Tzeltal or Tseltal (/ˈ(t)sɛltɑːl/)[2] is a Mayan language spoken in the Mexican state of Chiapas, mostly in the municipalities of Ocosingo, Altamirano, Huixtán, Tenejapa, Yajalón, Chanal, Sitalá, Amatenango del Valle, Socoltenango, Las Rosas, Chilón, San Juan Cancuc, San Cristóbal de las Casas and Oxchuc. Tzeltal is one of many Mayan languages spoken near this eastern region of Chiapas, including Tzotzil, Chʼol, and Tojolabʼal, among others. There is also a small Tzeltal diaspora in other parts of Mexico and the United States, primarily as a result of unfavorable economic conditions in Chiapas.[3]
The area in which Tzeltal is spoken can be divided in half by an imaginary north-south line; to the west, near Oxchuc, is the ancestral home of the Tzeltal people, predating Spanish colonials, while the eastern portion was settled primarily in the second half of the twentieth century.[3] Partially as a result of these migrations, during which the Tzeltal people and other cultural groups found each other in close proximity, four different dialects of Tzeltal have been described: north, central (including Oxchuc), south, and southeast, though the southeastern dialect is today spoken only by a few elderly and geographically dispersed speakers.[4] It is a living language with some 371,730 speakers as of 2005, including approximately 50,000 monolinguals.[5]
Tzeltal forms, together with the Tzotzil language, a branch of the Mayan languages, called Tzeltalan, which in turn forms a branch with the Chʼolan languages called Cholan–Tzeltalan. All these languages are the most spoken Mayan languages in Chiapas today. Historically, the branches are believed to have split about 1,400 years ago.[ambiguous] Also, some researchers believe that the Tzeltal language has been spoken as far away as in Guatemala.[citation needed] While Greenberg groups Tzeltal with the proposed Penutian superfamily, this hypothesis is not well attested.[6]
The Ethnologue classifies Tzeltal as a 5 out of 10 (Developing) on its scale of endangerment status, and additionally describes its use as "vigorous." Nevertheless, its usage is almost exclusively oral; schools rarely incorporate Tzeltal materials, and as a result almost everyone under the age of 30 is bilingual in Spanish.[5]
One of the primary differences between the Tzeltalan and the Chʼol languages today is that while the Chʼol languages feature split ergativity, the Tzeltalan languages are fully morphologically ergative.
Tzeltal language programming is carried out by the CDI's radio station XEVFS, broadcasting from Las Margaritas, Chiapas.
In 2013, Pope Francis approved translations of the prayers for Mass and the celebration of sacraments into Tzotzil and Tzeltal. The translations include "the prayers used for Mass, marriage, baptisms, confirmations, confessions, ordinations and the anointing of the sick ... Bishop Arizmendi said Oct. 6 that the texts, which took approximately eight years to translate, would be used in his diocese and the neighboring Archdiocese of Tuxtla Gutierrez. Mass has been celebrated in the diocese in recent years[when?] with the assistance of translators – except during homilies – Bishop Arizmendi said in an article in the newspaper La Jornada.[7]
The phonology of Tzeltal is quite straightforward with a common vowel inventory and a typical consonant inventory for Mayan languages. Some phonological processes do occur, however, including assimilation, epenthesis, lenition and reduplication.
Tzeltal has 5 vowels:
Whether vowel length is phonemic in Tzeltal is debatable.[8]
Tzeltal has 21 consonants, including the glottal stop. Though Tzeltal does not have a standardized orthography, the bracketed letters in the chart below represent one orthography heavily derivative of Spanish:
/pʼ/ has three allophones:[9]
However, in the Oxchuc (central) dialect, the ejective [pʼ] does not exist, having been replaced by the phone [b]. Phonemic charts representing this dialect would include [b] but not [pʼ]. In this dialect, suffixes carrying ⟨b⟩ often may be realized as [m]. In the initial position of a suffix following a consonant, it is realized as the true stop [b], but in the postvocalic position it is preceded by a glottal stop, such that chabek 'wax' sounds like chaʼbek. When ⟨ʼb⟩ is found in the final position, it can be pronounced as ⟨ʼm⟩, or even disappear completely; thus cheb 'two' could sound like cheʼb, cheʼm, or even cheʼ.[10]
/w/ has two allophones:
Note, however, that it can be interchangeably [w] or [β] in the beginning of a word, as in wix [wiʃ] ~ [βiʃ] 'older sister'
When a vowel is found in the context [_ʔC], the vowel is pronounced with creaky voice.[11]
Contraction may occur with consecutive identical phonemes, either at a word- or morpheme-boundary. For example, the word /ta aʼtel/ ("at work") may be pronounced [taʼtel], the two [a] phonemes having been pronounced as one.[12]
The phoneme [h] may undergo a number of processes depending on context and dialect. In most dialects, most notably that of Bachajón, word-final [h] is very light and in rapid speech often disappears entirely if not protected by some other element. For example, in the Bachajón dialect, the nominal root bah ("corncob/field mouse") in isolation would lose the final [h] and sound like ba, but if the root takes the particle -e, the word will be pronounced [bahe]. This process does not hold true for word-final [j]. All dialects retain [h] before voiceless consonants. Similarly, medial [h] has disappeared from the Oxchuc dialect but not from the Bachajón dialect, such that yahl ("below") and chʼahil ("smoke") in Bachajón would be said yal and chʼail in Oxchuc.[10] Further, in the Oxchuc dialect, an [h] preceding a plain consonant will change the consonant into an ejective stop; thus baht' ("he/she went") in Oxchuc corresponds to baht in other dialects.[10]
In the majority of cases, root-initial glottal stop is pronounced, though it is often omitted in orthography. [ʼ] is only lost when the root is closely related to the preceding word. For example, the glottal stop in the particle -ʼix ("already") will never be pronounced, because the particle always attaches to the preceding word. The prefix ʼa- ("you/your") sometimes retains the glottal stop, but not when it occurs in a verb form. Similarly, the glottal stop in the particle maʼ has been lost in verbal forms. Thus, words beginning or ending with a vowel and not a glottal stop should be pronounced together with the word preceding or following it. For example, tal ix ("he already came") would sound like [talix].[10]
The following is a general list of common root shapes in Tzeltal. For further examples and detail, see section 3.3 below.
