Event
Brook Danielle Lillehaugen (Swarthmore) will be the "Thursday Thoughts" speaker on February 25th.
Abstract: Endangered languages, modern philology, &
digital humanities:
a digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec
Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, Haverford College
based on joint work with
George Aaron Broadwell, University of Florida,
Michel R. Oudijk, Universidad Nacional Aut�noma de M�xico
Laurie Allen, University of Pennsylvania
Zapotec (Otomanguean), an indigenous language family of
Oaxaca, Mexico, has a long record of alphabetic texts, the
earliest dating to 1565 (Oudijk 2008). Interpreting these
colonial documents can be difficult because of the challenges of
early orthography, grammar, and printing conventions.� In
this talk I describe how linguistic knowedge and tools from the
digital humanities can be brought to bear on this corpus of
texts in order to facilitate the use of the historical material
by non-specialists. I describe the project Ticha: a digital
text explorer for Colonial Zapotec (Lillehaugen et al.
2015), which allows users to explore multiple layers of these
these texts, including images of the original documents,
transcriptions, translations into English and modern Spanish,
linguistic analysis, and commentary.
Access to these texts has consequences outside of the field of
linguistics, including history, in which indigenous Zapotec
writings have been largely ignored, apart from the work of a
small handful of ethnohistorians.� Moreover, this
historical corpus of texts exists alongside modern Zapotec
speaking communities, most of whom do not know that these texts
exist.� There is great value in having a
demonstrable written history, especially to speakers of a
language that is marginalized. For speakers of Zapotec who are
resisting language loss and discrimination, the fact that there
are historical written texts can serve as a point of
valorization, and the texts themselves can be important
instruments for language revitalization.
�
Works Cited
Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle,
George Aaron Broadwell, Michel R. Oudijk, & Laurie Allen.
2015. Ticha: a digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec,
first edition. Online: http://ticha.haverford.edu/
Oudijk, Michel R. 2008. El texto m�s antiguo en zapoteca. Tlalocan
15.227-40. M�xico, D.F.: UNAM.