Misplaced Pages

#332667

98-515: Cardonal ( Otomi : ʼMohai ) is a town and one of the 84 municipalities of Hidalgo , in central-eastern Mexico . The municipality covers an area of 462.6 km². As of 2020, the municipality had a total population of 19,431, up from 15,876 in 2005. This article about a location in the Mexican state of Hidalgo is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Otomi language Like all other Oto-Manguean languages , Otomi

196-487: A dialect continuum that is clearly demarcated from its closest relative, Mazahua . For this article, the latter approach will be followed. Dialectologists tend to group the languages into three main groups that reflect historical relationships among the dialects: Northwestern Otomi spoken in the Mezquital Valley and surrounding areas of Hidalgo, Queretaro and Northern Mexico State, Southwestern Otomi spoken in

294-465: A featural system uses symbols representing sub-phonetic elements—e.g. those traits that can be used to distinguish between and analyse a language's phonemes, such as their voicing or place of articulation . The only prominent example of a featural system is the hangul script used to write Korean, where featural symbols are combined into letters, which are in turn joined into syllabic blocks. Many scholars, including John DeFrancis (1911–2009), reject

392-576: A characterization of hangul as a featural system—with arguments including that Korean writers do not themselves think in these terms when writing—or question the viability of Sampson's category altogether. As hangul was consciously created by literate experts, Daniels characterizes it as a "sophisticated grammatogeny " —a writing system intentionally designed for a specific purpose, as opposed to having evolved gradually over time. Other grammatogenies include shorthands developed by professionals and constructed scripts created by hobbyists and creatives, like

490-416: A component related to the character's meaning, and a component that gives a hint for its pronunciation. A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent either syllables or moras —a unit of prosody that is often but not always a syllable in length. The graphemes used in syllabaries are called syllabograms . Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, since

588-481: A different symbol is needed for every syllable. Japanese, for example, contains about 100 moras, which are represented by moraic hiragana . By contrast, English features complex syllable structures with a relatively large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters —making for a total of 15–16,000 distinct syllables. Some syllabaries have larger inventories: the Yi script contains 756 different symbols. An alphabet

686-418: A five-fold classification of writing systems, comprising pictographic scripts, ideographic scripts, analytic transitional scripts, phonetic scripts, and alphabetic scripts. In practice, writing systems are classified according to the primary type of symbols used, and typically include exceptional cases where symbols function differently. For example, logographs found within phonetic systems like English include

784-402: A formative which is either a verbal prefix or a proclitic depending on analysis. These proclitics can also precede nonverbal predicates. The dialects of Toluca and Ixtenco distinguish the present , preterit , perfect , imperfect , future , pluperfect , continuative , imperative , and two subjunctives . Mezquital Otomi has additional moods. On transitive verbs, the person of the object

882-465: A grammar of Otomi, but no copies have survived. He is the author of an anonymous dictionary of Otomi (manuscript 1640). In the latter half of the eighteenth century, an anonymous Jesuit priest wrote the grammar Luces del Otomi (which is, strictly speaking, not a grammar but a report on research about Otomi ). Neve y Molina wrote a dictionary and a grammar. During the colonial period, many Otomis learned to read and write their language. Consequently,

980-487: A leading advocate for the marking of tone, arguing that because tone is an integrated element of the language's grammatical and lexical systems, the failure to indicate it would lead to ambiguity. Bernard (1980) on the other hand, has argued that native speakers prefer a toneless orthography because they can almost always disambiguate using context, and because they are often unaware of the significance of tone in their language, and consequently have difficulty learning to apply

1078-741: A period of geographical expansion as the Spaniards employed Otomi warriors in their expeditions of conquest into northern Mexico. During and after the Mixtón rebellion , in which Otomi warriors fought for the Spanish, Otomis settled areas in Querétaro (where they founded the city of Querétaro ) and Guanajuato which previously had been inhabited by nomadic Chichimecs . Because Spanish colonial historians such as Bernardino de Sahagún used primarily Nahua speakers primarily as sources for their histories of

SECTION 10

#1732780932333

1176-508: A proclitic: Bi=hon-ga-wi-tho-wa Bi=hon-ga-wi-tho-wa "He/she looks for us only (around) here" The initial proclitic bi marks the present tense and the third person singular, the verb root hon means "to look for", the - ga - suffix marks a first person object, the - wi - suffix marks dual number, and tho marks the sense of "only" or "just" whereas the - wa - suffix marks the locative sense of "here". Originally, all dialects distinguished singular, dual and plural numbers, but some of

