This lesson is all about different types of verbs, mostly BASE-CHANGING. Section §15.1 presents irregular verbs whose bases start with b and g, and section §15.3 irregular verbs whose bases start with d and r. Section §15.2 is about regular verbs with bases beginning with r. Section §15.4 summarizes types of base-changing verbs. The verb rrilo “thinks” is explained in section §15.5. Section §15.6 explains how to form MODIFYING PHRASES.

Xiëru Zalo Ra Dizh

1. This Ra Dizh contains a number of new types of irregular verbs. You’ll learn about these in the lesson. Remember that stems other than the habitual are not listed in the vocabulary unless they are irregular. Similarly, pronunciations of stems other than the habitual are not included in a verb entry unless their vowel patterns are different from that of the habitual stem.

2. As you learned in Lecsyony Tsëbteby, possible subjects of a verb are indicated in parentheses after the verb definition, following “of”, as with

(You’ll learn more about verbs beginning with rr, like rrech, in section §15.2.) These two verbs tell about different types of things spilling:

Possible objects of a verb are shown in parentheses without the “of”, as with

This pair of verbs tells about someone spilling different types of things, as in

It may surprise you to learn that Zapotec has four verbs corresponding to English spill!

Many languages have quite different verbs used to say “puts on” or “takes off” or “wears” clothing, depending on the specific article of clothing. One such example is

The parentheses here tell you what items the verb can be used with, in sentences like

3. Certain verbs can only be used with plural subjects in some uses. This is true of the third meaning of rra, for example:

This type of information will always be included in verb entries in the Ra Dizh and Rata Ra Dizh.

_{Fot Teiby xte Lecsyony Tseiny (15). Sheep and bulls on a Tlacolula street returning from pasture at the end of the day. In the rear are two cali chiu taxis.}

§15.1. New irregular verbs with b and g bases

In Lecsyony Tsë, you learned about two verbs with extremely irregular irrealis stems, one of which was rbeb “rides (an animal); gets put on (something)”. The perfective of “rides”, wbeb, is formed regularly (for a verb whose base starts with b), but the irrealis stem, cweb, seems unexpected, since it does not contain the base consonant b at all. (All three stems have the same KC vowel pattern.)

If you look at the new vocabulary, you’ll see that it is not too uncommon for verbs whose base starts with b in the habitual to have irrealis stems beginning with cw. Rbeb is quite unusual, however, in that it has a regular perfective. Most verbs with habitual stems beginning with rb and irrealis stems beginning with cw have perfective stems beginning with bl. Here are some examples:

(Rbe “takes out” has a vowel-final stem, and works like those you studied in Lecsyony Tseiny (13). Its pronunciation with pronouns beginning with vowels is given in the Valley Zapotec Verb Charts.

Here are some examples of how these verbs are used:

As you learned in Lecsyony Tsëbteby, verbs like these are called BASE-CHANGING verbs, because their bases change in different stems. Rbez “waits for”, for example, has the base bez in the habitual, but the base lez in the perfective. It’s not clear what its base is in the irrealis, since it seems difficult to break up the stem cwez. With base-changing verbs, it’s often hard to break up the irrealis stem into a separate prefix and base.

Sometimes verbs with a habitual stem beginning with rb and an irrealis stem beginning with cw have a perfective beginning with br, not bl. Rbi “sits down” works like this:

Rbuzh and rbuzhya show that when the habitual stem of a verb like this starts with rbu, the irrealis stem starts with cu. Here are some examples:

The following verbs illustrate another pattern. Like rbez, they have perfective stems beginning with bl; like rbuzh, they have irrealis stems beginning with cu. But in the habitual, these verbs start with rg:

Here are some examples:

The new verb rgu raises a special spelling issue. You’d expect that with bound subject pronouns we’d get

But according to our spelling rules, the verbs in these examples don’t contain a u sound – gu is simply how we spell the sound [g] before an i or an ë. However, these verbs all have a u sound before the pronoun. The spellings above are not correct, then. (Remember, < >’s enclose a form that might be expected, but that is not correct.)

