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120-469: Mixquiahuala (officially Mixquiahuala de Juárez ; Otomi : Ntʼähi ) is a town and one of the 84 municipalities of Hidalgo , in central-eastern Mexico . The municipal seat lies at Mixquiahuala de Juárez (municipality) . The municipality covers an area of 138.1 km. As of 2005, the municipality had a total population of 37,747. This article about a location in the Mexican state of Hidalgo

240-487: 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

360-607: A different social structure. Until the accurate dating of Watson Brake and similar sites, the oldest mound complex was thought to be Poverty Point , also located in the Lower Mississippi Valley . Built about 1500 BCE, it is the centerpiece of a culture extending over 100 sites on both sides of the Mississippi . The Poverty Point site has earthworks in the form of six concentric half-circles, divided by radial aisles, together with some mounds. The entire complex

480-402: 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

600-465: 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,

720-487: 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

840-741: 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

960-762: A population of over 20,000. Other chiefdoms were constructed throughout the Southeast, and its trade networks reached to the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. At its peak, between the 12th and 13th centuries, Cahokia was the most populous city in North America. (Larger cities did exist in Mesoamerica and the Andes.) Monks Mound , the major ceremonial center of Cahokia, remains the largest earthen construction of

1080-508: 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

1200-555: 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

1320-524: A single unified empire. The Mixtecs would eventually be conquered by the Aztecs until the Spanish conquest. The Mixtecs saw the Spanish conquest as an opportunity for liberation and established agreements with the conquistadors that allowed them to preserve their cultural traditions, though relatively few sections resisted Spanish rule. The Totonac civilization was concentrated in the present-day states of Veracruz and Puebla . The Totonacs were responsible for

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1440-707: 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

1560-421: 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

1680-441: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Otomi language Like all other Oto-Manguean languages , Otomi 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

1800-678: Is currently divided into two general approaches. The first is the short chronology theory with the first movement beyond Alaska into the Americas occurring no earlier than 14,000–17,000 years ago, followed by successive waves of immigrants. The second belief is the long chronology theory , which proposes that the first group of people entered the hemisphere at a much earlier date, possibly 50,000–40,000 years ago or earlier. Artifacts have been found in both North and South America which have been dated to 14,000 years ago, and accordingly humans have been proposed to have reached Cape Horn at

1920-530: 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

2040-584: 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

2160-478: 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

2280-568: 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 ,

2400-411: Is nearly a mile across. Mound building was continued by succeeding cultures, who built numerous sites in the middle Mississippi and Ohio River valleys as well, adding effigy mounds , conical and ridge mounds, and other shapes. The Woodland period of North American pre-Columbian cultures lasted from roughly 1000 BCE to 1000 CE. The term was coined in the 1930s and refers to prehistoric sites between

2520-475: 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

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2640-522: Is reflected in the oral histories of the indigenous peoples, described by a wide range of traditional creation stories which often say that a given people have been living in a certain territory since the creation of the world. Throughout thousands of years, paleo-Indian people domesticated, bred, and cultivated many plant species, including crops that now constitute 50–60% of worldwide agriculture. In general, Arctic, Subarctic, and coastal peoples continued to live as hunters and gatherers, while agriculture

2760-479: 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/ ,

2880-433: 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

3000-685: 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

3120-593: Is the Olmec. This civilization established the cultural blueprint by which all succeeding indigenous civilizations would follow in Mexico. Pre-Olmec civilization began with the production of pottery in abundance, around 2300 BCE in the Grijalva River delta. Between 1600 and 1500 BCE, the Olmec civilization had begun, with the consolidation of power at their capital, a site today known as San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán near

3240-634: Is the determinant factor for the number of gene lineages and founding haplotypes present in today's Indigenous populations . Human settlement of the Americas occurred in stages from the Bering Sea coastline , with an initial 20,000-year layover on Beringia for the founding population . The microsatellite diversity and distributions of the Y lineage specific to South America indicate that certain Amerindian populations have been isolated since

3360-563: 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

3480-425: 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 Pre-Columbian In

3600-527: 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

3720-704: The Americas via the Bering Land Bridge (Beringia), now the Bering Strait , and possibly along the coast. Genetic evidence found in Indigenous peoples ' maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) supports the theory of multiple genetic populations migrating from Asia. After crossing the land bridge, they moved southward along the Pacific coast and through an interior ice-free corridor. Throughout millennia, Paleo-Indians spread throughout