1274-408: A set of defined graphemes, collectively called a script . The concept of the grapheme is similar to that of the phoneme used in the study of spoken languages. Likewise, as many sonically distinct phones may function as the same phoneme depending on speaker, dialect, and context, many visually distinct glyphs (or graphs ) may be identified as the same grapheme. These variant glyphs are known as

1372-439: A set of symbols, called a script , as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language . The earliest writing was invented during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each writing system invented without prior knowledge of writing gradually evolved from a system of proto-writing that included a small number of ideographs , which were not fully capable of encoding spoken language, and lacked

1470-555: A significant number of Otomi documents exist from the period, both secular and religious, the most well-known of which are the Codices of Huichapan and Jilotepec. In the late colonial period and after independence, indigenous groups no longer had separate status. At that time, Otomi lost its status as a language of education, ending Classical Otomi period as a literary language. This led to a declining numbers of speakers of indigenous languages, as Indigenous groups throughout Mexico adopted

1568-707: A slower pace than the general population. While absolute numbers of Otomi speakers continue to rise, their numbers relative to the Mexican population are falling. Although Otomi is vigorous in some areas, with children acquiring the language through natural transmission (e.g. in the Mezquital valley and in the Highlands), it is an endangered language . Three dialects in particular have reached moribund status: those of Ixtenco ( Tlaxcala state), Santiago Tilapa ( Mexico state ), and Cruz del Palmar ( Guanajuato state). On

1666-542: A spoken language, this functions as literacy in a second, acquired language. A single language (e.g. Hindustani ) can be written using multiple writing systems, and a writing system can also represent multiple languages. For example, Chinese characters have been used to write multiple languages throughout the Sinosphere —including the Vietnamese language from at least the 13th century, until their replacement with

1764-421: A tail and a hook and an u with a tail) to represent the central vowels. Orthographies used to write modern Otomi have been a focus of controversy among field linguists for many years. Particularly contentious is the issue of whether or not to mark tone, and how, in orthographies to be used by native speakers. Many practical orthographies used by Otomi speakers do not include tone marking. Bartholomew has been

1862-658: A written language when friars taught the Otomi to write the language using the Latin script ; colonial period's written language is often called Classical Otomi . Several codices and grammars were composed in Classical Otomi. A negative stereotype of the Otomi promoted by the Nahuas and perpetuated by the Spanish resulted in a loss of status for the Otomi, who began to abandon their language in favor of Spanish. The attitude of

1960-447: Is a tonal language , and most varieties distinguish three tones. Nouns are marked only for possessor; the plural number is marked with a definite article and a verbal suffix, and some dialects keep dual number marking. There is no case marking. Verb morphology is either fusional or agglutinating depending on the analysis. In verb inflection, infixation, consonant mutation, and apocope are prominent processes. The number of irregular verbs

2058-493: Is a set of letters , each of which generally represent one of the segmental phonemes in a spoken language. However, these correspondences are rarely uncomplicated, and spelling is often mediated by other factors than just which sounds are used by a speaker. The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta , the names for the first two letters in the Greek alphabet . An abjad is an alphabet whose letters only represent

SECTION 20

#1732780932333

2156-438: Is a visual and tactile notation representing language . The symbols used in writing correspond systematically to functional units of either a spoken or signed language . This definition excludes a broader class of symbolic markings, such as drawings and maps. A text is any instance of written material, including transcriptions of spoken material. The act of composing and recording a text may be referred to as writing , and

2254-468: Is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. In an abugida, there may be a sign for k with no vowel, but also one for ka (if a is the inherent vowel), and ke is written by modifying the ka sign in a consistent way with how la would be modified to get le . In many abugidas, modification consists of

2352-451: Is defined as a potentially permanent means of recording information, then these systems do not qualify as writing at all, since the symbols disappear as soon as they are used. Instead, these transient systems serve as signals . Writing systems may be characterized by how text is graphically divided into lines, which are to be read in sequence: For example, English and many other Western languages are written in horizontal rows that begin at

2450-530: Is found in the Valle de Mezquital region of Hidalgo and the southern portion of Querétaro . Some municipalities have concentrations of Otomi speakers as high as 60–70%. Because of recent migratory patterns, small populations of Otomi speakers can be found in new locations throughout Mexico and the United States. In the second half of the 20th century, speaker populations began to increase again, although at

2548-584: Is generally written ʉ or u̱, and front mid rounded vowel [ø] is written ø or o̱ . Letter a with trema , ä, is sometimes used for both the nasal vowel [ã] and the low back unrounded vowel [ʌ] . Glottalized consonants are written with apostrophe (e.g. tz' for [t͡sʔ] ) and palatal sibilant [ʃ] is written with x. This orthography has been adopted as official by the Otomi Language Academy centered in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo and

