive though.  Someone else said her son collects them and can sell them for a peso each.  That could result in a very expensive taco, though I’m not really sure you would need that many.  It seems a little goes a long way.

Apparently, there’s no word for these things in Macuiltianguis Zapotec; it’s too cold for them there.  I’ll have to check to see what the words might be for them in other, warmer areas.

Now, it leaves me wondering what other edible bugs are out there.  If nothing else, maybe I should give chapulines another try.

Radio Mixteco

Yesterday, The New York Times ran a nice article on “La Hora Mixteca”, a weekly radio program broadcasting out of Fresno, CA and directed toward the Oaxacan immigrant farm workers in central California.  The host, Filemón López, is Mixtec and the program regularly features Spanish, Mixtec, and other languages of Oaxaca.  The NYTimes article includes a sample.  The program has also been picked up by Radio Bilingüe, the only Spanish-language public radio network in the US, which allows for the show to be picked up over the Internet as well on Sundays from 10-2 (unclear is that is PDT or EDT).  But independently, Radio Bilingüe seems worth checking out.

[hat tip: Pam Munro]

Springtime in Oaxaca

Today’s the first day of spring, though in Oaxaca it has been quite summer-like for a good month more.  It’s been quite warm here and dry.  Very enjoyable I think.  Come summer, it actually cools off here somewhat and rains a bit.

To commemorate the first day of spring, there is a children’s day environmental parade going on through the centro of Oaxaca.  Various daycares, including Benjamin’s, are participating in the parade.  The children are dressed up in various costumes with a spring/environmental theme: mostly as animals, but some were decked out as things to recycle and as trash that shouldn’t be thrown out on the street.  There are a couple of bands leading the parade through the streets of Oaxaca, starting off at the Santo Domingo church, and wending their way through the streets of Oaxaca.

Benjamin and Margarita in the Spring Parade