The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

1.5.1 Glottalization/laryngealization. The phonemic inventories of the Totonac-Tepehua
languages vary in interesting ways in their inclusion of the glottal stop, ejective stops, and
laryngealized sonorants and vowels (Levy 1987:59-65). Glottalization and/or laryngealization
are also morphological markers of 2 nd person subject in these languages. FM Totonac has its own
unique place in the range of possibilities available in the family: it seems to be in the process of
losing the glottal stop and glottalized consonants word-internally and relegating them to the role
of prosodic boundary markers (§2.6.5.3). Even morphological glottalization marking a 2 nd person
subject fails to be realized unless it occurs at a prosodic boundary (e.g. word-finally), thus for
example, laaqtsiníit’! ‘you have seen it’ vs. laaqtsiníita xúuk’i ‘you have seen the deer’.
1.5.2 Nasal epenthesis. At clitic-stem and word-word boundaries in FM Totonac that bring
together a vowel and an oral stop or affricate, a nasal homorganic with the stop (or stop portion
of the affricate) is regularly inserted, for example tii ‘who’ + taqa"tawaqá ‘they study! becomes
tíi n taqa"tawaqá ‘those who study! (§2.6.5.2). The phenomenon may also be analyzed as the
appearance of prenasalized segments in particular contexts (see McQuown 1940: §2.2.2, 4.1, 4.2,
4.6 for such an interpretation for Coatepec Totonac); in either case, it is rather unusual.
1.5.3 Sound symbolism and ideophones. FM Totonac has a large number of ideophones in four
categories: sound and manner of motion adverbials (such as "qonq" "qonq" ‘sound of snoring’,
#un #un ‘something rushes by quickly’); colors (e.g., snapáp! ‘white’, tsutsóqo" ‘red’);
odors/flavors (e.g., skunk ‘odor of egg, fish, dog, or blood’; !qonq ‘odor of beef or mutton’); and
descriptive adjectives (such as slamáma ‘shiny’, lasása ‘thin’)(§2.5). Many ideophones feature
sound symbolic phonemes that occur in three intensity series: a fricative series: s, #, "; a mostly
affricate series: t, ts, tl, $; and a velar-uvular stop series: k, q (all common series crosslinguistically;
see Nichols 1971) (§2.8). The sound symbolic series are also found in sections of
the normal lexicon, and have an augmentative/diminutive function. However, synchronically
there is no clear directionality in intensity in any of these series (see McFarland, to appear).
1.5.4 Inflectional combinatorics. The inflectional system of FM Totonac is quite complex;
modeling it presents difficulties of approximately the same level as the Georgian system
(Gurevich 2009). Phenomena of interest include the presence of both subject and object affixes
on either side of the root (thus kaa- object plural and ta- 3 rd subject plural prefixes, –ni 2 nd object
and –w! 1 st plural suffixes); marking of 2 nd person singular subject by the glottalization of the
final consonant of the stem and suppletion of certain roots and derivational morphemes; long
distance blocking of all second person subject morphology (affixes, suppletion and
glottalization) by a first person plural marker; the compositionality of certain person agreement
markers, such as the first person object plural, which requires kin- 1OBJ, kaa- OBJ.pl, and –ni"
2OBJ with a third person subject, and kin- 1OBJ, laa- 2/1, and –w! 1pl when the subject is
second person.
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