For this reason, we spell these verbs rgu-i, rgu-ëng, rgu-ëb, rgu-ëm, and rgu-ën, with hyphens indicating that the u and following vowel are in separate syllables, as follows:

You don’t need to write this hyphen in the corresponding forms of the perfective or irrealis of rgu, since they do not have a base ending in gu. (The hyphen always indicates a break between two syllables in a pronunciation guide, as you learned in §4.2 and Lecsyony Tseiny (13). Normally we don’t write hyphens in ordinary spelling, but any time you have a verb whose stem ends in gu, you’ll need to write a hyphen before any bound pronoun or other ending that begins with i or ë. There are not too many verbs like this, however.)

In Lecsyony Tsëbteby, you learned about another type of irregular verb that started with rg in the habitual stem and with c or qu (a k sound) in the irrealis. This is one of the most common types of irregular verb in Zapotec, but there are other variations, as in

Rguied “pierces” has two perfective forms. The second (but less common), bdied, follows the same pattern as the verbs in Lecsyony Tsëbteby. The first, more common perfective form, however, has a different change in the first consonant and vowel of its base, to zu, bzuad. Rgyet “plays” works the same way.

§15.2. Regular bases beginning with r

Several new verbs in the vocabulary have pronunciation changes, but really don’t have different bases in different stems. These are verbs whose bases begin with r, like the following:

These verbs form their stems regularly (so perfective and irrealis stems are not listed in their vocabulary entries). The perfective stems of these verbs begin with br, and their irrealis stems begin with yr. What is unusual about these verbs is that their habitual stems begin with the habitual prefix r- plus the base consonant r, producing the trilled double rr sound. Thus, the pronunciation of the base changes from rr in the habitual to r in the other stems, but the habitual still contains the regular prefix r- added to a regular base.

Of course, you need to pay attention to the way verbs with vowel-final stems combine with pronouns beginning with vowels. All the forms of the new verbs rra and rria are given in the Valley Zapotec Verb Charts. Something you haven’t seen before happens with distal subjects of rria, as in

(Briei is pronounced [bri’èi’].) You’d think that adding the bound pronoun -i to the stem rria would produce <rriai.>. However, any time you would expect the sound sequence <iai>, what you actually get is iei. An a between two i‘s is always pronounced as e in Valley Zapotec.

Here’s another similar case: in the verb “appears”, a base beginning with r alternates with a base beginning with d, and only the d base is used in the irrealis:

Here are some examples of how the new verbs are used:

§15.3. Irregular bases beginning with d and r

In Lecsyony Tsë, you learned two verbs with irregular irrealis stems, rdily “fights someone” and rdeidy “crosses”. The perfective of these verbs, bdily and bdeidy, are regular, but their irrealis forms, tily and teidy, are not. Here’s another verb that works the same way:

Here are some examples using these verbs:

Now, here are two other verbs that have irregular irrealis stems beginning with t (or, actually, with ty).

These verbs have bases that start with r. Their perfective stems are regular (bro “grew”, bruan “abandoned”), but their irrealis stems start with ty, as in

_{Fot Tyop xte Lecsyony Tseiny (15). Lambs in a yard in San Lucas.}

§15.4. Types of base-changing verbs

The table at the end of this section summarizes the most important types of Zapotec base-changing verbs whose bases begin with consonants. (You’ll learn more about vowel-initial bases, some of which are base-changing, in Lecsyony Tseinyabteby.) The table shows the habitual, perfective, and irrealis stems of these verbs. The regular verbs in the chart use the same base in all forms. The other verbs are base-changing verbs. In most cases, their perfective base is different from their habitual base, and their irrealis stem is a combination of prefix and base.

