TZOTZIL LANGUAGE

'Tzotzil' is a Maya language spoken by the indigenous Tzotzil Maya people in Chiapas, Mexico. Tzeltal is the most closely related language to Tzotzil and together they form a Tzeltalan sub-branch of the Mayan language family. Tzeltal, Tzotzil and Ch'ol are the most widely-spoken languages in Chiapas. Unlike Ch'ol, which features split ergativity, Tzeltal and Tzotzil are fully morphologically ergative. There are very few prepositions and each has a wide semantical spectrum.
''Centro de Lengua, Arte y Literatura Indígena'' (CELALI) suggested in 2002 that the name of the language (and the ethnicity) should be spelled Tsotsil, rather than Tzotzil. Native speakers and writers of the language are picking up the habit of using ''s'' instead of ''z''.

Contents

Dictionaries and grammars

Notes

References

External links

Dictionaries and grammars

In 1975, the Smithsonian Institution produced a dictionary of Tzotzil,^[1] containing some 30,000 Tzotzil-English entries, and half that number of English-Tzotzil entries, the most comprehensive resource on Tzotzil vocabulary to that date. Tzotzil word-lists and grammars date back to the late 19th century, most notably in Otto Stoll's ''Zur Ethnographie der Republik Guatemala'' (1884).^[2]

Notes

1. The work in question is ''The great Tzotzil dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán'' (Laughlin 1975).
2. See Dienhart (1997), "Data Sources Listed by Author".

References

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External links

★ Sk'op Sotz'leb, an online grammar, with glossary and pronunciation examples for Zinacantan