TICHA: A digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec (Haverford College)
Ticha is an online, digital explorer for a corpus of Colonial Zapotec texts. Ticha allows users to access and explore many interlinked layers of these texts, including images of the original documents, transcriptions, translations into English and modern Spanish, linguistic analysis (including morphological interlinearization), and commentary. Ticha is innovative in bringing together data analzed in FLEx (Fieldworks Language Explorer) a system for lexical and grammatical analysis, with current TEI standards (Text Encoding Initiative) for paleographic and translational representations of texts. Ticha seeks to make this corpus of Colonial Zapotec texts accessible to scholars in diverse fields (including linguistics, anthropology, and history), Zapotec community members, and the general public.
Zapotec is an extensive language family indigenous to southern Mexico, which belongs to the larger Otomanguean family Today, there are over 50 different Zapotec languages (iso code zap) most of which are endangered. They are spoken primarily in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, by a total of approximately 425,000 people (INEGI 2010) within a much larger Zapotec ethnic community. Due to immigration, there are now Zapotec speakers in many other parts of Mexico and the United States. Dialectal divergence between Zapotec-speaking communities is extensive and complicated. Many varieties of Zapotec are mutually unintelligible with one another. The Zapotec language family is on par with the Romance language family in terms of time depth and diversity of member languages.
The variety of Zapotec presented in Ticha represents the Zapotec of the colonial period of Mexico (1521-1821). During this period, hundreds of documents were written in Zapotec, including religious materials, last wills and testaments, deeds, and letters. Many of these documents were written by native speakers for use by native speakers, such as local administrative texts. Other texts were written to be used by Spanish speaking priests and were likely created in collaboration with Spanish speakers.
