Tlahuitoltepec Mixe Coatlán Mixe including San José El Paraíso

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3.7.3 Tlahuitoltepec Mixe

In his description of Tlahuitoltepec Mixe, Lyon 1980 does not discuss the palatalization of consonants, except to indicate palatalized allophones in the examples. From the list of allophones that are written in phonetic brackets in comparison to the example words written in slant lines, it is evident that most of the consonants in the inventory are palatalized by the third person possessor morpheme; for example, p has a palatalized allophone [p y ], shown in pya ºht [p y a ºht] ‘his broom.’ Lyon 1980:25–29. 57 The word for ‘broom’ without the third person marker is given in the vocabulary list as pa ºht. From the examples given, it is evident that Lyon has phonemicized Tlahuitoltepec Mixe palatalized consonants as Cy just as Crawford has done for Totontepec Mixe. Wichmann 1995, in describing all the Oaxacan Mixe languages, follows Crawford and Lyon in treating palatalization as the phonemic palatal consonant j. However Wichmann 1995:57–58 does not say that j metathesizes with the following consonant, but that j palatalizes the following consonant.

3.7.4 Coatlán Mixe including San José El Paraíso

In Van Haitsma [Dieterman] and Van Haitsma 1976:5–11, palatalization in the Mixe of San José El Paraíso 58 is similar to that in the other Oaxacan Mixe languages i.e. secondary palatalization of nearly all of the consonants. It is called a suprasegmental phoneme of consonants to avoid positing palatalized consonants as phonemes, which would nearly double the consonant inventory, and to maintain the more simple syllable onset. The authors state that all primary consonants may be palatalized, writing palatalization as a tilde over the consonants. Distinct from palatalization is the phoneme y which does not palatalize the first person marker prefix n- or the second person prefix m- when they precede a word beginning with y. The contrasts are shown in these examples: nyaH ¹o­k 59 ‘I killed him’ and ñ o­k ‘he lit it’ in which ny is a sequence of the first person n- plus y and ñ is a palatalized n, the third person palatalization morpheme plus n. Hoogshagen 1984:4, in describing the effects of palatalization on the entire consonant inventory of Coatlán Mixe, writes the third person marker as y- preceding the word initial consonant and states that in initial position, the y- indicates that the palatalized allophone of the consonant occurs: mo ºk ‘corn’; ymo ºk [m  ok µ] ‘his corn.’ However, if the word initial consonant is y and the second person marker occurs, palatalization does not occur: yo ¹ok ‘mother-in-law’; myo¹ok [myo¹okµ] ‘your-mother-in-law.’ Hoogshagen and Hoogshagen 1993 in their dictionary of Coatlán Mixe Mixe-Spanish, represent palatalization by the use of the orthographic y and in the phonology section describe the pronunciation of yC C represents any consonant as a palatal articulation of the consonant which follows y and a palatal off-glide from the consonant on the following vowel. It is stated that the y represents a morpheme, i.e. as a prefix, it is third person; as a suffix written Cy, it indicates adverbial concordance of the verb. Although this is a popular grammar written in Spanish, and not a linguistic description, it gives a more complete depiction of the palatalization phenomena than have been presented in other descriptions, either linguistic or popular. Palatalization in Coatlán Mixe is basically the same as the 57 The Tlahuitoltepec words are shown as examples of the fronted allophone of a which occurs before or after the y Lyon 1980:28. The fronting arrow over the [a] is omitted here. There is a misprint in the actual example given for p and [p y ] as p y çhk [p y çhkµ] with the superscript [p y ] in phonemic slashes Lyon 1980:25. Note that none of the phonemic examples have superscripted letters. p y çhk should have been written pyçhk; palatalized consonants are phonemicized as Cy as in Totontepec Mixe. 58 One of the villages in the Coatlán Mixe district is called San José El Paraíso; the language spoken there is considered to be the same language as Coatlán Mixe. 59 The capital H indicates what is called an aspirated vowel in the Mixe of San José El Paraíso Van Haitsma [Dieterman] and Van Haitsma 1976:5–11. 39 secondary palatalization described in this study for Isthmus Mixe i.e. morphemically-induced secondary palatalization.

3.7.5 The origin of secondary palatalization in the Oaxacan Mixe languages