_{Fot Teiby xte Lecsyony Tseinyabteby. Young women from Tlacolula in traditional dress.}

This chapter begins with three sections about verbs. Section §16.1 is about two types of vowel-initial bases; section §16.2 is about d-base verbs; and section §16.3 is a summary of what we know about vowel-initial verb bases. Section §16.4 shows how to talk about eating and drinking formally, and section §16.5 introduces the -ne “with” extender. Section §16.6 explains the difference between rni “says” and the neutral “say” verb na. Finally, section §16.7 presents inverse idioms.

Xiëru Zalo Ra Dizh

1. Remember that you can check out all the forms of new verbs in the Valley Zapotec Verb Charts.

2. Rats isn’t used with human subjects, even though you might believe that people could get yellow. As you learn more Zapotec, you’ll find that some things that seem logical to a speaker of another language just aren’t expressed the same way in Zapotec.

3. Rau guet, rquiny guet, and rgwe dizh are expressions that include objects that often aren’t translated. Literally they mean “eats tortillas” and “speaks words”, but they are used just to mean “eats” and “speaks”.

§16.1. Two types of vowel-initial bases

In Lecsyony Tsëbtyop you learned about the verb runy “does”, a verb that has a vowel-initial base (uny) and the following other stems: habitual runy, progressive cayuny, irrealis guny, and perfective beiny (in the perfective, the base einy). Vowel-initial bases work differently from the bases you’ve learned up to this point. There are three main types of vowel-initial bases. Two are described in this section; you’ll learn about the third type in section §16.2.

Like other verbs, vowel-initial bases use the r– prefix in the habitual. A cay– prefix is used before a vowel-initial base  in the progressive. In the irrealis, vowel-initial bases usually use either a g– prefix (like runy) or a gy– prefix. But there are two different ways such bases work in the perfective. In the perfective, vowel-initial bases use either a b– prefix, as in beiny and the other verbs you have learned up to now, or a gu- or gw– prefix. (The change of the base vowel u to ei in beiny is irregular.) There may also be changes in the vowel pattern of the verb, especially in the irrealis — for example, guny has a PP vowel pattern, not the B of the habitual stem. Beiny also has a change in its vowel pattern, to KC.

When you see that a verb has a vowel-initial base (because its habitual stem has a vowel after the r– prefix), you will know that the corresponding progressive stem starts with cay– (or, as some speakers pronounce it, cagy-), rather than ca-. It is always good to memorize the irrealis and perfective stems of any new verb with a vowel-initial base. These are always listed in the vocabulary for you.

Here are three other verbs with vowel-initial bases that, like runy, use a b– or by– prefix in the perfective:

As you’ve learned, vocabulary entries list unexpected stems and usually include pronunciation guides for separately listed stems only if the vowel pattern in those stems is different from that of the habitual. Rual / ruald “reads; sings” is pronounced differently by different people: some use a d at the end of the habitual and irrealis (and also progressive) stems, while others do not. In the perfective, there is additional variation. In the perfective, some speakers use an unexpected perfective stem, bily, while others use one which looks more like the habitual stem.

Below are four new verbs with vowel-initial bases that use gw- or gu- in the perfective:

The entry for reipy “tells; asks” is different from others you’ve seen in several ways. First, like rdeidy “gives”, reipy can have only a noun phrase or a “him”, “her”, or “them” pronoun as its object — you can’t use this verb with a “me”, “you”, or “us” object (the object cannot be the speaker or hearer):

Secondly, for many speakers of Valley Zapotec, reipy has no perfective stem. The first sentence above uses the habitual, but is translated in the simple past. Reipy does have an (irregular) imperative, however — and of course you can form polite and plural commands using the irrealis:

(Irregular imperatives will be listed in the Rata Ra Dizh and the Valley Zapotec Verb Charts. There are some speakers of Valley Zapotec who use gwuats as the perfective stem of reipy, but we will not use this word this way in this book.)

You can also use reipy to say “tells (someone) to (do something)” or “asks (someone) to (do something)” by adding an irrealis verb to the sentence:

The sentence pattern used in these sentences is as follows:

This sentence starts with a form of reipy, followed by a subject and an object. (Of course, in an imperative, like the last example, there is no subject.) Next is an irrealis verb whose subject is the same as the object of the reipy sentence. Finally comes the rest of the sentence.

§16.2. D-base verbs

In Lecsyony Tseiny (15) you learned that verb bases can be referred to by their initial consonants. Thus, a d-base is a verb base whose base consonant is d. D-base verbs are a third type of vowel-initial verb that works differently from the other two you just learned about. Here are some examples from this lesson’s Ra Dizh:

As you can see, d-base verbs have a vowel-initial base in the habitual and the irrealis stems, but a base starting with d (a d-base) in the perfective.