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3840-601: The Archaic Period , numerous archaeological cultures have been identified. The unstable climate led to widespread migration, with early Paleo-Indians soon spreading throughout the Americas, diversifying into many hundreds of culturally distinct tribes. The Paleo-Indians were hunter-gatherers , likely characterized by small, mobile bands consisting of approximately 20 to 50 members of an extended family. These groups moved from place to place as preferred resources were depleted and new supplies were sought. During much of

3960-670: The Archaic period and the Mississippian cultures . The Adena culture and the ensuing Hopewell tradition during this period built monumental earthwork architecture and established continent-spanning trade and exchange networks. This period is considered a developmental stage without any massive changes in a short period but instead has a continuous development in stone and bone tools, leatherworking, textile manufacture, tool production, cultivation, and shelter construction. Some Woodland people continued to use spears and atlatls until

4080-702: The Cliff Palace of Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado and the Great Houses in Chaco Canyon , New Mexico . The Puebloans also constructed a road system that stretched from Chaco Canyon to Kutz Canyon in the San Juan Basin . The Ancestral Puebloans are also known as "Anasazi", though the term is controversial, as the present-day Pueblo peoples consider the term to be derogatory, due to

4200-679: 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

4320-697: The Maya script . Other accounts also suggest that the Huastecs migrated as a result of the Classic Maya collapse around the year 900 CE. The Zapotecs were a civilization that thrived in the Oaxaca Valley from the late 6th century BCE until their downfall at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors. The city of Monte Albán was an important religious center for the Zapotecs and served as the capital of

4440-664: The Olmec , Teotihuacan , Mayas , Zapotecs , Mixtecs , Huastecs , Purepecha , Toltecs , and Mexica / Aztecs . The Mexica civilization is also known as the Aztec Triple Alliance since they were three smaller kingdoms loosely united together. These Indigenous civilizations are credited with many inventions: building pyramid temples, mathematics , astronomy , medicine, writing, highly accurate calendars , fine arts , intensive agriculture, engineering , an abacus calculator, and complex theology . They also invented

4560-463: The Tlingit , Haida , Chumash , Mandan , Hidatsa , and others, and some established large settlements, even cities, such as Cahokia , in what is now Illinois . Mesoamerica is the region extending from central Mexico south to the northwestern border of Costa Rica that gave rise to a group of stratified, culturally related agrarian civilizations spanning an approximately 3,000-year period before

4680-472: 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

4800-644: The history of the Americas , the pre-Columbian era , also known as the pre-contact era , or as the pre-Cabraline era specifically in Brazil , spans from the initial peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic to the onset of European colonization , which began with Christopher Columbus 's voyage in 1492. This era encompasses the history of Indigenous cultures prior to significant European influence, which in some cases did not occur until decades or even centuries after Columbus's arrival. During

4920-630: The Americas and oral histories. Other civilizations, contemporaneous with the colonial period, were documented in European accounts of the time. For instance, the Maya civilization maintained written records, which were often destroyed by Christian Europeans such as Diego de Landa , who viewed them as pagan but sought to preserve native histories. Despite the destruction, a few original documents have survived, and others were transcribed or translated into Spanish, providing modern historians with valuable insights into ancient cultures and knowledge. Before

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5040-477: The Europeans arrived, Indigenous peoples of North America had a wide range of lifeways from sedentary, agrarian societies to semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. Many formed new tribes or confederations in response to European colonization. These are often classified by cultural regions , loosely based on geography. These can include the following: Numerous pre-Columbian societies were sedentary, such as

5160-736: 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,

5280-668: The Hohokam, they constructed kivas and great houses as well as ballcourts . Several of the Sinagua ruins include Montezuma Castle , Wupatki , and Tuzigoot . The Salado resided in the Tonto Basin in southeastern Arizona from 1150 CE to the 15th century. Archaeological evidence suggests that they traded with far-away cultures, as evidenced by the presence of seashells from the Gulf of California and macaw feathers from Mexico. Most of

5400-592: 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

5520-734: The Maya city of Chichen Itza . The Toltecs established vast trading relations with other Mesoamerican civilizations in Central America and the Puebloans in present-day New Mexico . During the Post-Classic era, the Toltecs suffered a subsequent collapse in the early 12th century, due to famine and civil war. The Toltec civilization was so influential to the point where many groups such as the Aztecs claimed to be descended from. With

