414 UNIT 4 MESOAMERICAN CULTURAL FEATURES
The consonants of Mesoamerican languages also sometimes show contrasts that
are unfamiliar in European languages. Totonacan languages and several Guatemalan
Mayan languages include the consonant q,which sounds somewhat like kbut is ar-
ticulated farther back in the mouth.
Another consonant common in Mesoamerican languages is the glottal stop,men-
tioned before. It was not spelled at all in the Spanish-based orthographies adopted
for most indigenous languages in the early Colonial period (a possible exception is
that in some Classical Nahuatl texts, the letter hwas used for a sound that corre-
sponds to glottal stops of some Nahua dialects). Today it is usually spelled by an apos-
trophe in practical orthographies; linguists transcribe it by an apostrophe, by a 7,or
by the linguistic symbol ..
Other consonants occur in a few Mesoamerican language families. Nahua and
Totonacan languages have a consonant usually written tlby nonlinguists. This sound
is made with the tip of the tongue firmly against the base of the upper front teeth, as
for a t;but when moving to the next sound, air is released at one side of the tongue
while the tip of the tongue remains against the teeth. This sound is distinct from both
tand l.Many nouns in colonial Nahuatl ended in this tlsound, and when such words
were borrowed into Spanish, the final tlwas replaced with Spanish -te;for example,
Nahuatl tomatlbecame Spanish tomate“tomato.” There are whole classes of conso-
nants that are found in some (but not all) Mesoamerican language families, such as
glottalized (e.g., k, t), aspirated (e.g., kh,ph), and palatalized (e.g., ky,py) consonants.
One feature that is common in European languages but that is rare in the lan-
guages of Mesoamerica is a contrast between consonants based on voicing. Voicing
refers to the vibration of the vocal cords while producing a consonant, and English
has many contrasts based on voicing; for example, bis voiced whereas pis voiceless;
dis voiced whereas tis voiceless; and gis voiced, whereas kis voiceless. In many
Mesoamerican languages, there is no contrast between these pairs of sounds;
pand bare usually treated as variant pronunciations of the same basic sound.Morphology
In all languages, the order of elements in a word is strictly defined. Words are made
up of a root element plus (usually) some number of affixes (that is, prefixes, suf-
fixes, and infixes) that must appear in a definite order. The orders of elements within
a word will, of course, vary from language to language, but there are fixed rules of
order for any particular language.
In almost all Mesoamerican languages, for example, a verb contains a verbal
stem plus affixes that indicate the tense-aspect of the verb. In many languages, it also
contains pronominalaffixes (agreement markers) that indicate the person and number
of the subject (in some, also the object, if there is one). Table 11.1 shows verbs with
affixes in three Mesoamerican languages.
Pronouns and pronominal affixes exhibit a number of different patterns. In gen-
eral, they are based on the category of person,defined in terms of the participants in
a speech event. Some languages have rather different pronominal systems from those
found in English or Spanish. In several Mesoamerican languages, there are differ-