All verb bases use the habitual prefix r-, and all verbs whose bases start with consonants and are not base-changing use the irrealis prefix y-. The table shows that base-changing verbs use the perfective prefix b- (although, as you know, regular verbs that are not base-changing that begin with b or n use w- or m- for their perfective prefixes). It’s important to learn the perfective stem of any verb whose base (in the habitual) starts with b, d, g, or r, however, because these are the ones that are most likely to change their bases in the perfective. Most of these base-changing verbs have irrealis stems that begin with c or qu, although there are a few with irrealis stems beginning with t or ty.

The table lists both regular and base-changing verbs according to their BASE CONSONANT, the first consonant of the base used in the habitual stem. We can call a verb whose base consonant is b a b-base verb. If the first consonant of that base changes to l, we can refer to the result as an l-base: this base is just the same as the b-base, except with l instead of b. With the irrealis stems whose base and prefix combine, things are a bit more complicated. Rbe “takes out” has the b-base be. The irrealis cwe is described in the table as having “cw plus b-base minus b“. This means that you start with the b-base, be, take away the b (leaving e), and add the cw prefix.

Some irregular verbs don’t follow the table. For example, rbeb “rides” works like a regular non-base-changing verb in the perfective wbeb, but has an irrealis stem cweb that looks as if it belongs to a base-changing verb. As you saw in section §15.1, rguied “pierces” and rgyet “plays” work like ‘”slaps” and “pays” in the irrealis, but have irregular perfectives with a base starting with zua (rguied can also be used with the expected d-base).

Studying Table 15.1 will help you understand the relationships between the stems of new verbs you learn, and will enable you to see which parts of the vocabulary entry of a new verb are most important to study.

In Lecsyony Tseinyabteby you’ll learn about one special type of vowel-initial D-BASE VERB that has a d-base in some forms.

§15.5. Rrilo

Rrilo (also pronounced rralo) means “thinks” or “thinks that”. It is normally used only in the habitual, even if you are talking about someone thinking in the past. You can put this verb together with a statement of what someone thinks or thought, as in

In the first sentence here, the subject of rrilo is mes; the subjects of rrilo in the next two sentences — the ones who are doing the thinking — are the bound pronouns -ëng “she” (proximate) and -a “I”. These sentences follow the following pattern:

(As you can see, there is no word corresponding to English that.)

There’s another way to express the same idea when the person doing the thinking is expressed with a pronoun, however, as shown in

In sentences like these, the person doing the thinking is expressed with a free pronoun. For this reason, sentences like these seem to have a structure more like English It seems to… that… sentences.

§15.6. Modifying phrases

Below are some examples of noun phrases followed by MODIFYING phrases:

Valley Zapotec modifying phrases are used with simple nouns or noun phrases to specify more clearly which noun is referred to in a given context, or to give more information about that noun. A modifying phrase follows a MODIFIED NOUN in the following pattern:

The noun or noun phrase to be modified comes first, followed by ni [nih], which usually corresponds to English “who”, “that”, or “which” (or may not be translated at all).  After that comes the rest of the phrase used to specify the noun, beginning with its verb, followed by the other words in that sentence. The modified noun can be either the subject or object of the verb in the modifying phrase.

Nouns with modifying phrases can be used as subjects or objects in longer sentences:

(Modifying phrases usually aren’t used after names or pronouns.)

Sometimes Zapotec modifying phrases can have two English translations:

This is somewhat similar to the way NOUN PHRASE — VERB — NOUN PHRASE sentences with focused noun phrases can have two meanings, as you saw in Lecsyony Xop:

You can think of verbs like rtaz “hit” as REVERSIBLE — usually, you can interchange the subject and the object of such verbs and still have a sentence that makes sense (although the meaning changes, of course!). Any time you have a reversible verb followed by only one noun phrase (no other noun phrase, no pronoun), two translations are possible. Thus, in buny ni btaz Gyeily, Buny btaz Gyeily, mna ni cuzh doctor, or Mna cuzh doctor, just one noun phrase (Gyeily or doctor) follows the verb, so the sentence or phrase could be used in two very different situations, with two very different meanings.

This kind of double meaning possibility doesn’t really bother Zapotec speakers. In a given context, usually it’s completely clear what a speaker means.