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FAMSI © 2001: J. Kathryn Josserand and Nicholas A. Hopkins |
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Chol Ritual Language Appendix II. Tila Chol Text In the course of the 1995 field season we recorded a number of Chol texts in Tila, including several texts about ceremonial activity narrated by Bernardo Pérez Martínez, a bilingual schoolteacher from the Barrio San Sebastián, Tila. During the summer, Pérez was asked by a colleague representing the federal Ministry of Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública, SEP) if he would contribute texts to a project which planned to publish Chol materials for regional distribution and use in educational projects. In order to further this work, we prepared the texts we had recorded in an orthography suitable to SEP publications, rather than the orthography we usually employ. The text sample presented here, Santa Cruz (Holy Cross), retains this SEP orthography, and words which appear in the text or in lexical citations from the text are written in a form distinct from that of other sources. The principal differences between our normal orthography and the one employed in the following text relate to palatalization. All Chol dialects regularly palatalize dental and alveolar stops and nasals (t, t’, n); we normally transcribe these phonemes without indicating the palatalization, since in most varieties of Chol the palatalization is automatic and non-contrastive. In the orthography used for the SEP texts, these phonemes are transcribed as palatals ty, ty’, and ñ. As we worked on the transcription of Perez’ Tila-dialect tapes, we became aware of a previously unrecorded phenomenon. While instances of the phoneme /t/ that derive from earlier *t are indeed palatalized, they now contrast in the Tila variety of Chol with an unpalatalized dental/alveolar stop which comes in part from earlier *tz: The verbal preclitic which signals completive aspect in Tumbalá Chol is tza (or tzi if it incorporates the following third person pronoun). In Tila Chol this preclitic occurs as ta or ti, with unpalatalized stops. This creates a direct contrast with forms like tya’ ’excrement’ and tyi’ ’edge, mouth’. Other examples of non-palatalized t arise from reduced forms; as an adverbial of motion, *til-el ’come’ is reduced to te (unpalatalized), contrasting with tye’ ’wood’. Proper transcription of Tila Chol thus requires a distinction between these two phonemes, even if an understanding of the historical origin of the contrast allows an educated reader to supply palatalization (or not) as needed. In the text which follows, palatalization is indicated where it occurs, using ty, ty’, and ñ. Forms which are transcribed with t, t’, and n are not palatalized. Other texts recorded during the 1995 field season are listed below. These texts have been recorded, transcribed, discussed, analyzed, edited, and translated to Spanish; English translations are under way, but are not ready for inclusion in this report. Recorded Tapes A listing of field recordings made during the summer, 1995; archived as TIL 95. The text Santa Cruz is recorded on tape TIL 95-2. TIL 95-1. Ausencio Cruz Guzmán, discusión de cuentos (en español y chol). A discussion of Chol narrative style. TIL 95-2. Chol de Tila, Bernardo Pérez Martínez. La Novena del Señor de Tila (2 partes); Cuento del Xnek; Santa Cruz; Todos Santos. Texts describing and discussing Tila ritual activity. TIL 95-3. Conversación sobre cargos y ceremonias en Tila, Sebastián Pérez P. and Alfonso Pérez Vásquez (en español). A conversation (in Spanish) with two informants from the Barrio San Sebastián, Tila, concerning past and future ceremonial activities. TIL 95-4. Ausencio Cruz Guzmán (en chol y español): Xibaj me’; arte del tigre. A text in Tumbalá Chol, with retelling in Spanish. Mariachi Los Coyotes: Peregrino. Cinta comercial que contiene "Himno al Señor de Tila" y otros himnos de la fiesta del Señor de Tila. A commercial tape with recordings of a traditional music for the fiestas honoring the Señor de Tila. |
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