UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Mixtec plant nomenclature and classification Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pp843br Author de Avila, Alejandro Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Mixtec plant nomenclature and classification by Alejandro de Ávila A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Overton Brent Berlin, Chair Professor Laura Nader Professor Leanne Hinton Fall 2010 Abstract Mixtec plant nomenclature and classification by Alejandro de Ávila Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Overton Brent Berlin, Chair Ñuu Savi (‘Sacred Rain’s collectivity’), the Mixtec people of southern Mexico, had created some of the most complex polities in the continent at the time of European contact. Five hundred years later, they remain cohesive, culturally distinct communities, as increasing numbers of individuals and families migrate to northern Mexico and the US for work in the agricultural and service sectors. In 2005, the Mexican Federal Government reported there were more than 446,000 speakers of Tu’un Savi (‘Sacred Rain’s word,’ the Mixtec languages) five years of age and older, 322,000 of them still living in 1551 settlements within their historic homeland; an additional 100,000 to 200,000 are estimated to reside in the US. The term Mixtec, derived from the Náhuatl mixte:cah (‘cloud-people’), has been considered by different authors to encompass between 12 and 52 mutually unintelligible languages, in addition to numerous dialects. According to the Summer Institute of Linguistics’ Ethnologue, it is the second most diversified group of languages in the Americas, after Zapotec. The Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas, however, recognizes 81 variants of Mixtec, making it the most diversified language group in Mexico following official criteria. The internal variation of Mixtec and its geographic proximity to three related groups (Cuicatec, Triqui and Amuzgo, members of the same lineage in a progressively earlier sequence of branching episodes), provide fertile ground for diachronic inquiry into various lexical and grammatical traits of these languages, which are part of the Otomanguean phylum. The Mixtec territory can be portrayed as an intricate mosaic in its geology and vegetation. It boasts one of the richest floras in Mexico, itself one of the most diverse areas of the planet in biological terms. Furthermore, the Mixteca (the local name for the region in Spanish) is notable for a high incidence of endemic species of vascular plants and terrestrial vertebrates, which reflect long series of climatic and ecological changes in the area’s natural history. It is part of a larger region of Otomanguean speech where a characteristic stone-working technology has been documented by archaeologists, in conjunction with the early development of plant domestication and agriculture. Natural complexity and cultural history thus converge to enhance the interest of the Mixtecan languages for ethnobotanical study. This dissertation presents the results of several years of research on the names and uses of plants in Mixtec communities in the states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero. Extensive 1 information is provided on plant terminology, backed in part by herbarium specimens collected in the field by the author. The Mixtec languages make use of a productive system of noun markers, in some cases matched by pronominal clitics, to label various plant categories. Adscription to these groupings appears to be determined by use, edibility and symbolic significance, as much as by life form affiliations that reflect adaptive design, such as woody plants, leafy herbs, vines and grasses. Categories labeled by class terms appear consistently in all the Mixtec languages that have been documented to date. The dissertation reviews the botanical nomenclature recorded by linguists and naturalists throughout the Mixteca since the 16th century. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction: natural history and cultural chronology of the Mixtec region 1 1.1 Geological history 1 1.2 Climate 6 1.3 Flora and vegetation 6 1.4 Language diversity and Otomanguean prehistory 9 1.5 Mixtec language history 15 1.6 Archaeology and history 19 1.7 The modern period 23 2. History and theory of ethnobiological classification and nomenclature 28 2.1 Francisco del Paso and Franz Boas 29 2.2 Conklin and Lévi-Strauss 31 2.3 Brent Berlin’s principles of categorization 33 2.4 Berlin’s general principles of nomenclature 40 2.5 Recapitulation 43 3. Semantic classification in Mixtec grammar and lexical morphology 46 3.1 Noun classifiers 46 3.2 Mixtec orthography 49 3.3 Phonology 51 3.4 Morphophonemics 53 3.5 Morphology 55 3.6 Contraction processes 58 3.7 The pronouns 59 3.8 Mixtec