5640-454: The Maya civilization cannot be overstated: it transformed political power, artistic depictions, and the nature of economics. Within the city of Teotihuacan was a diverse and cosmopolitan population. Most of the regional ethnicities of Mexico were represented in the city, such as Zapotecs from the Oaxaca region. They lived in apartment communities where they worked their trades and contributed to

5760-778: The Mississippian groups had vanished, and vast swaths of their territory were virtually uninhabited. The Ancestral Puebloans thrived in what is now the Four Corners region in the United States. It is commonly suggested that the culture of the Ancestral Puebloans emerged during the Early Basketmaker II Era during the 12th century BCE. The Ancestral Puebloans were a complex Oasisamerican society that constructed kivas , multi-story houses, and apartment blocks made from stone and adobe, such as

5880-469: 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

6000-483: The Olmec resulted in a power vacuum in Mexico. Emerging from that vacuum was Teotihuacan, first settled in 300 BCE. By 150 CE, Teotihuacan had risen to become the first true metropolis of what is now called North America. Teotihuacan established a new economic and political order never before seen in Mexico. Its influence stretched across Mexico into Central America, founding new dynasties in the Maya cities of Tikal , Copan , and Kaminaljuyú . Teotihuacan's influence over

6120-744: The Olmecs, Teotihuacan, the Toltecs, the Mexica, and the Mayas. These civilizations (except for the politically fragmented Maya) extended their reach across Mesoamerica—and beyond—like no others. They consolidated power and distributed influence in matters of trade, art, politics, technology, and theology. Other regional power players made economic and political alliances with these civilizations over 4,000 years. Many made war with them, but almost all peoples found themselves within one of their spheres of influence. Regional communications in ancient Mesoamerica have been

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6240-675: The Paleo-Indian period, bands are thought to have subsisted primarily through hunting now-extinct giant land animals such as mastodon and ancient bison . Paleo-Indian groups carried a variety of tools, including distinctive projectile points and knives, as well as less distinctive butchering and hide-scraping implements. The vastness of the North American continent, and the variety of its climates, ecology , vegetation , fauna , and landforms, led ancient peoples to coalesce into many distinct linguistic and cultural groups. This

6360-756: 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

6480-506: 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

6600-459: The Spanish colonists. The Wichita people were a loose confederation that consisted of sedentary agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers who resided in the eastern Great Plains . They lived in permanent settlements and even established a city called Etzanoa , which had a population of 20,000 people. The city was eventually abandoned around the 18th century after it was encountered by Spanish conquistadors Jusepe Gutierrez and Juan de Oñate . When

6720-576: The Spanish conquest, Otomi became 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

6840-523: 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

6960-454: 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

7080-445: The Tlaxcalans for preserving their culture and for their assistance in defeating the Aztecs. The Tlaxcalans would once again assist to the Spaniards during the Mixtón War and the conquest of Guatemala . Cuzcatlan was a Pipil confederacy of kingdoms and city-states located in present-day El Salvador . According to legend, Cuzcatlan was established by Toltec migrants during the Classic Maya collapse in approximately 1200 CE. During

7200-429: 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

7320-521: The analysis. In verb inflection, infixation, consonant mutation, and apocope are prominent processes. The number of irregular verbs 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

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7440-402: 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

7560-443: The calendar, were bequest from the former inhabitants of Tula, the Toltecs. The Mexica-Aztecs were the rulers of much of central Mexico by about 1400 (while Yaquis , Coras, and Apaches commanded sizable regions of northern desert), having subjugated most of the other regional states by the 1470s. At their peak, the Valley of Mexico where the Aztec Empire presided, saw a population growth that included nearly one million people during

7680-457: The city's economic and cultural prowess. Teotihuacan's economic pull impacted areas in northern Mexico as well. It was a city whose monumental architecture reflected a monumental new era in Mexican civilization, declining in political power about 650 CE—but lasting in cultural influence for the better part of a millennium, to around 950 CE. Contemporary to Teotihuacan's greatness was that of the Maya civilization. The period between 250 CE and 650 CE

