Fortis/Lenis Affricates in Colonial and Modern Valley Zapotec

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2014
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Tri-College (Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges). Department of Linguistics
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Thesis
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
This thesis focuses on the phonological connections between three modern varieties (Mitla, Isthmus, San Lucas Quiaviní of the Zapotec language and Colonial Valley Zapotec, a variety spoken roughly 500 years ago. Zapotec is a group of Oto-Manguean languages currently spoken in the Oaxaca region of Mexico. Zapotec is underrepresented in current linguistic scholarship thus this project provides an exciting opportunity to understand how modern Zapotec relates to colonial Zapotec in a concrete and specific way that has not been studied before. Modern varieties of Zapotec show fortis/lenis contrasts (see Broadwell 2013), which can loosely be defined as the distinction between "strongly" and "weakly" produced consonants. My thesis examines fortis/lenis affricates as they exist in MZ, SLQZ, and IZ and looks at whether this contrast is represented in the orthography of CVZ, and how it is represented. An affricate is a sound that consists of a stop followed by a fricative (controlled release of air)–like the sound at the beginning and end of the English word church. Using the 100-item Swadesh list and some additional semantically-related lists I selected, I identified instances of fortis and lenis affricates in MZ, SLQZ, and IZ. I used the Fieldworks Language Explorer database to find the CVZ cognates of these words. Using the concordance feature of the FLEx database, I searched through all texts contained in the database for instances of each of these words. All instances of non-{ch} representations of affricates in CVZ correspond to modern lenis affricates. Though this correlation proved statistically insignificant, doubling the figures in the same proportion does yield significance, so I conclude that this research uncovers a pattern that warrants further investigation.
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