26.997, Review: Language Documentation: Salminen (2014)

Thu Feb 19 15:15:45 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-997. Thu Feb 19 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.997, Review: Language Documentation: Salminen (2014)

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Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2015 10:15:04
From: Juan Colomina [Colomina-alminana_juan at austin.utexas.edu]
Subject: Díʔzte o zapoteco de San Agustín Loxicha, Oaxaca, México

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-965.html

AUTHOR: Mikko Benjamin Salminen
TITLE: Díʔzte o zapoteco de San Agustín Loxicha, Oaxaca, México
SUBTITLE: Esbozo gramatical acompañado de cuatro cuentos tradicionales con análisis morfológico y traducción
SERIES TITLE: Languages of the World/Materials 498
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Juan J Colomina, University of Texas at Austin

Review's Editors: Helen Aristar-Dry, Malgorzata Cavar, and Sara Couture

INTRODUCTION

Salminen’s short study is the first serious attempt to build a written grammar
and syntax of Oaxacan Zapotec variety (Díʔzte). This book is a perfect
introduction for undergraduates and graduates to the grammar of this language
as well as a perfect approach to the basics of linguistic methodologies and
fieldwork (including the collection and analysis of audio files).
Additionally, the volume offers advanced students and academics the
possibility to compare between Díʔzte and other Oaxaca Zapotec varieties,
although the comparative analysis is not shown in the book directly. The book
is written in Spanish. However, given the technicality of the linguistic
grammar analysis, non-Spanish readers should have no problems in understanding
the syntactic and morphological developments included.

Even though I think that the book should have required one or two additional
edits before publication, I really applaud Salminen’s agenda in the book. It
is obvious that Salminen’s agenda never was to give an exhaustive description
of the Oaxacan Zapotec variety’s grammar but to offer an accessible
introduction to it. Salminen explicitly states that in the introductory notes,
and also clarifies his intention to further research in this direction. Of
course, I could not agree more with Salminen’s way in pursuing its goals: by
rejecting the idea that words are neutral and mean things by themselves,
without attending to the cosmovision that surrounds the speaker. In other
words, Salminen agrees with the idea that the meaning of words is necessarily
embedded in a culture. 

SUMMARY

San Agustín Loxicha’s Díʔzte is a Zapotec variety belonging to the Miahuatec
subdivision of the Southern Zapotec branch spoken in the coastal region of the
Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is a tone language with level and contour tones,
suprasegmental glottalization and an intricate verb system, which often marks
aspect by means of fossilized prefixes or floating tone. The description, cast
in the framework of Basic Linguistic Theory (BLT, as described by Dixon 2009,
among others), draws frequent comparisons to other Zapotec languages and to
Proto-Zapotec reconstructions.  The book includes an introductory description
of the cultural context within which the language is spoken, among others
introducing the belief system featuring a 9/13 day calendar system based on
the Mesoamerican ritual calendar, which is still in use in the community to
the present day.

“Díʔzte, o zapoteco de San Agustín Loxicha, Oaxaca, México (Esbozo gramatical
acompañado de cuatro cuentos tradicionales con análisis morfológico y
traducción)” is a grammatical description of San Agustín Loxicha’s Zapotec
with four texts including a morpheme analysis and translation as well as links
to the corresponding audio files. The description is mostly based on data
collected during fieldwork by the author, and was submitted as an MA thesis at
Leiden University in 2010. Its publication in Lincom’s Languages of the
World/Materials Series reflects the current emphasis on revitalizing
endangered languages and documenting and recording them before they are gone.

EVALUATION

Díʔzte is the only one of the fifty-eight different Zapotec varieties spoken
in Oaxaca, and belongs to the so-called medular/Sierra Sur Zapotec dialects,
one of the five dialectal groups of this Mesoamerican language, specifically
to the Miahuatec subdialectal family. It is mainly spoken in the locality of
San Agustín Loxicha (Pochutle, Oaxaca, Mexico) by - according to Salminen -
around 14,000 persons. Nonetheless, given the low skills shown among the youth
and the high level of bilingualism registered in the data, the number of
people still fluent in the language is  probably lower. One may ask why is it,
then, necessary to write a complete book to describe its grammar? 

It is important to have it in mind that, even though it is the usual term to
refer to this language among academics, Zapotec is the Náhuatl-derived word
generally employed to refer to the whole linguistic family but not the word
used by the speakers to self-refer. So, by employing the word Díʔzte in this
book, Salminen follows the correct intuition that it is preferable to use the
appellation that the same speakers use to refer to themselves. Additionally,
when constructing and analyzing its grammar and morphological analysis at the
end of the book, the author describes not a generalized standard variety of
Zapotec but instead the ordinary language variety that the speakers really use
in everyday conversations.