7800-406: The civilizations in its area, the Tarascan Empire was the most prominent in metallurgy, harnessing copper, silver, and gold to create items such as tools, decorations, and even weapons and armor. Bronze was also used. The great victories over the Aztecs by the Tarascans cannot be understated. Nearly every war they fought in resulted in a Tarascan victory. Because the Tarascan Empire had little links to

7920-429: The cliff dwellings constructed by the Salado are primarily located in Tonto National Monument . The Iroquois League of Nations or "People of the Long House" was a politically advanced, democratic society, which is thought by some historians to have influenced the United States Constitution , with the Senate passing a resolution to this effect in 1988. Other historians have contested this interpretation and believe

8040-404: The coast in southeast Veracruz . The Olmec influence extended across Mexico, into Central America , and along the Gulf of Mexico . They transformed many peoples' thinking toward a new way of government, pyramid temples, writing, astronomy, art, mathematics, economics, and religion. Their achievements paved the way for the Maya civilization and the civilizations in central Mexico. The decline of

8160-400: 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 "

8280-432: The de Soto expedition wandered the American Southeast for four years, becoming more bedraggled, losing more men and equipment, and eventually arriving in Mexico as a fraction of its original size. The local people fared much worse though, as the fatalities of diseases introduced by the expedition devastated the populations and produced much social disruption. By the time Europeans returned a hundred years later, nearly all of

8400-463: The decline of the Toltec civilization came political fragmentation in the Valley of Mexico . Into this new political game of contenders to the Toltec throne stepped outsiders: the Mexica . They were also a desert people, one of seven groups who formerly called themselves "Azteca", in memory of Aztlán , but they changed their name after years of migrating. Since they were not from the Valley of Mexico , they were initially seen as crude and unrefined in

8520-464: 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

8640-514: The development of archaeology in the 19th century, historians of the pre-Columbian period mainly interpreted the records of the European conquerors and the accounts of early European travelers and antiquaries. It was not until the nineteenth century that the work of people such as John Lloyd Stephens , Eduard Seler , and Alfred Maudslay , and institutions such as the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University , led to

8760-411: 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

8880-491: 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,

9000-663: The empire from 700 BCE to 700 CE. The Zapotecs resisted the expansion of the Aztecs until they were subjugated in 1502 under Aztec emperor Ahuitzotl . After the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire , the Zapotecs resisted Spanish rule until King Cosijopii I surrendered in 1563. Like the Zapotecs, the Mixtecs thrived in the Oaxaca Valley. The Mixtecs consisted of separate independent kingdoms and city-states, rather than

9120-595: The end of the period when they were replaced by bows and arrows . The Mississippian culture was spread across the Southeast and Midwest of what is today the United States, from the Atlantic coast to the edge of the plains, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Upper Midwest, although most intensively in the area along the Mississippi River and Ohio River . One of the distinguishing features of this culture

9240-462: The establishment of cities, such as El Tajín as important commercial trading centers. The Totonacs would later assist in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire as an opportunity to liberate themselves from Aztec military imperialism. The Toltec civilization was established in the 8th century CE. The Toltec Empire expanded its political borders to as far south as the Yucatán peninsula , including

9360-403: The first Cazonci, Tariacuri, united these communities and built them into one of the most advanced civilizations in Mesoamerica. Their capital at Tzintzuntzan was just one of the many cities—there were ninety more under its control. The Tarascan Empire was among the largest in Central America, so it is no surprise that they routinely came into conflict with the neighboring Aztec Empire . Out of all

9480-482: 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

9600-400: The former Toltec Empire , they were also quite independent in culture from their neighbors. The Aztecs, Tlaxcaltec , Olmec, Mixtec, Maya, and others were very similar to each other, however. This is because they were all directly preceded by the Toltecs, and they therefore shared almost identical cultures. The Tarascans, however, possessed a unique religion, as well as other things. Tlaxcala

9720-425: 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

9840-596: The impact was minimal or did not exist, pointing to numerous differences between the two systems and the ample precedents for the constitution in European political thought. The Calusa were a complex paramountcy/kingdom that resided in southern Florida . Instead of agriculture, the Calusa economy relied on abundant fishing. According to Spanish sources, the "king's house" at Mound Key was large enough to house 2,000 people. The Calusa ultimately collapsed into extinction at around 1750 after succumbing to diseases introduced by

