A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan (1557-2000)

by Victoria R. Bricker

  language.

  The second was my first student, Philip C. Thompson, who offered to let me use his microfilms con-

  taining 512 Colonial Maya documents from the town of Tekanto in my teaching and research (he was

  interested in the cultural, not the linguistic, contents of those documents, which left me free to make

  whatever linguistic use of them I wished). I appreciate his generosity in making this wonderful collection

  of documents available to me.

  The third was Eleuterio Poʔot Yah, originally of Hocaba, Yucatan, who taught me and my students his

  dialect of the Modern spoken language and who persuaded me to collaborate with him on a dictionary of

  his language, from which I have drawn many examples for comparison with the grammar of its Colonial

  predecessor. I am grateful to him for sharing his language with me and for the many hours he devoted to

  bring the dictionary to fruition.

  The fourth was my colleague in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane, Olanike Ola Orie, who

  guided me in the phonological analysis of Colonial Maya and other grammatical topics covered in this

  book. I appreciate her willingness to become so involved in a language so far removed, in both space and

  time, from her own linguistic specialities.

  A number of the anthropology graduate students at Tulane made the initial transcriptions of the hun-

  dreds of Colonial documents on which this study is based. Craig A. Hanson was the first to help me in this

  way. He transcribed the Maya documents in the Hacienda Tabi papers in the Latin American Library at

  Tulane. The many documents from Tekanto were transcribed by a number of graduate student research

  assistants over the years: James Dugan, Rebecca Hays, Rebecca E. Hill, Katrina Kubicek, Christopher N.

  Nichols, Masaki Noguchi, Dan Stauber, Christopher von Nagy, and Zonghua Wu. And Timothy W. Knowlton

  transcribed a set of documents from Ixil. I appreciate their efforts on behalf of this project.

  Upon learning of my interest in Maya documents, several colleagues supplied facsimile copies that

  filled lacunae in my database, including Mark Christensen, Don E. Dumond, William F. Hanks, and Paul Sulli-

  van. So also did former Tulane students, such as Rani Alexander, John Chuchiak, and Stacy Schwartzkopf. I

  am grateful to them for helping me in this way.

  In the Latin American Library at Tulane University, three Directors —  Marjorie Le Doux, Guillermo

  Nañez, and Hortensia Calvo —  facilitated my access to the Maya documents in their Special Collections, and

  the librarians responsible for those collections —  David Dressing and Christine Hernandez —  supported my

  research by providing facsimile copies of the documents that were most relevant for my investigations.

  I am grateful to them for their contribution to the success of my project.

  I also appreciate the cooperation I received from Greg Finnegan, the Reference Librarian at the Tozzer

  Library at Harvard University, where I spent two weeks during the summer of 2004, working with that

  Preface xxi

  Library’s copy of the Titles of Ebtun. I am grateful to Tom Reese, Director of Tulane’s Center for Latin Amer-

  ican Studies, for defraying my transportation expenses in connection with that visit, and to Nan Vogt, for

  her hospitality during the weeks I spent in the Tozzer Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  While I was in graduate school at Harvard, I had learned the value of concordances for organizing

  numerous texts for analysis. As the number of Maya documents in my database increased, I soon real-

  ized that concordances could be equally useful for identifying grammatical patterns in a language, and I

  enlisted the help of William R. Ringle, then a Tulane graduate student and now Professor of Anthropology

  at Davidson College, to write a concordancing program for this purpose. His first program was designed

  for Tulane’s DEC mainframe computer. His second, in the SNOBOL language, could run on a desktop com-

  puter. The concordances produced by his programs were invaluable for my grammatical research, and

  I am grateful to Bill for producing such a useful tool for this project.

  Some time after I had begun the analysis of my data, I realized that it behooved me to spend some time

  familiarizing myself with the largest of the sixteenth-century Maya- Spanish dictionaries, the Calepino de

  Motul. Because a dictionary is not the kind of work that one can read from cover to cover, I decided that the

  best way to ensure that I had read every word in it was to translate all the Maya entries and example sen-

  tences into English and to distribute the example sentences under all the head words contained in them.