classifiers 63 3.9 Innovation and loss of the classifiers 70 4. A corpus of Mixtec plant lexicon 73 4.1 The sources of information 74 4.2 Dialectal geography of the sources 84 4.3 The plants marked tun-/tnu-/nu- 87 4.3.1 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <a> 91 4.3.2 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <ch> 91 i 4.3.3 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <d> 93 4.3.4 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <i> 94 4.3.5 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <j> 96 4.3.6 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <k> 96 4.3.7 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <l> 100 4.3.8 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <m> 100 4.3.9 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <n> 100 4.3.10 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <nd> 102 4.3.11 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <ñ> 110 4.3.12 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <o> 113 4.3.13 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <p> 113 4.3.14 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <r> 113 4.3.15 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <s> 113 4.3.16 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <t> 115 4.3.17 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <ts> 124 4.3.18 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <v> 124 4.3.19 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <w> 126 4.3.20 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <x> 126 4.3.21 Cognate sets and individual terms with initial <y> 128 4.4 The plants labeled yuku 135 4.5 Plants labeled ita 153 4.6 The plants labeled yuva and nduva 167 4.7 Other labeled groupings 187 4.7.1 Thorny plants 187 4.7.2 Grasses 189 4.7.3 Brooms – switches – shrubs 190 4.7.4 Soap plants 191 4.7.5 Tuberous roots 192 4.7.6 Agaves and plants that resemble them 194 4.7.7 Vines 196 4.8 Unaffiliated plants 198 ii 4.9 The main crops 208 4.9.1 Maize 209 4.9.2 Beans 213 4.9.3 Squashes 215 5. Conclusion: the geography of quelites and flowers 218 5.1 Spatial distribution of the yuva and nduva class terms 218 5.2 Botanical class terms in other Mesoamerican languages 220 Notes 225 Bibliography 232 iii Acknowledgments I am indebted to numerous kind people who have generously shared their knowledge with me during my field work in Oaxaca, Puebla and Guerrero. I cite their names in section 4.1 of this dissertation, listed by communities. I am grateful to Celso Flores Romero and Sergio Méndez, who instructed me in Coicoyán and San Miguel Tlacotepec Mixtec with great patience. The members of Ve’e Tu’un Savi heard my original proposal for documentation of the Mixtec plant lexicon and made helpful observations; I especially thank Juan Julián Caballero and Ubaldo López García for their encouragement and friendship. Many colleagues have offered the results of their own field research to me with great kindness; I would like to express my gratitude to Esther Katz, Priscilla C. Small, Susan J. Hugghins, Anna Piestrzynska, Jonathan Amith, Michael W. Swanton and Sebastian van Doesburg. Alfredo Saynes Vásquez provided Latin binomials for many of the plants I collected in Coicoyán and Jicayán; Silvia Salas Morales, Emily J. Lott and Abisaí García Mendoza have helped me identify the voucher specimens we have gathered subsequently. Salvador Maldonado Paz assisted me in the transcription of field notes, and Javier Ríos Medina prepared the topographic map of the Mixtec region presented in chapters 1 and 4. Óscar Mingüer Vargas helped me convert the manuscript into the format of a dissertation. My research has been supported at different stages by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT), the Missouri Botanical Garden, the New York Botanical Garden, the World Wildlife Fund, the Instituto Tecnológico de Oaxaca (ITO), the American Philosophical Society, and the Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca. iv 1. Introduction: natural history and cultural chronology of the Mixtec region Ñuu Savi (‘Sacred Rain’s collectivity’), the Mixtec people, had created some of the most refined polities in the American Continent at the time of European contact [1.]. Five hundred years later, they remain cohesive, culturally distinct communities, as increasing numbers of individuals and families migrate to northern Mexico and the United States for work in the agricultural and service sectors. In 2005, the Mexican Federal Government reported there were more than 446,000 speakers of Tu’un Savi (‘Sacred Rain’s word,’ the Mixtec languages) 5 years of age and older in the country, 322,000 of them still living in 1551 settlements within their historic homeland (INALI, 2005); an additional 100,000 to 200,000 are estimated to reside outside of Mexico.