La serpiente-petate

Resumen

The story about the ‘mat-snake’, is from Ayutla Mixe oral tradition, and different versions were collected by the author Rodrigo Romero in 2005. It is about a young girl who is carried away and raised by the ‘mat-snakes’. The text presented here was told by Irene Galván, and was transcribed by Romero in collaboration with Adelaida Avelino Galván and Amalia Ramírez Antonio. The author explains that the Ayutla variant has been classified as belonging to the southern highland Mixe dialect area, although he notes that it may be that it should be classified as a separate Mixean language. Then he provides a brief description of the phonology, including the correspondences between the linguistic symbols and the practical alphabet, and of the basic inflectional morphology. Romero also provides the reader with a morphological analysis in Spanish and translations of the text into both Spanish and English.