(As the first example shows, rau guet, literally “eats tortillas”, can also be used just to mean “eats” in Valley Zapotec. This example also will remind you that w is used between any bound pronoun and any vowel-final stem ending in a diphthong ending in u (such as rau), as you learned in Lecsyony Tsëda.) The “you” singular informal form of rau is irregular, however — it doesn’t use this w:

But having a perfective base beginning with d is not the main peculiarity of d-base verbs — as you know, there are many verbs whose perfective base is different from their habitual base. D-base verbs are especially unusual because their “we” forms use the d-base not just in the perfective, but in every stem. Compare the “I” and “we” subject forms below:

In every case, the “I” form uses the verb stem you see in the Ra Dizh entry, but the “we” form uses the same base with d added to the front (instead of au, the “we” base for “eats” is dau; instead of any, the “we” base for “sits on” is dany, and so on — the vowel patterns in the d-bases are just the same as in the habitual). These d-bases are the same ones used in the perfective.

Now, look at the irrealis sentences above. You’ll see that, because the d-base starts with a consonant, the “we” sentences have the regular irrealis prefix y- rather than the g- or gy- prefix used with vowel-initial bases.

The d-bases of these verbs are used only in the perfective (for every subject) and with “we” subjects (using the bound pronoun -ën). With any other pronoun subject or with noun phrase subjects, the base is the one listed in the Ra Dizh and used in the “I” sentences, and in the following additional examples:

Thus, the d-base is used only in the perfective and with “we” subjects.

Ria “drinks” is also a d-base verb, but it is especially irregular because it does not use the d-base in the perfective stem (which also has a change in the base vowel):

Because ria is a d-base verb, you know that it will use a d-base in the “we” form of every stem. The d-base for all the stems uses the same vowel as the perfective: it is de. Every time this stem is used, it has the bound “we” pronoun -ën added to it. Because the vowel pattern of this verb is KCB, it is a CB stem, so the final B vowel of the pronunciation guide will drop when the pronoun is added in a separate syllable. So the d-base for all the “we” forms is deën [dèe’-ëhnn]. Here are some examples of “we drink” sentences:

With any other subject, whether it is a noun phrase or a bound pronoun other than ‑ën, you use the stems listed in the Ra Dizh, which work like other vowel-final CB stems.

You’ll recall that with a CB stem, the final B vowel of the pronunciation guide is dropped before pronouns that start with a vowel are added in a separate syllable. Thus, for example, the “I” subject habitual uses the stem ria [rìi’ah], minus the final B vowel, with the bound pronoun -a, giving ria [rìi’-a’]. In the perfective, the verb ends with e, which becomes i before this pronoun, so “I drank” is gwia [gwìi’-a’].

§16.3 Vowel-initial bases: a summary

The table below shows the three types of vowel-initial bases covered in this lesson. Of course there are exceptions (like ria), but these are the three main types of vowel-initial  bases:

§16.4. Eating and drinking formally

You learned about polite verbs (formed with the extender la) in Lecsyony Ga. Zapotec also has several FORMAL VERBS, whose stems are completely different from the corresponding non-formal verbs.

In the last sections you learned to use the d-base verbs rau “eats” and ria “drinks”. These verbs are not used, however, when the person eating or drinking is someone for whom or for whose position you have great respect — in other words, anyone you would address with a formal pronoun or refer to with a respectful pronoun (such as a priest, teacher, government official, parent, or other older or respected person). With these subjects, the verb to use is the formal verb rquiny [rquììi’ny], which can mean either “eats” or “drinks”:

The second example here shows that rquiny guet can be used to mean “eat” in general just the same way that rau guet can. The only way to be sure whether rquiny means “eats” or “drinks” is to think about the context and what the object is.

Formal verbs are identified in the Ra Dizh as “(form. verb)”.

§16.5. The -ne “with” extender

The verbs in the following sentences use a new extender, -ne [nèe] “with”:

When you add -ne to a verb, the new verb stem you make is used in a different sentence pattern. Thus, the verbs rgyet “plays” and rzhuny “runs” are normally used in sentences that just contain subjects. Sentences with the extended verbs rgyetne “plays with” and rzhunyne “runs with” contain two noun phrases or pronouns, the subject and an object who does the action along with the subject.

Similarly,  when you add -ne to a sentence with a verb that is used with an object, the new -ne verb can be used with two objects:

As these examples show, the person who does the action “with” the subject comes right after the subject, followed by the object of the action. The one that does the action with the subject is an object too (we can call it the -ne object), so it can be a free pronoun. (However, -ne sentences usually can’t be formed from original sentences with objects that are people or animals.)

Here’s the -ne sentence pattern:

The second example here will remind you that since -ne ends with e, that e will become i before the bound subject pronoun -a. Any extended verb that includes -ne is a vowel-final stem, so it will work like other verbs ending in a KP vowel pattern.

Below is the pronunciation of the forms of rzhunyne “runs with” that use pronoun subjects starting with vowels:

If a verb uses irregular bases in some forms, you just add -ne onto those. For example, here’s how to talk about “eating with” in the past:

When used with verbs referring to communication, -ne can mean “to” or “at” rather than “with”, as in

You’ve already learned another way to say “with”, of course, using cuan. Many sentences can be expressed either with -ne or with cuan:

However, there are many differences between using -ne and cuan. For one thing, -ne is attached to the verb, before the subject, but cuan goes later in the sentence, after the subject (unless it comes before the verb) and, as the last example shows, a -ne object comes before any other object in the sentence, but cuan and its object come after any other object.