2646-478: Is indicated by the use of articles ; the nouns themselves are unmarked for number. In most dialects, the pronominal system distinguishes four persons (first person inclusive and exclusive , second person and third person) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). The system below is from the Toluca dialect. The following atypical pronominal system from Tilapa Otomi lacks the inclusive/exclusive distinction in

2744-422: Is large. A class of morphemes cross-references the grammatical subject in a sentence. These morphemes can be analysed as either proclitics or prefixes and mark tense , aspect and mood . Verbs are inflected for either direct object or dative object (but not for both simultaneously) by suffixes. Grammar also distinguishes between inclusive 'we' and exclusive 'we' . After the Spanish conquest, Otomi became

2842-516: Is marked by a suffix. If either subject or object is dual or plural, it is shown with a plural suffix following the object suffix. So the structure of the Otomi verb is as follows: The present tense prefixes are di - (1st person), gi - (2nd person), i - (3rd person). The Preterite is marked by the prefixes do-, ɡo-, and bi- , the Perfect by to-, ko-, ʃi- , the Imperfect by dimá, ɡimá, mi ,

2940-586: Is no evidence of contact between China and the literate peoples of the Near East, and the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches for representing aspects of sound and meaning are distinct. The Mesoamerican writing systems , including Olmec and the Maya script , were also invented independently. The first known alphabetic writing appeared before 2000 BC, and was used to write a Semitic language spoken in

3038-475: Is noted by Cárceres, but he does not transcribe it. Cárceres used the letter æ for the low central unrounded vowel [ʌ] and æ with cedille for the high central unrounded vowel ɨ . He also transcribed glottalized consonants as geminates e.g. ttz for [t͡sʔ] . Cárceres used grave-accented vowels è and ò for [ɛ] and [ɔ] . In the 18th century Neve y Molina used vowels with macron ē and ō for these two vowels and invented extra letters (an e with

Cardonal - Misplaced Pages Continue

3136-479: Is subsumed under Anaya/Mezquital. The following phonological description is that of the dialect of San Ildefonso Tultepec, Querétaro, similar to the system found in the Valle del Mezquital variety, which is the most widely spoken Otomian variety. The phoneme inventory of the Proto-Otomi language from which all modern varieties have descended has been reconstructed as /p t k (kʷ) ʔ b d ɡ t͡s ʃ h z m n w j/ ,

3234-433: Is synthetic and has elements of both fusion and agglutination. Verb stems are inflected through a number of different processes: the initial consonant of the verb root changes according to a morphophonemic pattern of consonant mutations to mark present vs. non-present, and active vs. passive. Verbal roots may take a formative syllable or not depending on syntactic and prosodic factors. A nasal prefix may be added to

3332-685: Is synthetic, and the sentence level is analytic. Simultaneously, the language is head-marking in terms of its verbal morphology, and its nominal morphology is more analytic. According to the most common analysis, Otomi has two kinds of bound morphemes, pro clitics and affixes . Proclitics differ from affixes mainly in their phonological characteristics; they are marked for tone and block nasal harmony . Some authors consider proclitics to be better analyzed as prefixes. The standard orthography writes proclitics as separate words, whereas affixes are written joined to their host root. Most affixes are suffixes and with few exceptions occur only on verbs, whereas

3430-650: Is the Brahmic family of scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia. The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Geʽez script used in some contexts. It was coined as a linguistic term by Peter T. Daniels ( b.  1951 ), who borrowed it from the Ethiopian languages. Originally proposed as a category by Geoffrey Sampson ( b.  1944 ),

3528-498: Is the term used to define the Otomi spoken in the early centuries of colonial rule. This historical stage of the language was given Latin orthography and documented by Spanish friars who learned it in order to proselytize among the Otomi. Text in Classical Otomi is not readily comprehensible since the Spanish-speaking friars failed to differentiate the varied vowel and consonant phonemes used in Otomi. Friars and monks from

3626-452: Is used for issuing direct orders. Verbs expressing movement towards the speaker such as ʔįhį 'come' use a different set of prefixes for marking person/ TAM . 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. mba-tųhų 3 / MVMT / IMPERF -sing Writing system A writing system comprises

3724-996: Is used in various models either as a synonym for "morphographic", or as a specific subtype where the basic unit of meaning written is the word . Even with morphographic writing, there remains a correspondence between graphemes and the sounds of speech, but the pronunciation values of the units of meaning is not what is being encoded firstly by the writing system. Many classifications define three primary categories, where phonographic systems are subdivided into syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental ) systems. Syllabaries use symbols called syllabograms to represent syllables or moras . Alphabets use symbols called letters that correspond to spoken phonemes—or more technically to diaphonemes . Alphabets are generally classified into three subtypes, with abjads having letters for consonants , pure alphabets having letters for both consonants and vowels , and abugidas having characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs. David Diringer proposed

