154 Personal Pronouns in Zapotec and Zapotecan1
PERSONAL PRONOUNS IN ZAPOTEC AND ZAPOTECAN1 Natalie Operstein University of California, Los Angeles This paper is a comparative and historical study of personal pronouns in Zapotec and Zapotecan. It is based on data from more than 20 Zapotec languages and several dialects of Chatino. On the basis of this study, a number of dialectal isoglosses involv- ing personal pronouns are identified and full reconstructions of the Proto-Zapotec and Proto-Zapotecan systems of personal pronouns are attempted. [Keywords: Zapotec, Chatino, Zapotecan, Otomanguean, personal pronouns] 1. Introduction. 1.1. Zapotec and Zapotecan. The Zapotec family of languages is spo- ken mainly in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico. Together with Chatino it con- stitutes the Zapotecan branch of the Otomanguean stock. The exact number of different languages within Zapotec has not been determined with cer- tainty. Based on structural criteria, Kaufman (n.d.:1, 13) recognizes 5 to 10 different languages within Zapotec, while the Ethnologue (Grimes et al. 2002), based on mutual intelligibility testing, identifies 57. Zapotec is di- vided into the following dialectal zones: Solteco and Papabuco (spoken in Sola de Vega), Central (comprising the Zapotec languages of the Oaxaca Valley and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec), Northern and Southern (spoken to the north and south of the Oaxaca Valley, respectively) (on the classification of Zapotec, see Angulo 1926, Angulo and Freeland 1935, Kaufman, n.d., and Suárez 1990 and the bibliography cited therein).2 1 I would like to thank Terrence Kaufman and John Justeson for the opportunity to work on the Zapotec of Santa María Zaniza during the summers of 1999 and 2000 as part of their Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica.
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