Another difference between -ne and cuan involves meaning. -Ne can express “to” or “at” as well as “with”, but cuan cannot. Cuan can be used between two noun phrases or pronouns to mean “and”, but -ne is never used this way.

_{Fot Tyop xte Lecsyony Tseinyabteby. Entrance to a tomb at the Yagul archaeological site.}

§16.6. Rni “says” and the neutral verb na

Rni [rnnììi’] means “says” in Zapotec. Here are the forms of this vowel-final verb:

Unlike every verb you’ve learned so far, “they” subject forms of rni do not use the expected combination form of this verb ([rnnìi’]). Instead, they use a special combination form rnie [rnnìe’], and the extra e vowel in this form also appears with the other bound pronouns that begin with ë.

Rni is the habitual form of “says”. The perfective, as you’d expect, is mni. This verb has another form, though, na [nnah]. Na is a special type of verb stem called the NEUTRAL (abbreviated as “neut.”; you’ll learn more about neutral verbs in Lecsyony Tseinyabchon). Neutral stems of verbs with consonant-initial bases usually consist of the base on its own, but na is exceptional, since it changes the vowel of the “say” base ni. Here are the forms of na:

Listen as your teacher pronounces the forms of both these verbs. As you can see,  na is quite irregular in its pronunciation!

The translation given here for na is “said”, which is normally the way you’ll hear this verb used. Here are some examples of the use of na and rni in longer sentences:

There are two patterns here. The first uses a QUOTATION, representing exactly what the person said, in quotation marks (“ ”), in the following pattern:

The second type of sentence expresses the idea that someone says something, but does not report the exact words the person used. Instead, this type of sentence uses a DEPENDENT SENTENCE to report this. (This is very similar to the English translation. If Elena says, “I like dogs”, someone may report this by saying “She said she likes dogs”, using the dependent sentence “she likes dogs”. They are being accurate about the idea, but not quoting Elena’s exact words.) Here’s the pattern:

A dependent sentence is a sentence that is part of another sentence. (You’ve already seen some dependent sentences used with rcaz.)

§16.7. Inverse idioms

Here’s a sentence you saw in Part Chon of Blal xte Tiu Pamyël:

As the note about this sentence following the story said, the verb riabzac (a common way to express “likes” in Valley Zapotec) works “backwards” from the way the English verb likes works.

Lia Araceli is the subject of the first part of this sentence (Riabzac Lia Araceli naa), and naa is the object. (You can tell this because of the order the parts of the sentence come in: first verb, then subject, then object.) “You guys” is the subject of the second part of the sentence (riabzacad naa), and again, naa is the object. (You can tell this because the verb is followed by the bound pronoun -ad.) But both parts of the sentence are used to talk about a feeling the speaker has — in English, we express this with an I subject. The Valley Zapotec verb riabzac works “backwards” from the English verb likes (or, alternatively, the English verb works “backwards from the Zapotec one!) — you just have to remember to express the person who does the liking as the object of this verb.

Here are two more examples:

(Note that riabzac is only used about liking people.) All these examples use the following sentence pattern:

In each case, the one doing the liking is the object of the sentence. (If it’s a pronoun, it must be a free pronoun rather than a bound pronoun, and when both subject and object come after the verb, the object must be second.) The one that is liked is the subject. (If it’s a pronoun, it must be a bound pronoun rather than a free pronoun, and when both subject and object come after the verb, the subject must come first.)

One way to think of this is to imagine that the verb means “pleases” rather than “likes” — then you can think of the first sentence above as something like “Araceli pleases me, but you guys please me more!” Although that isn’t exactly the right meaning, at least the subject and object seem correct! (If you know Spanish, you will realize that the Spanish verb gustar works just like riabzac, which is a translation of a similar Spanish idiom, le caye bien, which means something like “fall well to (someone)”.)

This new sentence pattern is “inverted” from what we’d expect in English, so we’ll refer to it as an INVERSE IDIOM sentence pattern. Rsan “leaves” is another verb that can be used as an inverse idiom, to mean “misses (a bus, train, etc.)”:

Here’s the inverse idiom sentence pattern:

In a sentence with an inverse idiom, you need to remember that the noun phrases you’d expect to be the subject and object will be expressed as the object and subject, respectively, in the Valley Zapotec sentence, in the pattern diagrammed below. Keep in mind that a pronoun corresponding to an English subject will be expressed with a free pronoun (like any other object), and that a pronoun corresponding to an English object will be expressed with a bound pronoun (like any other subject). This may seem a bit confusing at first, but you’ll catch on to this pattern when you practice it.

Endings

-ne [nèe] with; at, to (extender, see lesson)

Abbreviations

neut. neutral