3822-527: Is used on road signs in the Mezquital region and in publications in the Mezquital variety, such as the large 2004 SIL dictionary published by Hernández Cruz, Victoria Torquemada & Sinclair Crawford (2004) . A slightly modified version is used by Enrique Palancar in his grammar of the San Ildefonso Tultepec variety. The morphosyntactic typology of Otomi displays a mixture of synthetic and analytic structures. The phrase level morphology

3920-440: Is used throughout the study of writing systems, the precise interpretations of and definitions for concepts often vary depending on the theoretical model employed by the researcher. A grapheme is the basic functional unit of a writing system. Graphemes are generally defined as minimally significant elements which, when taken together, comprise the set of symbols from which texts may be constructed. All writing systems require

4018-428: The allographs of a grapheme: For example, the lowercase letter ⟨a⟩ may be represented by the double-storey | a | and single-storey | ɑ | shapes, or others written in cursive, block, or printed styles. The choice of a particular allograph may be influenced by the medium used, the writing instrument used, the stylistic choice of the writer, the preceding and succeeding graphemes in

Cardonal - Misplaced Pages Continue

4116-679: The EZLN and indigenous social movements. Decentralized government agencies were created and charged with promoting and protecting indigenous communities and languages; these include the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI) and the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI) . In particular, the federal Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas ("General Law on

4214-444: The Latin alphabet and Chinese characters , glyphs are made up of lines or strokes. Linear writing is most common, but there are non-linear writing systems where glyphs consist of other types of marks, such as in cuneiform and Braille . Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya script were often painted in linear outline form, but in formal contexts they were carved in bas-relief . The earliest examples of writing are linear: while cuneiform

4312-662: The Sinai Peninsula . Most of the world's alphabets either descend directly from this Proto-Sinaitic script , or were directly inspired by its design. Descendants include the Phoenician alphabet ( c.  1050 BC ), and its child in the Greek alphabet ( c.  800 BC ). The Latin alphabet , which descended from the Greek alphabet, is by far the most common script used by writing systems. Several approaches have been taken to classify writing systems, with

4410-560: The Tengwar script designed by J. R. R. Tolkien to write the Elven languages he also constructed. Many of these feature advanced graphic designs corresponding to phonological properties. The basic unit of writing in these systems can map to anything from phonemes to words. It has been shown that even the Latin script has sub-character features. In linear writing , which includes systems like

4508-408: The ampersand ⟨&⟩ and the numerals ⟨0⟩ , ⟨1⟩ , etc.—which correspond to specific words ( and , zero , one , etc.) and not to the underlying sounds. A logogram is a character that represents a morpheme within a language. Chinese characters represent the only major logographic writing systems still in use: they have historically been used to write

4606-472: The caron ( ǎ ). Nasal vowels are marked with a rightward curving hook ( ogonek ) at the bottom of the vowel letter: į, ę, ą, ų. The letter c denotes [t͡s] , y denotes [j] , the palatal sibilant [ʃ] is written with the letter š , and the palatal nasal [ɲ] is written ñ . The remaining symbols are from the IPA with their standard values. Colonial documents in Classical Otomi do not generally capture all

4704-404: The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet (with these graphemes corresponding to various phonemes), punctuation marks (mostly non-phonemic), and a handful of other symbols, such as numerals. Writing systems may be regarded as complete if they are able to represent all that may be expressed in the spoken language, while a partial writing system cannot represent

4802-622: The varieties of Chinese , as well as Japanese , Korean , Vietnamese , and other languages of the Sinosphere . As each character represents a single unit of meaning, many different logograms are required to write all the words of a language. If the logograms do not adequately represent all meanings and words of a language, written language can be confusing or ambiguous to the reader. Logograms are sometimes conflated with ideograms , symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas; most linguists now reject this characterization: Chinese characters are often semantic–phonetic compounds, which include

4900-478: The 20th century due to Western influence. Several scripts used in the Philippines and Indonesia, such as Hanunoo , are traditionally written with lines moving away from the writer, from bottom to top, but are read horizontally left to right; however, Kulitan , another Philippine script, is written top-to-bottom in columns arranged right-to-left. Ogham is written bottom-to-top and read vertically, commonly on

4998-736: The Future by ɡo-, ɡi-, and da- , and the Pluperfect by tamą-, kimą-, kamą-. All tenses use the same suffixes as the Present tense for dual and plural numbers and clusivity. The difference between Preterite and Imperfect is similar to the distinction between the Spanish Preterite habló 'he spoke (punctual)' and the Spanish Imperfect hablaba 'he spoke/he used to speak/he was speaking (non-punctual)'. In Toluca Otomi,

