CHAPTER 11 LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES OF MESOAMERICA 417as well. It appears that Nahuas changed their word order after they entered the
Mesoamerican world (see Box 11.7 later in the chapter). The persistence of SOV
order in Tarascan is one of several ways that Tarascans’ practices were somewhat in-
dependent from those of other Mesoamericans.
A similar shift can be demonstrated in the Mixe-Zoquean language family. For
decades it was thought that all Mixe-Zoquean languages had verb-first word order, but
other grammatical features suggested that at an earlier stage, they had SOV order.
In the early 1990s, this earlier SOV stage was confirmed in epi-Olmec hieroglyphic
texts, written in Zoquean, at least as late as A.D. 162. Since then, linguistic fieldwork
has shown that Zoque of Santa María Chimalapa—the most conservative of the Zo-
quean languages—still preserves this order today. Proto-Zoquean must also have pre-
served SOV order, since Chimalapa Zoque descends from it; SOV order was preserved
in the epi-Olmec area at least into the Classic period. It was therefore individual Zo-
quean languages that changed to verb-initial order, after proto-Zoquean split into sep-
arate Zoque and Gulf Zoquean branches; this was probably no earlier than the Late
Classic period (on early Zoqueanspeaking Mesoamericans, see Chapter 1).
Although verb-initial orders are the most common or basic orders, it is usual for
alternative orders to be used for special purposes. In the case of intransitive verbs in
the epi-Olmec texts, subjects that control the action described by the verb usually pre-
cede (SV), as they do in a transitive (SOV) sentence, whereas those that undergo
the action usually follow (VS). More generally, it is rather common in verb-initial
languages for the subject to be moved to the front of the sentence when it is being
emphasized. In many languages, anyordering of subject, verb, and object is possible,
each order emphasizing a different notion.
Other features of the grammar of Mesoamerican languages we summarize more
briefly as follows. When nouns (for example, “dog”) are possessed, as in “the man’s
dog,” the typical pattern in Mesoamerican languages is to say “(his) dog the man,”
or, less commonly, “the man (his) dog.” The Kaqchikel and Zapotec examples in
Table 11.3 show these patterns.
In many Mesoamerican languages, words that correspond in function/meaning
to locative prepositions in English (for example, “on,” “under,” “inside”) are based
on or are identical to words for parts of the body. For example, one word may be used
for both “head” and “on”; another may be used for both “back” and “behind.” In
some languages, this may mean that there are no locative prepositions, and that
body-part nouns are used in their place. In other languages, it is better to say that loca-
tive prepositions are a separate part of speech, but many of these prepositions are
morphologically identical to body-part nouns. The Zapotec example in Table 11.3
shows that the same word, dèhjts,is both “back” and “behind.”
Numerals have a vigesimal,or base-20 structure; rather than counting in decimal
units that are powers of ten (10s, 100s, 1000s), as we normally do, Mesoamericans
count with vigesimal units that are powers of 20 (20s, 400s, 8000s). Thus a number
like fifty-five is expressed as “two twenties plus fifteen.” The Zapotec and Classical
Nahuatl examples in Table 11.3 show vigesimal structure. (For more detail on this
kind of counting, see Box 11.8 later in the chapter.)