  To this end, I asked Adrienne Tremblay to scan all the pages in Ramón Arzápalo Marín’s (1995) edition of

  the Calepino with an OCR program. I then replaced all the Spanish glosses on each page with my English

  translation of the Maya entries and example sentences. This task took me four years, at the end of which

  I could truthfully say that I had read every word in the dictionary and assigned the example sentences to

  the main entries contained in them. I appreciate the care with which Adrienne scanned the pages of the

  Calepino and made sure that the special characters in them came through.

  When David Bolles learned of the work I was doing with the Calepino de Motul, he sent me a copy of

  his searchable, digital transcription of this dictionary, which he thought would be useful for specifying the

  pages in the original manuscript from which my example sentences would be drawn. It made the task of

  proofreading the example sentences against a facsimile copy of the original Calepino much easier, and I

  am grateful to him for anticipating this need.

  Over the years, a number of colleagues have provided insights on comparative Mayan grammar,

  beginning with Thom Smith-Stark in the 1970s and William N. Norman in the early 1980s. More recently,

  John S. Justeson, Terrence Kaufman, Katherine Langan, Judith Maxwell, and Marc Zender have shared their

  knowledge of Mayan languages with me, Yoshiho Yasugi enlightened me about the structure of focused

  constructions in Colonial Maya grammar, and Alfonso Lacadena suggested a better arrangement of the

  chapters of this book. I appreciate the willingness of all these scholars to respond to my questions and

  clarify points of grammar with which I was not familiar.

  Ema Uhu de Pech, who replaced Eleuterio Poʔot Yah in teaching Spoken Yucatecan Maya at Tulane

  after his death, patiently responded to questions intended to reveal phonological continuities and changes

  between her dialect and Colonial Yucatec. I am indebted to her for making it possible for such information

  to be included in this historical grammar.

  Finally, I am grateful to Patrick L. Hadley and Rebecca L. Rauch at the University of Utah Press for their

  efforts to facilitate the production of this book.

  CHAPTER 1

  INTRODUCTION

  In this work, I present a historical grammar of the Maya language of the Yucatan peninsula, based on an

  analysis of provenienced documents written in the Latin alphabet. Maya is second only to Nahuatl among

  Native American languages in the number of written texts that have survived from the Colonial period and

  later and in the diversity of genres recorded by native scribes in their language.

  1. Terminology

  “Maya” is the name that the present-day descendants of the original inhabitants of the peninsula use in


  referring to their language. Some historical linguists (e.g., McQuown 1967) find it useful to distinguish

  between two varieties of this language, which they call Classical Yucatec and Modern Yucatec. However,

  as Ortwin Smailus (1989:1) points out, the term “Classical Yucatec” is valid only for the variety of Maya

  that was spoken before 1545, when the Spanish conquest of the peninsula was completed; by the 1570s,

  when the first bilingual dictionaries were being compiled, there were already many Spanish loans in Maya.

  He prefers to refer to the earlier variety as Colonial Yucatec Maya, presumably encompassing the years

  1545 to 1821, when the Colonial period ended. Although I have followed Smailus in referring to the earlier

  variety as Colonial Yucatec, I have singled out the language of the sixteenth century for special attention as

  a benchmark for historical comparison and have traced the changes it underwent during the seventeenth,

  eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. “Modern Yucatec” refers to the Maya language as it is spoken today.

  Practically speaking, “today” means the period after 1930, when the first audio recordings of the language

  were made (McQuown 1979:41).