SECTION 50

#1732780932333

5096-592: The Language Rights of the Indigenous Peoples"), promulgated on 13 March 2003, recognizes all of Mexico's indigenous languages, including Otomi, as " national languages ", and gave indigenous people the right to speak them in every sphere of public and private life. Currently, Otomi dialects are spoken by circa 239,000 speakers—some 5 to 6 percent of whom are monolingual —in widely scattered districts (see map). The highest concentration of speakers

5194-494: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in the 20th century. In the first several decades of modern linguistics as a scientific discipline, linguists often characterized writing as merely the technology used to record speech—which was treated as being of paramount importance, for what was seen as the unique potential for its study to further the understanding of human cognition. While certain core terminology

5292-469: The Nahuatl names. For example, the Nahuatl place name Tenochtitlān , "place of Opuntia cactus", was rendered as *ʔmpôndo in proto-Otomi, with the same meaning. At the time of the Spanish conquest of central Mexico, Otomi had a much wider distribution than now, with sizeable Otomi speaking areas existing in the modern states of Jalisco and Michoacán . After the conquest, the Otomi people experienced

5390-756: The Proto-Otomi clusters *ʔm and *ʔn before oral vowels have become /ʔb/ and /ʔd/ , respectively. In most dialects *n has become /ɾ/ , as in the singular determiner and the second person possessive marker. The only dialects to preserve /n/ in these words are the Eastern dialects, and in Tilapa these instances of *n have become /d/ . Many dialects have merged the vowels *ɔ and *a into /a/ as in Mezquital Otomi, whereas others such as Ixtenco Otomi have merged *ɔ with *o . The different dialects have between three and five nasal vowels. In addition to

5488-506: The Spanish mendicant orders such as the Franciscans wrote Otomi grammars, the earliest of which is Friar Pedro de Cárceres's Arte de la lengua othomí [ sic ], written perhaps as early as 1580, but not published until 1907. In 1605, Alonso de Urbano wrote a trilingual Spanish- Nahuatl -Otomi dictionary, which included a small set of grammatical notes about Otomi. The grammarian of Nahuatl, Horacio Carochi , has written

5586-595: The Spanish language and Mestizo cultural identities. Coupled with a policy of castellanización this led to a rapid decline of speakers of all indigenous languages including Otomi, during the early 20th century. During the 1990s, however, the Mexican government made a reversal in policies towards indigenous and linguistic rights, prompted by the 1996 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights and domestic social and political agitation by various groups such as social and political agitation by

5684-570: The Spanish trilled [r] , and /s/ , which is not present in native Otomi vocabulary either. All Otomi languages are tonal , and most varieties have three tones, high, low and rising. One variety of the Sierra dialect, that of San Gregorio, has been analyzed as having a fourth, falling tone. In Mezquital Otomi, suffixes are never specified for tone, while in Tenango Otomi, the only syllables not specified for tone are prepause syllables and

5782-895: The ability to express a broad range of ideas. Writing systems are generally classified according to how its symbols, called graphemes , generally relate to units of language. Phonetic writing systems, which include alphabets and syllabaries , use graphemes that correspond to sounds in the corresponding spoken language . Alphabets use graphemes called letters that generally correspond to spoken phonemes , and are typically classified into three categories. In general, pure alphabets use letters to represent both consonant and vowel sounds, while abjads only have letters representing consonants, and abugidas use characters corresponding to consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use graphemes called syllabograms that represent entire syllables or moras . By contrast, logographic (alternatively morphographic ) writing systems use graphemes that represent

5880-550: The academic designation from Otomi to Hñähñú , the endonym used by the Otomi of the Mezquital Valley ; however, no common endonym exists for all dialects of the language. The Oto-Pamean languages are thought to have split from the other Oto-Manguean languages around 3500 BC. Within the Otomian branch, Proto-Otomi seems to have split from Proto-Mazahua ca. 500 AD. Around 1000 AD, Proto-Otomi began diversifying into

5978-635: The act of viewing and interpreting the text as reading . The relationship between writing and language more broadly has been the subject of philosophical analysis as early as Aristotle (384–322 BC). While the use of language is universal across human societies, writing is not—having first emerged much more recently, and only having been independently invented in a handful of locations throughout history. While most spoken languages have not been written, all written languages have been predicated on an existing spoken language. When those with signed languages as their first language read writing associated with

SECTION 60

#1732780932333

6076-415: The addition of a vowel sign; other possibilities include rotation of the basic sign, or addition of diacritics . While true syllabaries have one symbol per syllable and no systematic visual similarity, the graphic similarity in most abugidas stems from their origins as abjads—with added symbols comprising markings for different vowel added onto a pre-existing base symbol. The largest single group of abugidas

