Week 2 Learning Experience--"a frog"

Language Learning

            I have decided to create a word bank from the vocabulary used in the ten poems of Terán’s Podcast.  I have printed the poems in English and Isthmus Zapotec and began creating lists of the words on the poetry sheets themselves.  It may seem redundant to list the words that are right there on the paper, but there is a learning process involved.  I only list each word once; if I’ve seen the word in another poem, I do not list it again.  I do take note of where words are repeated and in what position of the sentence.  I write the English translation next to the word if it is available.  Shook’s translations are not word for word.  He has translated the poems to be beautiful in the English language, as well.  If I cannot determine an English translation, I list the IZ word and fill in the blank English meaning later if I can find it.  I could try using other resources for word definitions, but for now, this is a fun way to find the meanings through the poetry translations.  It is like a word search puzzle, cross-referencing between the different poems to find meaning. 

At a later study time, I was excited to discover the meaning of a word I did not have an English translation for while reading an excerpt to a reference book online.  This is a small discovery, but important nonetheless.  Terán wrote a very short poem for children called “Bidxi” or “Frog.”  The English translation of this poem, however, does not give me a clue to the meaning of the word ti.  I was reading about accents in the reference book and ti was used as an example.  I recognized the mystery word immediately.  An unaccented ti is just an indefinite article, ‘a’ or ‘an’, and with an accent tí means ‘because.’  So, ti bidxiˈ just means ‘a frog’!  Even though this is such a small find, I will not easily forget the meaning of ti or tí.  Through this little lesson, I also learned that Isthmus Zapotec uses articles.  Here is the poem in IZ and English:

 1         Cachesa, cachesa                   Jump! Jump!

 2         ti bidxiˈ ludoo                         Frog skip the rope

 3         ti bidxiˈ ruangola                     Wide-mouth frog

 4         ti bidxiˈ nambóˈ                      Pot-bellied frog

 5         Latáˈ, lataguuyaˈ                    Come, come and see

 6         lataguuya oh,                          Come and see - look

 7         ti bidxiˈ luyaandi                     Bug-eyed frog

 8         cachese ludoo.                       Jump skip the rope

Can you see why I could not deduce the meaning of ti from the English translation?  There are a few other things that I can point out using this poem as an example.  According to the online reference book I used to learn about ti, the basic sentence structure of Isthmus Zapotec is verb-subject-object (VSO).  (By the way, I just ordered this dictionary from Amazon.com: Zapotec-English/English-Zapotec (Isthmus) Concise Dictionary by A. Scott Britton, 2003.)  In line 2, we can observe a SVO structure that reminds us of English.  This is poetry, however, and poetry breaks the rules for beauty.  The SVO word order in line 2 aligns ti bidxiˈ with lines 3 and 4 where the adjectives are following the noun.  I have not yet confirmed whether this is the norm or just poetic license.  This is all I’ll say for tonight.