9960-687: The influence that astronomical activities had upon Mesoamerican people before the arrival of Europeans. Many of the later Mesoamerican civilizations carefully built their cities and ceremonial centers according to specific astronomical events. The biggest Mesoamerican cities, such as Teotihuacan , Tenochtitlan , and Cholula , were among the largest in the world. These cities grew as centers of commerce, ideas, ceremonies, and theology, and they radiated influence outwards onto neighboring cultures in central Mexico. While many city-states, kingdoms, and empires competed with one another for power and prestige, Mesoamerica can be said to have had five major civilizations:

10080-429: The initial colonization of the region. The Na-Dené , Inuit , and Indigenous Alaskan populations exhibit haplogroup Q-M242 (Y-DNA) mutations, however, and are distinct from other Indigenous peoples with various mtDNA mutations. This suggests that the earliest migrants into the northern extremes of North America and Greenland derived from later populations. Asian nomadic Paleo-Indians are thought to have entered

10200-518: 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

10320-526: 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

10440-418: 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

10560-472: The late Aztec period (1350–1519). Their capital, Tenochtitlan , is the site of modern-day Mexico City . At its peak, it was one of the largest cities in the world with population estimates of 200,000–300,000. The market established there was the largest ever seen by the conquistadores on arrival. Initially, the lands that would someday comprise the lands of the powerful Tarascan Empire were inhabited by several independent communities. Around 1300, however,

10680-607: The late twentieth century, archeologists have studied, analyzed, and dated these sites, realizing that the earliest complexes were built by hunter-gatherer societies, whose people occupied the sites on a seasonal basis. Watson Brake , a large complex of eleven platform mounds, was constructed beginning in 3400 BCE and added to over 500 years. This has changed earlier assumptions that complex construction arose only after societies had adopted agriculture, and become sedentary, with stratified hierarchy and usually ceramics. These ancient people had organized to build complex mound projects under

10800-461: The majority of the Y-chromosome is unique and does not recombine during meiosis . This has the effect that the historical pattern of mutations can easily be studied. The pattern indicates Indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced two very distinctive genetic episodes: first with the initial peopling of the Americas and second with European colonization of the Americas . The former

10920-458: 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

11040-432: 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

11160-603: 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

11280-703: 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

11400-516: The only true writing system native to the Americas using pictographs and syllabic elements in the form of texts and codices inscribed on stone, pottery, wood, or perishable books made from bark paper. The Huastecs were a Maya ethnic group that migrated northwards to the Gulf Coast of Mexico. The Huastecs are considered to be distinct from the Maya civilization, as they separated from the main Maya branch at around 2000 BCE and did not possess

11520-416: 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

11640-610: 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

11760-657: The people abandoned their settlements, likely due to drought. The Mogollon resided in the present-day states of Arizona , New Mexico, and Texas as well as Sonora and Chihuahua . Like most other cultures in Oasisamerica, the Mogollon constructed sophisticated kivas and cliff dwellings. In the village of Paquimé , the Mogollon are revealed to have housed pens for scarlet macaws , which were introduced from Mesoamerica through trade. The Sinagua were hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists who lived in central Arizona. Like

11880-579: 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

12000-422: The pre-Columbian era, many civilizations developed permanent settlements, cities, agricultural practices, civic and monumental architecture, major earthworks , and complex societal hierarchies. Some of these civilizations had declined by the time of the establishment of the first permanent European colonies, around the late 16th to early 17th centuries, and are known primarily through archaeological research of

12120-416: The prehistoric Americas . The culture reached its peak in about 1200–1400 CE, and in most places, it seems to have been in decline before the arrival of Europeans. Many Mississippian peoples were encountered by the expedition of Hernando de Soto in the 1540s, mostly with disastrous results for both sides. Unlike the Spanish expeditions in Mesoamerica, which conquered vast empires with relatively few men,

12240-405: 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,

12360-624: The reconsideration and criticism of the early European sources. Now, the scholarly study of pre-Columbian cultures is most often based on scientific and multidisciplinary methodologies. The haplogroup most commonly associated with Indigenous Amerindian genetics is Y-chromosome haplogroup Q1a3a . Researchers have found genetic evidence that the Q1a3a haplogroup has been in South America since at least 18,000 BCE. Y-chromosome DNA , like mtDNA , differs from other nuclear chromosomes in that