6174-566: The addition of dedicated vowel letters, as with the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet c.  800 BC . Abjad is the word for "alphabet" in Arabic and Malay: the term derives from the traditional order of the Arabic alphabet 's letters 'alif , bā' , jīm , dāl , though the word may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic . An abugida

6272-402: The basic word order is Verb Subject Object , but some dialects tend towards Subject Verb Object word order, probably under the influence of Spanish. Possessive constructions use the order possessed-possessor , but modificational constructions use modifier -head order. From the variety of Santiago Mexquititlan, Queretaro, here is an example of a complex verb phrase with four suffixes and

6370-453: The colony, the Nahuas' negative image of the Otomi people was perpetuated throughout the colonial period. This tendency towards devaluing and stigmatizing the Otomi cultural identity relative to other Indigenous groups gave impetus to the process of language loss and mestizaje , as many Otomies opted to adopt the Spanish language and customs in search of social mobility. " Classical Otomi "

6468-583: The consonantal sounds of a language. They were the first alphabets to develop historically, with most that have been developed used to write Semitic languages , and originally deriving from the Proto-Sinaitic script . The morphology of Semitic languages is particularly suited to this approach, as the denotation of vowels is generally redundant. Optional markings for vowels may be used for some abjads, but are generally limited to applications like education. Many pure alphabets were derived from abjads through

6566-544: The degree of mutual intelligibility between varieties. It assigns an ISO code to each of these nine. INALI , the Mexican National Institute of Indigenous Languages, avoids the problem of assigning dialect or language status to Otomian varieties by defining "Otomi" as a "linguistic group" with nine different "linguistic varieties". Still, for official purposes, each variety is considered a separate language. Other linguists, however, consider Otomi to be

6664-411: The dialect. Most of those forms are composed of two morphemes , meaning "speak" and "well" respectively. The word Otomi entered the Spanish language through Nahuatl and describes the larger Otomi macroethnic group and the dialect continuum. From Spanish, the word Otomi has become entrenched in the linguistic and anthropological literature. Among linguists, the suggestion has been made to change

6762-523: The earliest true writing, closely followed by the Egyptian hieroglyphs . It is generally agreed that the two systems were invented independently from one another; both evolved from proto-writing systems between 3400 and 3200 BC, with the earliest coherent texts dated c.  2600 BC . Chinese characters emerged independently in the Yellow River valley c.  1200 BC . There

6860-491: The eastern dialect of San Pablito Pahuatlan in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, and Otomi of Santa Ana Hueytlalpan. A voiceless aspirate stop series /pʰ tʰ kʰ/ , derived from earlier clusters of stop + [h] , occurs in most dialects, but it has turned into the fricatives /ɸ θ x/ in most Western dialects. Some dialects have innovated a palatal nasal /ɲ/ from earlier sequences of *j and a nasal vowel. In several dialects,

6958-482: The first person plural and the dual/plural distinction in the second person. Otomi nouns are marked only for their possessor; plurality is expressed via pronouns and articles . There is no case marking. The particular pattern of possessive inflection is a widespread trait in the Mesoamerican linguistic area : there is a prefix agreeing in person with the possessor, and if the possessor is plural or dual, then

7056-425: The four nasal vowels of proto-Otomi, some dialects have /õ/ . Ixtenco Otomi has only /ẽ ũ ɑ̃/ , whereas Toluca Otomi has /ĩ ũ ɑ̃/ . In the Otomi of Cruz del Palmar, Guanjuato, the nasal vowels are /ĩ ũ õ/ , the former *ɑ̃ having changed to /õ/ . Modern Otomi has borrowed many words from Spanish, in addition to new phonemes that occur only in loan words, such as /l/ that appears in some Otomi dialects instead of

7154-473: The hand is to the right side of the pen. The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew , came to be written right-to-left . Scripts that historically incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically in columns arranged from right to left, while a horizontal writing direction in rows from left to right became widely adopted only in

7252-518: The languages spoken in Teotihuacan , the greatest Mesoamerican ceremonial center of the Classic period, the demise of which occurred ca. 600 AD. The Precolumbian Otomi people did not have a fully developed writing system . However, Aztec writing , largely ideographic, could be read in Otomi as well as Nahuatl. The Otomi often translated names of places or rulers into Otomi rather than using

7350-526: The larger world toward the Otomi language started to change in 2003 when Otomi was granted recognition as a national language under Mexican law together with 61 other indigenous languages. Otomi comes from the Nahuatl word otomitl , which in turn possibly derived from an older word, totomitl "shooter of birds." It is an exonym ; the Otomi refer to their language as Hñähñú, Hñähño, Hñotho, Hñähü, Hñätho, Hyųhų, Yųhmų, Ñųhų, Ñǫthǫ, or Ñañhų , depending on

