The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac

colonialization. This would be after 1519, the date of first contact between the Spanish and the
Totonacos. This subsection gives a brief overview of the phonological adaptation of Spanish
words into FM Totonac.
I assume a model in which a bilingual speaker may misperceive the phonetic cues in an L2 word
and therefore adopt an underlying phonemic representation for the word that is different from
that of a native speaker of L2. It is this possibly ‘deviant’ UR, determined by a perception
grammar that has been shaped by the constraints of the native language (as suggested by
Broselow 2004), which is evaluated by the constraints of L1 to produce the surface loan form.
Table 2.16 presents a phonemic inventory for 16 th century Spanish, based on Penny (2002:54-110).
As can be seen by comparing this table with the inventory of FM Totonac in Table 2.1, the
phonemes present in 16 th century Spanish and absent or rare in FM Totonac are /b/, /d/, /g/, /f/, /z/,
/z"/, /ñ/, /$/, /r/, /e/ and /o/. In addition, hiatus and tautomorphemic obstruent-liquid clusters,
frequent in Spanish, are prohibited in Totonaco.
Table 2.16 Spanish phonemes (16 th century)
p b t d c" k g
f s z s, z, s" z" x
m n ñ
l $ r
w y
u i a e o
2.9.1 Phonemic substitutions. Many of the phonemes that are non-existent in FM Totonac are not
straight-forwardly replaced in loan words with a single native segment; different choices are made
in different words. More work is needed to determine the basis for these choices; it is possible that
some were borrowed into FM Totonac through neighboring indigenous languages.
2.9.1.1 Voiced stops. Spanish d and g (in either their stop or spirantized allophones) are usually
replaced by their voiceless counterparts, but b is substituted sometimes by p, other times by w.
There are too few examples to find a pattern.
210) Examples of loan words with voiced stops
tumínku& < Sp. domingo ‘Sunday’
sáapatu& < Sp. sábado ‘Saturday’
karawása < Sp. garbanzo ‘garbanzo bean’
buréko < Sp. Borrego ‘sheep’
piolín < Sp. violin ‘violin’
wákas" < Sp. vacas ‘cows’
! *+!