12480-515: The rest of North and South America. Exactly when the first people migrated into the Americas is the subject of much debate. One of the earliest identifiable cultures was the Clovis culture , with sites dating from some 13,000 years ago. However, older sites dating back to 20,000 years ago have been claimed. Some genetic studies estimate the colonization of the Americas dates from between 40,000 and 13,000 years ago. The chronology of migration models

12600-604: 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

12720-446: 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

12840-524: 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

12960-553: The southern tip of South America by this time. In that case, the Inuit would have arrived separately and at a much later date, probably no more than 2,000 years ago, moving across the ice from Siberia into Alaska. The North American climate was unstable as the ice age receded during the Lithic stage . It finally stabilized about 10,000 years ago; climatic conditions were then very similar to today's. Within this time frame, roughly about

13080-564: The subject of considerable research. There is evidence of trade routes starting as far north as the Mexico Central Plateau , and going down to the Pacific coast. These trade routes and cultural contacts then went on as far as Central America . These networks operated with various interruptions from pre-Olmec times and up to the Late Classical Period (600–900 CE). The earliest known civilization in Mesoamerica

13200-436: 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

13320-879: 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

13440-555: The visits to the Caribbean by Christopher Columbus. Mesoamerican is the adjective generally used to refer to that group of pre-Columbian cultures. This refers to an environmental area occupied by an assortment of ancient cultures that shared religious beliefs, art, architecture, and technology in the Americas for more than three thousand years. Between 2000 and 300 BCE, complex cultures began to form in Mesoamerica. Some matured into advanced pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations such as

13560-500: The ways of the Nahua civilization. Through political maneuvers and ferocious martial skills, they managed to rule Mexico as the head of the 'Triple Alliance' which included two other Aztec cities, Tetxcoco and Tlacopan . Latecomers to Mexico's central plateau , the Mexica thought of themselves, nevertheless, as heirs of the civilizations that had preceded them. For them, arts, sculpture, architecture, engraving, feather-mosaic work, and

13680-420: The wheel, but it was used solely as a toy. In addition, they used native copper , silver , and gold for metalworking. Archaic inscriptions on rocks and rock walls all over northern Mexico (especially in the state of Nuevo León ) demonstrate an early propensity for counting. Their number system was base 20 and included zero . These early count markings were associated with astronomical events and underscore

13800-667: The word tracing its origins to a Navajo word meaning "ancestor enemies". The Hohokam thrived in the Sonoran desert in what is now the U.S. state of Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora . The Hohokam were responsible for the construction of a series of irrigation canals that led to the successful establishment of Phoenix, Arizona via the Salt River Project . The Hohokam also established complex settlements such as Snaketown , which served as an important commercial trading center. After 1375 CE, Hohokam society collapsed and

13920-504: 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]

14040-493: Was a Nahua republic and confederation in central Mexico. The Tlaxcalans fiercely resisted Aztec expansion during the Flower Wars ever since the Aztecs expelled them from Lake Texcoco . The Tlaxcalans would later ally with the Spanish conquistadors under Hernán Cortés as an opportunity to liberate them from the Aztecs and managed to successfully conquer the Aztecs with the help of the conquistadors. The Spaniards would reward

14160-416: Was a time of intense flourishing of Maya civilized accomplishments. While the many Maya city-states never achieved political unity on the order of the central Mexican civilizations, they exerted tremendous intellectual influence upon Mexico and Central America. The Maya built some of the most elaborate cities on the continent and made innovations in mathematics, astronomy, and calendrics. The Maya also developed

14280-583: Was adopted in more temperate and sheltered regions, permitting a dramatic rise in population. After the migration or migrations, it was several thousand years before the first complex societies arose, the earliest emerging about seven to eight thousand years ago. As early as 5500 BCE, people in the Lower Mississippi Valley at Monte Sano and other sites in present-day Louisiana , Mississippi , and Florida were building complex earthwork mounds , probably for religious purposes. Beginning in

14400-538: Was the construction of complexes of large earthen mounds and grand plazas, continuing the mound-building traditions of earlier cultures. They grew maize and other crops intensively, participated in an extensive trade network, and had a complex stratified society. The Mississippians first appeared around 1000 CE, following and developing out of the less agriculturally intensive and less centralized Woodland period. The largest urban site of these people, Cahokia —located near modern East St. Louis, Illinois —may have reached

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