Coatzospan Mixtec

Coatzospan Mixtec
(San Juan Coatzóspam)
Ntudu tuhun davi / Tu’un davi
Native toMexico
RegionOaxaca
Native speakers
2,100 (2000)[1]
Oto-Manguean
Language codes
ISO 639-3miz
Glottologcoat1241
ELPNorthern Alta Mixtec (shared)

Coatzospan Mixtec (Coatzóspam Mixtec) is a Mixtec language of Oaxaca spoken in the town of San Juan Coatzospan.

Phonology

Consonants in parentheses are marginal.

Consonants[2]
Labial Dental Alveolar Palatal Velar
plain labial
Nasal m n ɲ
Plosive/
Affricate
voiceless (p) t ts ~ k
prenasal (ᵐb) ⁿd (ⁿdz) (ⁿdʲ ~ ⁿdʒ) (ᵑɡ) (ᵑɡʷ)
Fricative β ð (ðʲ) (s) ʃ
Liquid l (r)

In women's speech, /t/ is realized as [tʃ] before front vowels.

Vowel qualities are /a ɨ e i o u/. Vowels may be oral or nasal, creaky or modal, long or short: e.g. /kɨ̰̃ː/ "to go". /o/ is apparently never contrastively nasalized, though it may be phonetically nasalized due to assimilation with a nasal vowel in a following syllable, and morphologically nasalized for the second-person familiar (e.g. /kḭʃi/ 'to come', /kḭʃĩ/ 'you will come'). The preceding vowel nasalizes only if the intervening consonant is voiced, or in some words /ʃ/. Nonetheless, even voiceless fricatives and affricates are phonetically nasalized in such environments: [β̃, ð̃, ts̃, ʃ̃]; the nasalization is visible in the flaring of the nostrils.

The first vowel of a disyllable is creaky if the second consonant is voiceless (except for /ʃ/); only when C2 is voiced or /ʃ/ can there be a contrast between creaky and modal vowels in V1. The irregular behavior /ʃ/ is apparently due to it deriving from proto-Mixtec from both voiceless velar */x/ and voiced */j/ ("*y"). It is words in which /ʃ/ derives from *j that allow V1 to be nasalized or contrastively modally voiced.

Tones are ...

References

  1. ^ Coatzospan Mixtec at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ Gerfen 2001
  • Gerfen, Chip. 1999. Phonology and Phonetics in Coatzospan Mixtec (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 48). Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
  • Gerfen, Chip (2001). "Nasalized Fricatives in Coatzospan Mixtec". International Journal of American Linguistics. 67 (4): 449–466. doi:10.1086/466471. JSTOR 1265756. S2CID 144266099.
  • Pike, Eunice V. & Priscilla C. Small. 1974. Downstepping terrace tone in Coatzospan Mixtec. In Ruth M. Brend (ed.), Advances in tagmemics (North-Holland Linguistic Series 9), 105-34. Amsterdam: North-Holland.