Common bisyllabic roots include:
These final three bisyllabic root constructions result almost always from the combination of two roots, and are always nominal roots.[12][10]
Stress always falls on the last syllable of a word. If a root takes a suffix or if it follows a particle, the accent falls on the latter. Many Spanish loanwords retain penultimate stress in the Spanish style.[10]
Kaufman provides the following list of minimal pairs from "dialects other than that of Aguacatenango,"[10] though recall that, for example, [pʼ] is a phoneme in some dialects and does not exist in others.
Tzeltal is an ergative–absolutive language, meaning that the single argument of an intransitive verb takes the same form as the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the subject of a transitive verb. It is also an agglutinative language, which means that words are typically formed by placing affixes on a root, with each affix representing one morpheme (as opposed to a fusional language, in which affixes may include multiple morphemes). Tzeltal is further classified as a head-marking language, meaning that grammatical marking typically occurs on the heads of phrases, rather than on its modifiers or dependents.[13]
There are three types of morphemes in Tzeltal: roots, affixes, and clitics. Kaufman distinguishes between roots, from which stems are derived, and stems, which are inflected to form full morphological words. Each root and stem belongs to a class, which determines the ways in which it may be affixed; see the section below for details. Affixes cannot appear alone; they are bound morphemes found only attached to roots and stems, and in Tzeltal are usually suffixes. Derivational affixes turn roots into stems and can change the grammatical category of the root, thought not all roots need to be affixed to become a stem. Inflectional affixes denote syntactic relations, such as agreement, tense, and aspect. Clitics are syntactically and prosodically conditioned morphemes and only occur as satellites to words.
In addition to denoting grammatical possession, the suffix -Vl in Tzeltal is highly productive as a means of noun-to-noun, noun-to-adjective, and adjective-to-noun derivation, each exemplified below:
In the case of noun-to-noun derivation, the suffix -il is particularly prominent, often used to produce a noun marked for non-referentiality in cases of interrogation. It is followed by the additional suffix -uk. In the sentence Banti wits-il-uk ay te ja-na e ("Which mountain is your house on?"), the word Banti ("mountain") receives these suffixes as it is the thing in question [clarification needed].
In addition to suffixation and prefixation, Tzeltal uses the morphological processes of infixation, reduplication, and compounding to derive words. The only infix is -j-, and only appears in CVC roots, yielding a CVjC root. With a transitive verb, -j- derives a passive; compare mak ("to close") and majk ("to be closed").[14]
Reduplication can only occur with monosyllablic roots, and is typically used with numbers and numeral classifiers. With classifiers, reduplication also entails the insertion of a Vl syllable between the repeated roots. For example, wojkʼ ("group") can become wojkʼ-ol-wojkʼ ("group by group/one group after the other"). When a redoubled root takes the suffix -tik, it creates the effect of a distributive plural; thus be ("road") becomes be-be-tik ("a network of roads"). With redoubled adjective roots, -tik attenuates the quality of the verb, such that tsaj ("red") becomes tsaj-tsaj-tik ("reddish").[14]
Compounding is most commonly used to compound a transitive verb with its object, in so doing creating a noun describing the action in question.
There are six stem classes defined by unique sets of inflectional affixes with which they may occur. The unique set for each stem class may be increased by up to four affixes. Although the total set representing each stem class is unique, certain subsets of affixes are shared by multiple stem classes. Kaufman describes six stem classes, followed by his abbreviations: <