Salminen introduces his methodology as a “holistic approach” (12). Following
the idea that language is not an isolated autonomous unit, Salminen
understands language as a non-detachable system symbiotically embedded in the
culture. Consequently, when a speaker employs her language, she is not only
describing the way things are, but also expressing the whole worldview and
history of the community that speaks that language. For this reason, Salminen
claims that language should never be studied only from an aseptic formal
approach, but also from a perspective that always brings attention to the fact
that speakers communicate much more than what the literal meaning of the
words. In agreement with this idea, Salminen states that we, as scholars
interested in the real significance of meaning, must account for language from
a more context-sensitive methodology/theory. 

Salminen’s own choice is to approach language employing the theoretical
framework of Basic Linguistic Theory (as developed by Dixon (2009) and Payne
(1997), among others), which allows a more adequate description of the
sociocultural structures and patterns within the analyzed community and
language (15). The main idea is to describe the grammar of each language in
its own terms, without conceptually assessing it by using other languages’
structure and patterns.

Employing this theoretical frame, Salminen reconstructs Díʔzte’s grammar
(20-82). As expected, because of its word order (it has a Verb-Subject-Object
language form order), Díʔzte is rich in monosyllabic roots (22-24).
Consequently, the verb is conjugated using prefixes, as well as employing
prefixes for aspect and mode (24-28). Díʔzte shows derivational prefixes,
usually fossilized, as well as person markers (such as possessives) and/or
modifiers in post-clitic or free positions. Even though the grammar offered is
partial, the book does a good job providing the essentials to start to work
with Díʔzte. Interestingly, the book includes a description of the variety
within the phonological system, as well as an audio file analysis (83-94).
Since the centrality of the concept of phoneme, Salminen seems to correctly
identify the phonemes of Díʔzte, and also the phonological rules that could be
employed as a tool for reconstructing its whole phonological system. Salminen
also proves BLT as a successful methodology to analyze sentence composition
and verb construction. Unfortunately, the author says nothing about the
processes of collecting and analysis of data.

The book also includes the transcription from the audio records, the
morphological analysis, and the translation (to Spanish) of four short stories
from the Oaxacan Zapotec Díʔzte tradition (95-122). They are short texts
collected from the people’s oral tradition that allow Salminen to exemplify
the grammar exposed in the previous sections of the book and, actually, to
connect the language with the culture of its speakers. The texts narrate the
Día de los Muertos festivity in San Agustín Loxicha, the story of Los tres
flojos, and the fables of ‘El tlacuache y el coyote’ and ‘El conejo y el
coyote,’ respectively, and show not only the specific particularities of
Díʔzte’s grammar previously described in comparison to other Zapotec varieties
(even though the comparison is never explicit) but also the influence of the
San Agustín Loxicha’s people cosmovision in its own language.

Every scholar interested in Mesoamerican grammar and morpho-syntax should read
this book. Nonetheless, I also leave you with two final warnings. First, since
the author’s mother tongue is not Spanish, sometimes the argument is very hard
to follow. It is not a question of grammatical purity, it is a question of
clarity. Second, as pointed out before, even though the book offers a variety
of data, the reader probably will miss some important and necessary analyses.
For instance, an explicit comparison between the Díʔzte and other Zapotec
varieties is missing, or an analysis of certain processes of
grammaticalization that are actually happening in the Díʔzte variety because
of its contact with Spanish given the high level of bilingualism between the
speakers.

REFERENCES

Dixon, R. M. W. (2009). Basic Linguistic Theory (3 Volumes). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Payne, Thomas (1997). Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Juan J. Colomina-Almiñana received his PhD in Philosophy from the University
of La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain) in 2009. He is an Assistant Professor at the
Department of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies at UT-Austin. His books
include Los problemas de las teorías representacionales de la conciencia
(Tenerife: Universidad de La Laguna, 2010) and Implicaciones de la teoría de
los actos de habla (Madrid: EAE, 2011), and he has coedited (with V. Raga) La
filosofía de Richard Rorty (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2010.)  He has also
published more than fifty articles in several collected books and
international journals. His research areas of interest focus on the boundaries
between Semantics and Pragmatics, Philosophy of Language, Linguistic
Anthropology, Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, Philosophy of Science, and
Logic. In 2012, he received the Young Researcher Award from the Spanish
Society of Logic. He is a member of the Research Group for Logic, Language,
Epistemology, Mind, and Action (LEMA) at the University of La Laguna in Spain,
whose main project is “Points of View and Temporal Structures”
(FII2011-24549).

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