7448-418: The last syllable of polysyllabic words. Stress in Otomi is not phonemic but rather falls predictably on every other syllable, with the first syllable of a root always being stressed. In this article, the orthography of Lastra (various, including 1996, 2006) is employed which marks syllabic tone. The low tone is unmarked ( a ), the high level tone is marked with the acute accent ( á ), and the rising tone with

7546-458: The modern Otomi varieties. Much of central Mexico was inhabited by speakers of the Oto-Pamean languages before the arrival of Nahuatl speakers; beyond this, the geographical distribution of the ancestral stages of most modern indigenous languages of Mexico, and their associations with various civilizations remain undetermined. It has been proposed that Proto-Otomi-Mazahua most likely was one of

7644-432: The more innovative dialects, such as those of Querétaro and of the Mezquital area, distinguish only singular and plural numbers, sometimes using the previous dual forms as a paucal number. The Ixtenco dialect distinguishes singular, plural, and mass plural numbers. The personal prefixes distinguish four persons, making for a total of eleven categories of grammatical person in most dialects. The grammatical number of nouns

7742-441: The most common based on what unit of language is represented by each unit of writing. At the highest level, writing systems are either phonographic ( lit.   ' sound writing ' ) when graphemes represent units of sound in a language, or morphographic ( lit.   ' form writing ' ) when graphemes represent units of meaning, such as words or morphemes . The term logographic ( lit.   ' word writing ' )

7840-548: The national average. The Otomi languages belongs to the Oto-Pamean branch of the Oto-Manguean languages . Within Oto-Pamean, it is part of the Otomian subgroup, which also includes Mazahua . Otomi has traditionally been described as a single language, although its many dialects are not all mutually intelligible. SIL International's Ethnologue considers nine separate Otomi languages based on literature needs and

7938-703: The noun is also marked with a suffix that agrees in number with the possessor. Demonstrated below is the inflectional paradigm for the word ngų ́ "house" in the dialect of Toluca. Definite articles preceding the noun are used to express plurality in nominal elements, since the nouns themselves are invariant for grammatical number. Most dialects have rʌ 'the (singular)' and yʌ 'the (dual/plural)'. Example noun phrases: Classical Otomi, as described by Cárceres, distinguished neutral, honorific, and pejorative definite articles: ąn , neutral singular; o , honorific singular; nø̌ , pejorative singular; e , neutral and honorific plural; and yo , pejorative plural. Verb morphology

8036-416: The oral vowels /i ɨ u e ø o ɛ a ɔ/ , and the nasal vowels /ĩ ũ ẽ ɑ̃/ . Modern dialects have undergone various changes from the common historic phonemic inventory. Most have voiced the reconstructed Proto-Otomian voiceless nonaspirate stops /p t k/ and now have only the voiced series /b d ɡ/ . The only dialects to retain all the original voiceless nonaspirate stops are Otomi of Tilapa and Acazulco and

8134-610: The other hand, the level of monolingualism in Otomi is as high as 22.3% in Huehuetla , Hidalgo, and 13.1% in Texcatepec , Veracruz). Monolingualism is usually significantly higher among women than among men. Due to the politics from the 1920s to the 1980s that encouraged the "Hispanification" of indigenous communities and made Spanish the only language used in schools, no group of Otomi speakers today has general literacy in Otomi, while their literacy rate in Spanish remains far below

8232-579: The phonological contrasts of the Otomi language. Since the friars who alphabetized the Otomi populations were Spanish speakers, it was difficult for them to perceive contrasts that were present in Otomi but absent in Spanish, such as nasalisation, tone, the large vowel inventory as well as aspirated and glottal consonants. Even when they recognized that there were additional phonemic contrasts in Otomi they often had difficulties choosing how to transcribe them and with doing so consistently. No colonial documents include information on tone. The existence of nasalization

8330-405: The proclitics occur both in nominal and verbal paradigms. Proclitics mark the categories of definiteness and number, person, negation, tense and aspect – often fused in a single proclitic. Suffixes mark direct and indirect objects as well as clusivity (the distinction between inclusive and exclusive "we"), number, location and affective emphasis. Historically, as in other Oto-Manguean languages,

8428-604: The root to express reciprocality or middle voice . Some dialects, notably the eastern ones, have a system of verb classes that take different series of prefixes. These conjugational categories have been lost in the Western dialects, although they existed in the Western areas in the colonial period as can be seen from Cárceres's grammar. Verbs are inflected for either direct object or indirect object (but not for both simultaneously) by suffixes. The categories of person of subject, tense, aspect, and mood are marked simultaneously with

