Tzotzil language

Vowels

Tzotzil has five vowels. o and u fluctuate between rounded and unrounded, some have proposed spelling the unrounded vowels as ö and ü respectively.

Before a glottalized consonant, a vowel appears to lengthen and tense, such as a in tak'in "money".

Consonants

/v/ may be unvoiced pronounced as the voiceless [f] when in a consonant cluster or in fast speech.

/b/ is frequently implosive [ɓ], especially when intervocalic or in initial position. It is also weakly glottalized in initial position.

/kʰ pʰ tʰ/ are more strongly aspirated in final position.

/w d f ɡ/ occur as well, but only in loanwords, such as bweno from Spanish bueno.

Aspirated and ejective consonants form phonemic contrasts, for example, kok, kok', and k'ok' all have different meanings: ('my leg', 'my tongue', and 'fire', respectively).

Syllable structure

All words in Tzotzil begin with a consonant (which may be a glottal stop). Consonant clusters are permissible, almost always found at the beginning of a word and consisting of a prefix together with a root. Roots in Tzotzil occur in the forms CVC (t'ul "rabbit"), CV (to "still"), CVCVC (bik'it "small"), CV(C)VC (xu(v)it "worm", the second consonant disappears in some dialects), CVC-CVC (’ajnil "wife"), CVCV (’ama "flute") or CVC-CV (vo'ne "long ago"). The most common root is CVC. Almost all Tzotzil words can be analyzed as a CVC root together with certain affixes.

Stress and intonation

In normal speech, stress falls on the first syllable of the root in each word and the last word in a phrase is heavily stressed. For words in isolation, primary stress falls on the final syllable except in affective verbs with -luh, first person plural exclusive suffixes, and reduplicated stems of two syllables. In these instances the stress is unpredictable and is therefore indicated with an acute accent. The Tzotzil variant of San Bartolomé de Los Llanos, in the Venustiano Carranza region, was analyzed as having two phonemic tones by Sarles 1966. Research by Heriberto Avelino in 2009 was not able to confirm more than an unstable and incipient tone contrast.

Phonological processes

Morphology

In Tzotzil, only nouns, verbs, and attributives can be inflected.

Nouns

Nouns can take affixes of possession, reflexive relation, independent state (absolutive suffix), number, and exclusion, as well as agentives and nominalizing formatives. Compounds can be formed in three ways:

An example of a prefix for nouns is x-, an indicator of a non-domesticated animal: x-t'el "large lizard"

The plural suffixes for a noun change based on whether or not the noun is possessed:

Some nouns, such as words for body parts and kinship terms, must always be possessed. They cannot be used without a possessive prefix, or otherwise must be used with an absolute suffix to express an indefinite possessor. The possessive prefixes are:

The prefix listed first is the one used before a root starting with a vowel, the prefix listed second is the one used before a root starting with a consonant. For example, k+ok kok "my foot", j+ba jba "my face"

The absolute suffix is usually il but can also have the form el, al, or ol: k'ob-ol "hand (of some unspecified person)"

Verbs

Verbs receive affixes of aspect, tense, pronominal subject and object and formatives of state, voice, mood and number. They can also form compounds in three ways:

Attributives

Attributives are words that can function as predicates, but are neither verbs nor nouns. Often they can be translated into English as adjectives. Unlike verbs, they do not inflect for aspect, and unlike nouns, they cannot head a noun phrase or combine with possessive affixes. The composition of attributives occurs in three ways:

For colors:

Syntax

The basic word order of Tzotzil is VOS (verb-object-subject). Subjects and direct objects are not marked for case. The predicate agrees in person, and sometimes in number, with its subject and direct object. Non-emphatic personal pronouns are always left out.

Verb agreement

Since the agreement system in Tzotzil is ergative-absolutive, the subject of an intransitive verb and the direct object of a transitive verb are marked by the same set of affixes, while the subject of a transitive is marked with a different set of affixes. For example, compare the affixes in the following sentences:

In the first sentence, the intransitive verb tal ("come") is affixed by -i-...-otik to show that the subject is the 1st person plural inclusive "we," but in the second sentence, since the verb pet ("carry") is transitive, it is affixed by j-...-tik to mark the subject as the 1st person plural inclusive "we."

From this sentence we can see that the 1st person plural inclusive object "us" is being marked the same as the 1st person plural inclusive intransitive subject "we" using -i-...-otik. Thus, -i-...-otik is the absolutive marker for 1st person plural inclusive and j-...-tik is the ergative marker for 1st person plural inclusive.

Also from the sentence l- i- s- pet -otik "He carried us (inclusive)" it is possible to see the 3rd person ergative marking s-, which contrasts with the 3rd person absolutive marking Ø in the sentence 'i- tal "He/she/it/they came."

Enumeration

With many nouns, numbers must be compounded to numeral classifiers that correspond to the physical nature of the object being counted. This precedes the noun being counted. For example, in vak-p'ej na "six houses" the classifier -p'ej "round things, houses, flowers, etc." is compounded to the number vak "six" and precedes the noun na "house(s)."

Sample lexicon

There are also many Spanish loanwords in Tzotzil, such as:

Dictionaries and grammars

In 1975, the Smithsonian Institution produced a dictionary of Tzotzil, containing some 30,000 Tzotzil-English entries, and half that number of English-Tzotzil entries, the most comprehensive resource on Tzotzil vocabulary to that date. Tzotzil word-lists and grammars date back to the late 19th century, most notably in Otto Stoll's Zur Ethnographie der Republik Guatemala (1884).

Liturgical use

In 2013, Pope Francis approved translations of the prayers for Mass and the celebration of sacraments into Tzotzil and Tzeltal. The translations include "the prayers used for Mass, marriage, baptisms, confirmations, confessions, ordinations and the anointing of the sick ... Bishop Arizmendi said Oct. 6 that the texts, which took approximately eight years to translate, would be used in his diocese and the neighboring Archdiocese of Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Mass has been celebrated in the diocese in recent years with the assistance of translators — except during homilies — Bishop Arizmendi said in an article in the newspaper La Jornada.

Media

Tzotzil-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio stations XEVFS, broadcasting from Las Margaritas, Chiapas, and XECOPA, based in Copainalá, Chiapas.