Vocabulary Otomi

by Dik Bakker and Ewald Hekking  

The vocabulary contains 2558 meaning-word pairs ("entries") corresponding to core LWT meanings from the recipient language Otomi. The corresponding text chapter was published in the book Loanwords in the World's Languages. The language page Otomi contains a list of all loanwords arranged by donor languoid.

Word form LWT code Meaning Core list Borrowed status Source words

Field descriptions

Gloss

In the glosses of the analyzable words full forms were used with their translations in English. No abbreviations were used, either from the Leipzig set of glossing rules or other.

Age

In order to determine the age of a loanword the following criteria were used. We verified if the Spanish loanwords already were attested by Urbano in his Arte breve de la lengua Otomi y vocabulario trilingüe from 1605. And we asked several elder native speakers of Otomí if the Spanish loanwords were borrowed after around 1950 or if they already were used before that year. So we classified the loanwords in three groups:
a. Spanish words attested by Urbano
b. Pre-modern words borrowed before around 1950
c. Modern words borrowed after around 1950

Borrowed

According to the degree of probability that a specific word is a loanword, words might be classified in five types (0. no evidence for borrowing; 1. very little for borrowing; 2. perhaps borrowed; 3. probably borrowed; 4. clearly borrowed). Because of our familiarity with the Otomí language for most of the 1459 entries in the LWT vocabulary it was easy to determine if a word was a loanword or not, even for old loanwords such as anxe, ata, badu, xabo, xebo, etc., which are more adjusted to the phonological patterns of Otomí than the recent loanwords. So almost all the entries of our wordlist belong to type 0 (no evidence for borrowing) or type 4 (clearly borrowed).

Reference

Most of the observations stem from field work done by Hekking. The observations in the database have been checked intensively with several native speakers of Otomí.

Andrews, Henrietta
1993 The Function of Verb Prefixes in Southwestern Otomi. The Summer Institute of Linguistics and the
University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics 115: 128 pp. Dallas: Summer Institute of
Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.

Bartholomew, Doris
2000 Intercambio lingüístico entre Otomi y náhuatl. In: Estudios de cultura otopame 2, Yolanda Lastra
de Suárez, and Noemí Quezada (eds.), 189–201. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas.

Bartholomew, Doris
2004 Notas sobre la gramática. In: Luis Hernández Cruz, Moisés Victoria Torquemada, and Donaldo
Sinclair Crawford (eds.). Diccionario del Hñähñu (Otomi) del Valle del Mezquital (Hidalgo).
Vocabularios Indígenas, no. 45. México, D.F.: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Ecker, Lawrence
1952 Compendio de gramática otomí (introducción a un diccionario otomí-español), Anales del Instituto
Nacional de Antropología e Historia, tomo 4, no. 32. México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e
Historia.

Guerrero, Alonso
2002 El Códice Martín del Toro. De la oralidad y la escritura, una perspectiva Otomi. Siglos XV-XVII.
Tesis de Licenciatura en Etnohistoria. Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Hekking, Ewald
1995 El Otomi de Santiago M: Desplazamiento Linguïstico, Préstamos y Cambios Grammaticales. Amsterdam: Institute for Funtional Research into Language and Language Use.

Hekking, Ewald, and Dik Bakker
1998 Language shift and Spanish content and function words in Otomi. In: Bernard Caron (ed.) Actes du
16e Congres International des Linguistes. Oxford: Elsevier Sciences.

Hekking, Ewald, and Dik Bakker
1998 El Otomi y el español de Santiago Mexquititlán: Dos lenguas en contacto. Foro Hispánico 13,
Sociolingüística: Lenguas en Contacto, 45-74. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Hekking, Ewald, and Dik Bakker
2007. The case of Otomí: a contribution to grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective. In: Matras, Yaron, and Sakel, Jeanette (eds.) Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective, 435-464. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Hekking, Ewald, and Severiano Andrés de Jesús
1984 Gramática Otomi. Querétaro (México): Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro.

Hekking, Ewald, and Andrés de Jesús, Severiano
1989 Diccionario español-otomí de la comunidad de Santiago Mexquititlán. Querétaro (México): Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro.

Hekking, Ewald, and Severiano Andrés de Jesús (eds.)
2002 Ya 'bede ar hñäñho Nsantumuriya / Cuentos en el Otomi de Amealco. Querétaro (México): Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro.

Hekking, Ewald, and Severiano Andrés de Jesús
fc. He'mi Mpomuhñä ar Hñäñho ko ya Njat'i / Diccionario Explicativo Ilustrado del Otomi del Estado de Querétaro.

Lastra de Suárez, Yolanda
1989 Otomi de San Andrés Cuexcontitlán, estado de México. Archivo de las lenguas indígenas de México. México: El Colegio de México.

Lastra de Suárez, Yolanda
1992 El Otomi de Toluca. México, D.F.: Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, UNAM.

Lastra de Suárez, Yolanda
1994 Préstamos y alternancias de código en Otomi y en español. In: Carolyn Mackay, and Veronica Vazquez (eds.) Investigaciones Lingüísticas en Mesoamérica, 185-95. México: Universidad Autónoma de México.

Lastra de Suárez, Yolanda
1997 El Otomi de Ixtenco. México, D.F.: Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, UNAM.

Urbano, A.
[1605] 1990. Arte breve de la lengua Otomi y vocabulario trilingüe. R. Acuña (ed.). México D. F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Voigtlander, Katherine, and Artemisa Echegoyen
1985 Luces contemporáneas del Otomi: Gramática del Otomi de la sierra. México, D.F.: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.