History
The Mixtec language group belongs to the Otomanguean family, whose urheimat may be the valley of Tehuacán (Puebla). This site was one of the places of the domestication of maize. The thousand-year presence of Otomanguean-speaking groups in this region makes it probable that they were active in this domestication process, which favored the inhabitants of the Altiplano's transition to a sedentary lifestyle and thus influenced the development of Mesoamerican civilization. Campbell and Kaufman have proposed that the Otomanguean languages began to diverge about 1500 BCE. The difficulty of establishing more general relationships between the eight subgroups of the family presents a difficulty for making more detailed inferences on the historical development of the languages.
Proto Otomanguean has been reconstructed by Robert Longacre and Calvin Rensch. The phonological system of the protolanguage has nine consonants, four vowels, and four tones. The groups of consonants and the diphthongs formed from this limited repertory would have been the origin of the phonemes in the daughter protolanguages of the various subgroups of Proto-Otomanguean. Some of the most significant changes in the diversification of Proto-Otomanguean phonemes into Proto-Mixtecan phonemes are the following:
| Proto-Otomanguean | **t | **k | **kʷ | **s | **n | **y | **w | **nt | **nk | **nkʷ | **ns | **nn | **ny | **nw |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proto-Mixtecan | *t | *k | *θ | *y | *w | *ⁿd | *ⁿɡ | *ⁿɡʷ | *ⁿɡʷ | *l | *m |
Rensch revised the reconstruction work of Longacre. He revised the probable phonological inventory and described some of his proposals, based on comparisons of the cognates in the Mixtecan languages. After this work, he proposed a reconstruction of the phonological system of Proto-Mixtecan. This proposal contains sixteen consonants, four vowels, and four tones.
| Reconstruction of the Proto-Mixtecan consonant system | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Postalveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
| Obstruents | *t *ⁿd | *k *kʷ *ⁿɡ *ⁿɡʷ |
*ʔ | ||||
| Fricatives | *θ | *x *xʷ | *h | ||||
| Approximants | *l | *j | *w | ||||
| Nasal consonant | *m | *n | |||||
Read more about this topic: Mixtec Language
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