Temoaya Otomi
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Temoaya Otomi, also known as Toluca Otomi or Otomi of San Andrés Cuexcontitlan, is a variety of the
Otomi language Otomi (; ) is an Oto-Pamean languages, Oto-Pamean language family spoken by approximately 240,000 indigenous Otomi people in the Mexican Plateau, central ''altiplano'' region of Mexico. Otomi consists of several closely related languages, many ...
spoken in
Mexico Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
by ca. 37,000 people in and around the municipality of
Temoaya Temoaya is a municipality in the State of Mexico, Mexico. It's municipal seat is the town of Temoaya which is the sixth largest town in the municipality. It is located from Toluca and from Mexico City. It is known for its large ethnic Otomi popu ...
, and in three communities within the municipality of
Toluca Toluca , officially Toluca de Lerdo , is the States of Mexico, state capital of the State of Mexico as well as the seat of the Municipality of Toluca. With a population of 910,608 as of the 2020 census, Toluca is the fifth most populous city in M ...
: San Andrés Cuexcontitlán, San Pablo Autopan and San Cristobal Huichochitlan. The two varieties are quite different. The speakers themselves call the language . Lastra (2001) classifies it as a southwestern dialect along with the dialects of Mexico state. Lastra also notes that the endangered Otomí dialect of San Felipe in eastern
Michoacán Michoacán, formally Michoacán de Ocampo (; Purépecha: ), officially the Free and Sovereign State of Michoacán de Ocampo ( es, Estado Libre y Soberano de Michoacán de Ocampo), is one of the 32 states which comprise the Federal Entities of ...
is most similar to the Otomí spoken in San Andrés Cuexcontitlan.


Grammar


Pronominal system

The pronominal system of Toluca Otomi distinguish four persons: 1st inclusive and exclusive, second and third and three numbers singular, dual and plural.


Nouns

Otomi nouns are inflected for possession. The particular pattern of possessive inflection is widespread throughout the
Mesoamerican Linguistic Area The Mesoamerican language area is a ''sprachbund'' containing many of the languages natively spoken in the cultural area of Mesoamerica. This sprachbund is defined by an array of syntactic, lexical and phonological traits as well as a number of ethn ...
. A possessed noun is prefixed with a morpheme agreeing in person with the possessor. If the possessor is plural or dual the nouns is also marked with a suffix agreeing with the possessor's number. Below is given the inflectional paradigm for the word /''ngų''´/ "house".


Articles

Plurality of nouns is expressed with articles preceding the noun, ''rʌ'' "the (singular)" or ''yʌ'' "the (dual/plural)":


Verbs

On verbs all of the categories of person of subject, tense, aspect and mood are marked by the means of a single prefix on each verb. The categories distinguished are
Present The present (or here'' and ''now) is the time that is associated with the events perception, perceived directly and in the first time, not as a recollection (perceived more than once) or a speculation (predicted, hypothesis, uncertain). It is ...
,
Preterit The preterite or preterit (; abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple pas ...
, Perfect,
Imperfect The imperfect (abbreviated ) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was walking" or "used to w ...
,
Future The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently ...
,
Pluperfect The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English, is a type of verb form, generally treated as a grammatical tense in certain languages, relating to an action that occurred prior to an aforementioned time i ...
, two different
Subjunctive The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of the utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude towards it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality ...
s, present and past Continuative and Imperative. On transitive verbs Person of object is inflected by a suffix. If either subject or object is dual or plural it is shown with a plural suffix following the object suffix. The structure of the Otomi verb is as follows:


Person, Number, Tense, Aspect and Mood

The present tense prefixes are di- (1st person), gi- (2nd person), i- (3rd person). The
preterite The preterite or preterit (; abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple pas ...
uses the prefixes ''do''-, ''go''- and ''bi''-, perfect uses ''to''-, ''ko''-, ''ʃi''-, imperfect uses ''dimá'', ''gimá'', ''mi'', future uses ''go''-, ''gi''- and ''da''- and pluperfect ''tamą''-, ''kimą''-, ''kamą''-. All tenses use the same suffixes for dual and plural numbers and clusivity as the present tense, from here on only the singular forms will be given. The difference between preterit and imperfect is similar to the distinction between the
preterit The preterite or preterit (; abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple pas ...
in
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
''habló'' "he spoke (punctual)" and the imperfect ''hablaba'' "he spoke/He used to speak/he was speaking (non-punctual)". In Toluca Otomi the semantic difference between the two subjunctive forms (A and B) are not easily defined according to Lastra sometimes Subjunctive B has a meaning that is more recent in time than Subjunctive A. Both have the meaning of something counterfactual. The past and present progressive are similar in meaning to English was and is X-ing respectively. The imperative is for issuing direct orders. Verbs expressing movement towards the speaker such as ''ʔįhį'' "come" use a different set of prefixes for marking person/T/A/M. These prefixes can also be used with other verbs to express "to do something while coming this way". In Toluca Otomi ''mba''- is the third person singular imperfect prefix for movement verbs. To form
predicates Predicate or predication may refer to: * Predicate (grammar), in linguistics * Predication (philosophy) * several closely related uses in mathematics and formal logic: **Predicate (mathematical logic) **Propositional function **Finitary relation, ...
from nouns the subject prefixes are simply added to the noun root:


