TILAPA OTOMI

1. Facts
2. Sources of the data
3. Orthography
4. Verb types
5. Verbal inflection
6. Inflectional classes by inflectional formatives
7. Inflectional classes by stem alternations

Facts

Otomi is a small language family within Oto-Manguean and Tilapa Otomi is the most conservative and the most endangered of all Otomi languages. It is spoken by about a dozen elderly people in the village of Santiago Tilapa in the State of Mexico.

Orthography

Verbal inflection

Like a typical Otomi language, verbs in Tilapa Otomi inflect for various TAM values and for person of the subject by means of a series of clitic words that precede the verbal stem, which we refer to as inflectional formatives.

Note: For practical purposes, in the database we treat such formatives as if they functioned like affixes.

Notes:

• A number of intransitive verbs inflect for subject by means of person suffixes:
    rá   ndoh-ki
    INCPL be.big-1S_O
    ‘I'm big/old.’
• These verbs fall into three subclasses, which we call ‘stative’, ‘patientive’ and ‘inchoative’. To inflect for TAM, these verbs use markers of 3rd person. This information is given in the database.
• Patientive verbs receive the same markers as other active verbs.
• Stative verbs select markers rá for INCPL.REALIS and trá for INCPL.IRREALIS.
• Inchoative verbs use the marker tɨ preceding the stem when the aspectual reading is dynamic, and inflect.



htïn- ‘get drunk’ (-gi -1S_O)

Realis	INCPL	rátɨ	htïn-gi	‘I'm getting drunk’
	HAB	rɨ́tɨ	htïn-gi	‘I get drunk’
	CPL	bwɨtɨ	htïn-gi	‘I got drunk’
	PRF	xɨ́n	htïn-gi	‘I'm drunk’
Irrealis	CPL	tɨdɨ	htïn-gi	‘I'll get drunk’
	PROSP	xtátɨ	htïn-gi	‘I'm about to get drunk’

Inflectional classes by stem alternations

Most Class I verbs select a secondary stem for the 3rd person in all aspect-moods except the incompletive (both realis and irrealis) and the habitual, e.g. kʰɨʰki (tr) ‘get out’. There are also some of Class II. The fact that not all verbs have different stems when in principle they could, suggests that verbs fall into different classes attending to whether they require a stem alternation pattern or not. Verbs with a glottal onset require the secondary stem for the 2nd person too, e.g ʔɛni (tr) ‘measure’. The database lists these alternations by referring to the process by which the secondary stem is built.