-:- a note on mazatec orthography -:-

Some people may find the title of the proposed book :: salviaspace - images from the heartspace of xca maria :: as a little strange in the spelling of what they would normally read as 'ska maria'. Similarly, some of the text of the poetry visible on this website which incorporates Mazatec words might look a bit different from what readers in the field may be used to. For example:

Nujun xca maria yun, Xca maria santa yun...

You speak, leaves of Maria You, holy leaves of Maria

This is simply because I have chosen to use the Mazatec orthography devised by linguist Carole Jamieson Capen who has worked with the Mazatec people in Chiquihuitlan for a number of years and whose orthography was ostensibly designed to accurately depict all the sounds of the Mazatec language using letter and sound correspondences that Mazatec people would already be familiar with from learning Spanish. Thus, Capen's orthography allows literacy and writing skills to be accessible to the Mazatec people in an instinctive way.

Previous writing systems (including the one that promotes the spelling ska maria) either required the learning of numerous counter-intuitive diacritic marks or failed to accurately represent all the sounds of the language, and as such was inaccessible to the Mazatec people who generally only receive instruction in Spanish - not Mazatec - literacy.

In reality, the 's' of 'ska maria' is to pronounced in a retroflex fashion, similar to the 's' sound of some dialects of Castilian Spanish (but different from English 's' and the Latin American 'z' sound). Mazatec distinguishes between normal 's' and retroflex 's' and as such in Capen's orthography, the latter sound is denoted by the letter 'x'. Hence xca maria. You might also see 'xuta chjine' rather than 'chota chine' to mean curandero or shaman.

If this seems counter-intuitive to you, then at least be assured that you're reading Mazatec words in a way that is accessible and intuitive to the native speakers of the language, and consider it to be a gesture of respect to those who act as the salvia divinorum plant and its many great traditions.

For examples of the diacritical orthography, see my earlier site on the Mazatec language, some pages of which use it and which I will eventually correct and transpose to Capen's superior orthography.