Introduction
In this article we linguists and historians analyze the language and content of the last will and testament of a Zapotec woman named Sebastiana de Mendoza prepared no later than 1675.
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First, we provide some historical context for understanding how and why the document was written and preserved, and summarize what the text tells us about the testator. Second, we make some observations about the lexicon, structure, and speech conventions of the original Zapotec. In our analysis of the language, we go beyond providing a transcription and translation of the text to show how we arrived at our translation. Our detailed analysis of Zapotec as it was written in the Valley of Oaxaca during colonial times is especially justified, considering that Zapotec is vastly understudied in comparison to other major languages of Mesoamerica, such as Nahuatl and the languages of the Mayan family. Finally, our analysis presented here benefits from and is relevant to the study of living Zapotecan languages, spoken today by some 400,000 people, primarily in Oaxaca.
In the sixteenth century, San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya was a Dominican center for work on Zapotec language writing in the Valley of Oaxaca. It was in Tlacochahuaya (the hispanized version of a Nahuatl name; the Zapotec name for the community was Zuuni) that Fray Juan de Córdova compiled the
Vocabulario en lengua çapoteca, printed in 1578. The last will and testament of Sebastiana de Mendoza, which comes from this town, is a fine example of a Zapotec language text, composed around but not before 1675. While there are a handful of publications in Spanish that present morphological analyses and translations of complete Zapotec language texts from this period, such as Oudijk (2008), Smith Stark et al. (2008), and Munro et al. (2017), as far as we know, this article is the first Zapotec language text from the Mexican colonial period published in whole with morphological analysis and translation into English.
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A copy of Sebastiana de Mendoza’s will survives to date because it entered the legal record in 1707, when Sebastiana’s grandson, Pedro de Mendoza, submitted the will as evidence in a court case, along with an informal Zapotec language bill of sale that was signed by a witness and a scribe.
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The bill of sale refers to a piece of land that Pedro’s grandfather had purchased for four pesos in 1675 from a man named Pedro Andrés.
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That purchased land is mentioned in the will, along with other lands and personal effects that belonged to the testator. Sebastiana’s grandson sought to return the land to the heirs of its previous owner, acknowledging that it had not been transferred properly (i.e., with the consent of royal officials), that it was actually worth about ten pesos, and that Pedro Andrés’s family needed the land. But Sebastiana’s grandson demanded a refund of the four pesos that his grandfather had paid for the land. This case suggests the fluidity and versatility of landholding arrangements among Zapotecs in this period.
Sebastiana was a native woman and was reasonably well-to-do. After arranging for her burial in the church, paying for masses and making offerings to various saints in the church, she bequeathed fields of land to three grandsons, Pedro, Nicolás, and Francisco. Nicolás also received 40 pesos. She gave ten magueys, a wool skirt, a cotton huipil, and ten pesos to her daughter Gerónima. She gave her two sons-in-law a yoke of oxen, but then instructed them to sell it for masses for her and her late husband. She gave her granddaughter and namesake, Sebastiana, five magueys and a picture of Saint Sebastian. She did not bequeath her house to anyone specifically, but she gave her daughter Lorenza a total of 35 magueys as incentive not to leave the house, which probably amounted to leaving the house in her charge. Magueys were valuable plants used for a variety of purposes, including indigenous medical and religious practices, the production of thread and rope, and especially to produce pulque, a fermented alcoholic beverage.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this will is Sebastiana’s reference to the key Zapotec concept of guelaguetza, a custom that persists to the present day by which people remember and record loans (usually turkeys, corn, cacao, other valuable goods, or money) to help relatives and neighbors with expenses associated with feasts and celebrations. (A description of the guelaguetza system of collaboration and exchange can be found in Flores-Marcial (2015).) Men from eleven households in a nearby community, San Juan Guelavía, owed Sebastiana guelaguetza that ranged from one to eight pesos. In this case, all the guelaguetza amounts enumerated were monetary, which demonstrates how Spanish introductions transformed indigenous lifeways. The appearance of this concept here and in other colonial documents confirms the continued existence of a presumably pre-Columbian Zapotec tradition of lending and borrowing, or reciprocal gift-giving, for the mutual support of households. Sebastiana closed her will by allocating some of the guelaguetza money to pay for additional masses for her and her late husband.
Colonial Valley Zapotec
Sebastiana’s will is written in Colonial Valley Zapotec (CVZ), our term for the form of Valley Zapotec used in written texts during the Colonial period. Valley Zapotec languages belong to the larger Zapotec language family. There is no agreement as to the number of languages in the Zapotec language family (part of the Otomanguean stock); claims range from ten or eleven (Kaufman, n.d.) to almost sixty (Simons and Fennig, 2017). CVZ likely represented spoken varieties that were the ancestors of many current languages of the Valley Zapotec subgroup of the family, including Tlacolula Valley Zapotec (cf., e.g., Munro and Lopez et al., 1999), some words from which are cited in our analysis of the document. Even though CVZ, like the modern languages, used many Spanish loanwords, CVZ is completely unrelated to Spanish (or any other European language).
Our exemplification of CVZ comes from three sources: early descriptions, principally those of Córdova (1578a,1578b);
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documents written by native speaking scribes like the one we analyze here; and religious writings like Feria’s Doctrina christiana en lengua castellana y çapoteca (1567), almost certainly written in collaboration with native speakers.
