Orthography issues

[Scott Berthiaume]

Dear Otomangueanist colleagues,


Orthography continues to be a challenge in Otomanguean.  There are two questions that come to mind.

1)  Is it possible to maintain one standard orthography for Otomanguean, say with some modifications like we see in the Romance languages?

2)  What are the common phonological issues in Otomanguean that make a unified orthography difficult?

3)  What sociological factors determine what orthography a community will adopt?

4) What organizations (mother-tongue or other) are dealing with the issue of orthography in Otomanguean?

I asked Beth Merrill to comment on her experience with Zapotec in Oaxaca.  She has been involved in several workshops on the issue and is currently working on a language salvage project (SIL).

Any additional comments are greatly welcome.

----- Original Message ----- 
From:  Beth_Merrill @sil.org 
To: Scott Berthiaume 
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2003 11:18 AM
Subject: zapotec orthography

As usual, the factors driving different orthographic decisions tend to be historical and sociological much more than linguistic. One of the interesting linguistic factors is that many Zapotec languages have a sixth vowel (i.e., as compared to the five vowels of Spanish)--however, phonetically, the sixth vowel is all over the map in different Zapotecs; in some variants, it's an  ae (read IPA symbol) like in "cat", in some it's a barred i sound (previously written in Chichicapan as an e with dieresis; they've since changed to a barred i character, which many Zapotec orthographies use; those that use the dieresis e usually are symbolizing the ae sound) and there are other variations as well; some variants have lost the sixth vowel altogether.

Lenis and fortis poses an interesting proposition; there's probably as many different ways to indicate that as there are people in the room! (Okay, so I'm exaggerating, but only a little.) For example, Isthmus Zapotec--one of the most numerous and most literate groups--writes the lenis and fortis palatal fricative exactly the opposite of how most of the Valley groups do (x and xh, and xh and x respectively). Others use an underline, or a geminate character (xx and x), and there are also other ways.

The group would like for the same sound to be written the same in all the variants, but because the phonemes aren't the same in all the variants, the issue of what you're contrasting with often drives orthographic decisions. For example, in some variants there is contrast between x (typically used to write the English sh) and sh, because the x is retroflexed and slightly backed, and can occur in the same environment and changes the meaning of the word.

Beth Merrill
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/otomanguean-l/attachments/20030121/a4bd6d2a/attachment.htm>