Background

•  Tzeltal is one of many Mayan languages spoken in the Mexican state of Chiapas (located at south east)

•  Tzeltal forms, together with the Tzotzil language, a branch of the Mayan languages, called Tzeltalan, which in turn forms a branch with the Ch'olan languages called Cholan–Tzeltalan

Background

•  All these languages are the most spoken Mayan languages in Chiapas today.

•  The branches are believed to have split about 1,400 years ago

•  Some researchers believe that the Tzeltal language has been spoken as far away as in Guatemala

•  Tzeltal is a living language, still being transmitted to children as their first language

•  Spanish is taught in school and is used in some public settings.

Background

•  There are 280,000 or more Tzeltal speakers spread across the state

•  Elevations range between 900 meters in the northeast ('hot country') to 2800 meters in the south ('cold country').

Alphabet

•  Tzeltal has 21 consonants , and 5 vowels

Morphology

•  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 : “I walk” à “Me walk”

•  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.

•  These six classes are nouns , adjectives , and different types of verbs.

Person marking

•  In the absolutive case, all person-marking affixes are suffixes

•  Ergative case is marked with a prefix

Grammar

•  The order of arguments in the phrase is variable, but the most frequent order for transitive phrases is VOS.

•  The relationship between arguments and predicates is mediated by the personal ergative and absolutive affixes, one affix occurring for each argument :

1) La s-ts'un ixim te h-bankile. ("My older brother sowed some corn.")

2) La s-ts'un. ("He sowed it.") (ts'un - "sow" ; ixim - "corn" , h-bankile - "my-older brother")

Grammar

•  A transitive verb with both third-person affixes appearing only with one argument (noun phrase) can be ambiguous:

La y-il(-Ø) te ach'ixe (il, "see" ; te ach'ixe, "the girl")

Could be either :

•  "The girl saw it/him/her“"•  "He/she saw the girl" "

because the noun phrase te ach'ixe could be either the subject or object.

Grammar

•  When the agent argument is a definite noun (phrase) and the patient argument is indefinite, only the active construction is grammatical.

•  Thus, the Tzeltal equivalent of the phrase "The dog killed a cat" could not be expressed in the passive voice, because the agent "the dog" is definite but the patient "a cat" is indefinite

•  ]Inversely, if the patient is definite and the agent indefinite, the passive voice is grammatically required. Whereas an English speaker could say either "A boy hit Michael" or "Michael was hit by a boy," Tzeltal speakers are obligated to use the passive construct.

Spatial Perspective

•  Tzeltal has an absolute spatial frame of reference system based on the overall uphill/downhill slope of the land

•  No directions (left/right or east/west) – use a village name if needed

•  No relative concept as “Behind” or “In Front”

Some Words Example

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGr5E8US7i4

References

•  http://www.mpi.nl/departments/language-and-cognition/fieldsites/tzeltal

•  http://www.native-languages.org/tzeltal_words.htm

•  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzeltal_language