Because we have no audio recordings or clear phonological descriptions of the pronunciation of CVZ, we cannot be certain about the exact nature of any tone and phonation contrasts used in the phonology, though based on evidence from modern Valley Zapotec languages we might hypothesize that there must have been some tone and/or phonation contrasts. Both vowels and consonants are inconsistently represented in written CVZ. Alphabetic writing at the time exhibited much variation in spelling choices -for example, early modern Spanish orthography was also highly variable (Lapesa, 1988). Despite these ambiguities, documents like the one we analyze here serve as important sources of information on the syntax and morphology of 16th-18th century CVZ, supplementing the description in sources like Córdova’s Arte en lengua zapoteca (1578b).
CVZ was typologically very similar to the modern Valley Zapotec languages. A language with basic VSO (verb-subject-object) word order (e.g. nosaui lorenso garcia xono peso ‘Lorenzo García owes eight pesos’, ll. 47-48), it had no nominal case marking. Focused items, especially objects, often appeared before the verb, in OVS order (as in chi toua huini guane...queca geronima... ‘Gerónima will take ten young magueys and...’, ll. 27-30) (see also Lillehaugen, 2016).
There were both bound pronouns, used to indicate subjects, possessors, and objects of prepositions (for instance, first person singular =(y)a is used in rapaya ‘I have’, pelalatia ‘my body’, and xteniya ‘of me’, all in ll. 2-3), and independent pronouns, used in apposition to noun phrases (naa in l. 1) and to indicate objects.
Verbs were marked with prefixes for aspect (e.g. habitual rapaya ‘I have’ (l. 2), irrealis quitani ‘he will come’ (l. 9), perfective petoo ‘sold’ (l. 26), neutral nayo ‘are in’ (l. 39); with time reference determined by these prefixes, adverbs, and context) and other concepts, such as causation. Topics relating to CVZ verbal aspect are discussed in Broadwell (2015), including the semantics of the habitual aspect. Causative verbs could include the prefix o-: thus, compare intransitive quicachi pelalatia ‘my body will be buried’ (l. 15) with causative cocachini pelalatia ‘they will bury my body’ (l. 12). See Operstein and Sonnenschein (2015) for more on causatives in Zapotec in general and Munro (2015) for causatives in Valley Zapotec with implications for CVZ.
Most prepositional concepts were expressed using words for body parts (e.g., lao ‘face’, expressing ‘before’ in lao testigo ‘before the witnesses’, l. 53) whose precise syntactic status in CVZ is uncertain. Lillehaugen has argued that the cognates of these body part locatives are grammatical prepositions in modern Valley Zapotec (2006) and that lao ‘face’ was likely grammaticized as a preposition even in CVZ (2014). Body part terms and other words were frequently incorporated into verbs, as for example with ticha ‘word’ in quitogotichani ‘he will judge’, literally ‘he will cut the word’.
Adjectives like huini ‘small’ followed nouns, while numbers and other quantifiers preceded nouns, as shown by chi toua huini ‘ten young magueys’ (l. 27). CVZ numbers and other quantifiers could bear verbal aspect morphology (Munro, Sonnenschein, and Comrie, in preparation); for example, in sechi toua ‘another ten magueys’ (l. 38) definite marking (which otherwise indicates a definite future) expresses ‘another’; irrealis marking (normally the most common future form) appears on a number in quiropa lechalano ‘us two spouses’, more literally ‘the two of our spouses’ (ll. 52-53).
The text
Below we provide the images of the Zapotec text (Archivo General del Poder Ejecutivo de Oaxaca, Alcaldes Mayores, legajo 42, expediente 10), with permission of the AGEO. This image is also available on the Ticha project website, where users can access a high-resolution, downloadable, color image at https://ticha.haverford.edu/en/texts/Tl675b/. The images of the Spanish translation, which we do not include in this publication, are also accessible on Ticha at https://ticha.haverford.edu/en/texts/Tl675bT/. A transcription of the Zapotec appears on the pages opposite the images. Following this, a line-by-line morphological analysis with English translation is provided.
We present the document in four lines for each original paleographic line. The first line represents a diplomatic transcription of the original manuscript, with original spelling and word divisions preserved. The second line contains the same words, rewritten to reflect our analysis of word boundaries (indicated with spaces), morpheme boundaries (indicated with hyphens), and clitic boundaries (indicated with the equals sign). Additionally, we move material from the beginning of one line to the end of the preceding line if the material in question completes a word from the preceding line (for example, the word xteniya breaks between ll. 2-3 of the original; we analyze it with l. 2). We use an open bracket “ [ ” to mark the beginning of material from the start of the following line. The third line is a gloss corresponding to the segmented items in the second. In some cases, two or more glosses in line 3 are underlined and an additional gloss is provided underneath those elements in cases where the meaning is not transparent, based on the meanings of the component parts, for example in l. 10 where ‘pueblo’ and ‘earth’ come together to mean ‘world’. The fourth line is an English translation of the Zapotec.
Periods separate elements of multiword glosses or cases where morphologically complex elements are not separately glossed. Compounds and various other multimorphemic elements are glossed as described above, with the glosses of the morphemes involved underlined, and the resulting gloss for the entire item underneath.