8526-446: The same language. They concluded that Texcatepec, Eastern Highland Otomi , and Tenango may be considered the same language at a lower threshold of 70% intelligibility. Ethnologue finds a similar lower level of 70% intelligibility between Querétaro, Mezquital, and Mexico State Otomi. The Ethnologue Temaoya Otomi is split off from Mexico State Otomi, and introduce Tilapa Otomi as a separate language; while Egland's poorly tested Zozea Otomi

8624-483: The script. Braille is a non-linear adaptation of the Latin alphabet that completely abandoned the Latin forms. The letters are composed of raised bumps on the writing substrate , which can be leather, stiff paper, plastic or metal. There are also transient non-linear adaptations of the Latin alphabet, including Morse code , the manual alphabets of various sign languages , and semaphore, in which flags or bars are positioned at prescribed angles. However, if "writing"

8722-524: The semantic difference between the two subjunctive forms (A and B) has not yet been clearly understood in the linguistic literature. Sometimes subjunctive B implicates that is more recent in time than subjunctive A. Both indicate something counterfactual. In other Otomi dialects, such as Otomi of Ixtenco Tlaxcala, the distinction between the two forms is one of subjunctive as opposed to irrealis . The Past and Present Progressive are similar in meaning to English 'was' and 'is X-ing', respectively. The Imperative

8820-477: The spoken language in its entirety. Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing systems consisting of ideograms and early mnemonic symbols. The best-known examples include: Writing has been invented independently multiple times in human history. The first writing systems emerged during the Early Bronze Age , with the cuneiform writing system used to write Sumerian generally considered to be

8918-451: The text, the time available for writing, the intended audience, and the largely unconscious features of an individual's handwriting. Orthography ( lit.   ' correct writing ' ) refers to the rules and conventions for writing shared by a community, including the ordering of and relationship between graphemes. Particularly for alphabets , orthography includes the concept of spelling . For example, English orthography includes

9016-436: The tone diacritics correctly. For Mezquital Otomi, Bernard accordingly created an orthography in which tone was indicated only when necessary to disambiguate between two words and in which the only symbols used were those available on a standard Spanish language typewriter (employing for example the letter c for [ɔ] , v for [ʌ] , and the symbol + for [ɨ] ). Bernard's orthography has not been influential and in used only in

9114-444: The top of a page and end at the bottom, with each row read from left to right. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left, with the animal and human glyphs turned to face the beginning of the line. The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions: horizontally from side to side, or vertically. Prior to standardization, alphabetic writing could be either left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL). It

9212-501: The units of meaning in a language, such as its words or morphemes . Alphabets typically use fewer than 100 distinct symbols, while syllabaries and logographies may use hundreds or thousands respectively. A writing system also includes any punctuation used to aid readers and encode additional meaning, including that which would be communicated in speech via qualities of rhythm , tone , pitch , accent , inflection , or intonation . According to most contemporary definitions, writing

9310-879: The valley of Toluca, and Eastern Otomi spoken in the Highlands of Northern Puebla, Veracruz and Hidalgo, in Tlaxcala and two towns in the Toluca Valley, San Jerónimo Acazulco and Santiago Tilapa . The Northwestern varieties are characterized by an innovative phonology and grammar, whereas the Eastern varieties are more conservative. The assignment of dialects to the three groups is as follows: Egland, Bartholomew & Cruz Ramos (1983) conducted mutual intelligibility tests in which they concluded that eight varieties of Otomi could be considered separate languages in regards to mutual intelligibility, with 80% intelligibility being needed for varieties to be considered part of

9408-504: The works published by himself and the Otomi author Jesus Salinas Pedraza. Practical orthographies used to promote Otomi literacy have been designed and published by the Instituto Lingüístico de Verano and later by the national institute for indigenous languages ( INALI ). Generally they use diareses ë and ö to distinguish the low mid vowels [ɛ] and [ɔ] from the high mid vowels e and o. High central vowel [ɨ]

9506-435: Was most commonly written boustrophedonically : starting in one (horizontal) direction, then turning at the end of the line and reversing direction. The right-to-left direction of the Phoenician alphabet initially stabilized after c.  800 BC . Left-to-right writing has an advantage that, since most people are right-handed , the hand does not interfere with text being written—which might not yet have dried—since

9604-409: Was not linear, its Sumerian ancestors were. Non-linear systems are not composed of lines, no matter what instrument is used to write them. Cuneiform was likely the earliest non-linear writing. Its glyphs were formed by pressing the end of a reed stylus into moist clay, not by tracing lines in the clay with the stylus as had been done previously. The result was a radical transformation of the appearance of

#332667