Transitivity and stative verbs

Transitive verbs are inflected for agreement with their objects by means of suffixes, while using the same agent prefixes as the intransitive verbs to agree with their arguments. However in all dialects a few intransitive verbs take the object suffix instead of the agent prefix, usually these intransitive verbs are stative, i.e. describing a state. This has led to the interpretation that in Otomi
morphosyntactic alignment In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between Argument (linguistics), arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like ''the dog chased the cat'', an ...
is split between active–stative and
accusative The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...
systems.Palancar (2008) In Toluca Otomi the object suffixes are -''gí'' (1st person), -''kʔí'' (2nd person) and -''bi'' (3rd person), but the vowel /i/ may
harmonize In music, harmonization is the chordal accompaniment to a line or melody: "Using chords and melodies together, making harmony by stacking scale tones as triads". A harmonized scale can be created by using each note of a musical scale as a ...
to /e/ when suffix to a root containing /e/. The first person suffix has is realized as ''-kí'' after
sibilant Sibilants are fricative consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English words ''sip'', ''zip'', ''ship'', and ...
s and after certain verb roots, and -''hkí'' when used with certain other verbs. The 2nd person object suffix may sometimes metathesise to -''ʔkí''.The third person suffix also has the
allomorph In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant phonetic form of a morpheme, or, a unit of meaning that varies in sound and spelling without changing the meaning. The term ''allomorph'' describes the realization of phonological variations for a specif ...
s -''hpí/-hpé'', -''pí'', -''bí'', and sometimes 3rd person objects is marked with a zero morpheme. Plural and dual number of object is marked by the same suffixes as the subject, in some cases leading to ambiguity about the respective numbers of subject and object. With object suffixes of the first or second person some times the verbal root changes, often dropping final vowels. A class of words that describe properties or states have been described either as adjectivesLastra (1992) or as
stative verb According to some linguistics theories, a stative verb is a verb that describes a state of being, in contrast to a dynamic verb, which describes an action. The difference can be categorized by saying that stative verbs describe situations that are ...
s.Palancar (2006, 2008) This wordclass consists of words with a meaning of attributing a property to an entity, e.g. "the man is tall", "the house is old". Within this class some roots use the normal subject/T/A/M prefixes, while others always use the object suffixes to encode the person of the patient/subject. The fact that they use the same suffixes that are used to encode the patient/objects of transitive verbs to encode the patient/subject of the predicate has been interpreted as a trait of Split intransitivity. This phenomenon occurs in all dialects, but which Stative verbs the object prefixes, and how many take, vary between dialects. In Toluca Otomi most stative verbs are conjugated using a set of suffixes similar to the object/patient suffixes and a third person subject prefix, while only a few use the present continuative subject prefixes. The following examples of the two kinds of stative verb conjugation in Toluca Otomi.


Other affixes

Temoaya Otomi also allow different kinds of
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
ial meanings to be inflected on the verb. From Toluca Otomi examples of adverbial affixes are: *''bí''- An
evidential In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particu ...
prefix used about progressive events being witnessed by the speaker (It only exists in third person singular): *''ga''- A prefix expressing two simultaneous events or one event immediately preceding another. Also has the second person ''ngo''-: *''ndɨ''- A prefix expressing that something was done well or a lot: Other affixes express
inchoative Inchoative aspect (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical aspect, referring to the beginning of a state. It can be found in conservative Indo-European languages such as Latin and Lithuanian, and also in Finnic languages or European derived languages w ...
aspect,
instrumental An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to instru ...
function or purpose. There is also a suffix with the meaning of "mean while"


Notes


References

* * * * * * {{Oto-Manguean languages Otomi language