  2. SOURCES

  For the early Colonial period, the most comprehensive source on the language was a Maya-Spanish

  dictionary known as the Calepino de Motul, a manuscript consisting of 465 folios that has been attributed to

  fray (friar) Antonio de Ciudad Real, a Spanish Franciscan priest who arrived in Yucatan in 1572 (Acuña 1984:

  xxvi–xxvii, 2001:19; Hanks 2010:164–165). A reference to the comet of 1577 on folio 58v of the Calepino

  implies that the extant version of the manuscript was compiled after that year (Ciudad Real 1600?), and the

  death of Ciudad Real on 5 July 1617 serves as a terminus ante quem for his project. The recent grammars

  of the sixteenth-century version of the language by McQuown (1967) and Smailus (1989) are heavily based

  on the Calepino de Motul.1 In addition, there are ca. 20 provenienced documents covering the period from

  1557 to 1600. To my knowledge, no one has considered the provenienced documents as sources of gram-

  matical information on Colonial Yucatec.

  1

  2 INTRODUCTION

  In the seventeenth century, a grammar attributed to friar Juan de Coronel was published in 1620, and

  a later grammar by friar Gabriel de San Buenaventura was published in 1684. A dictionary associated with

  a Diego Rejón probably dates to the second half of this century (Barrera Vásquez et al. 1980:21a-24a; but

  see Acuña 1993:22). I have in my possession 52 documents of seventeenth-century date.

  During the eighteenth century, friar Pedro Beltrán de Santa Rosa María published a detailed gram-

  mar of Maya in 1746. The number of legal documents increases dramatically during that century to 646

  in all. High concentrations of wills during 1727–1728, 1730, 1733, 1738, and 1751 correspond to years of

  epidemics and famines (V. Bricker and Hill 2009; Restall 1997:246–247). The Bourbon Reforms in the late

  eighteenth century generated a plethora of documents that ultimately resulted in the transfer of owner-

  ship of land from Indian into Spanish hands (Farriss 1984:366–375). Every decade in that century is repre-

  sented by two or more documents, and there are documents for every year between 1725 and 1743.

  The first five decades of the nineteenth century are also well represented by more than 150 prove-

  nienced documents. In the 1830s and 1840s, they are largely concerned with economic and political events

  leading up to the Caste War of 1847. Between 1847 and 1853, the Maya documents are preoccupied with

  troop movements, the unsuccessful attempts to broker a peace, and the development of the Cult of the

  Talking Cross in what is today the state of Quintana Roo. After 1860, the number of Maya documents

  dwindles to almost nothing. I have one document for the 1890s.

  The documentary record resumes only in the 1930s, with 19 letters written by descendants of the rebel

  Maya, living in what is today the state of Quintana Roo, addressed to the archaeologist, Sylvanus G. Morley,

  who was working at Chichen Itza at the time (Sullivan 1989). During the same decade, Manuel J. Andrade

  initiated the modern period of the study of Maya grammar by making the first sound recordings of the

  spoken language on aluminum disks (McQuown 1979:41).

  I have focused on provenienced documents in this discussion of sources because I believe that they

  have the greatest potential for tracking decade-by-decade changes in the Maya language. Because we

  know when and where they were produced, they can provide us with a chronology for dating unprove-

  nienced documents and with distributional data for identifying geographical dialects.

  Dictionaries, grammars, and legal documents are in a sense hybrid sources, involving an interface

  between the Maya and Spanish cultures and languages. Dictionaries are conditioned by the elicitation

  procedures of the lexicographers, which we know were based on a detailed questionnaire used for many

  Mesoamerican languages, which often forced Maya cultural concepts into a European mold (Hanks 2010;

  Laughlin and Haviland 1988:1–27). Grammars, too, were ethnocentric, applying Latin paradigmatic struc-

  tures (and strictures) to Maya data. Legal documents, although actually produced by Maya scribes, imi-

  tated Spanish discourse models and were highly formulaic in Europeanized ways.

  In addition to these sources, there were also the so-called Books of Chilam Balam, a set of related

  manuscripts that were largely written in Maya. There are nine such Books still in existence, the ones from

  Chumayel, Tizimin, Mani (also known as the Códice Pérez), Kaua, Tekax, Tusik, Chan Kan, Ixil, and the Nah,

  which is named after a person, not a place. The Chumayel, the Tizimin, and the Tusik are primarily historical

  and prophetic works. The Kaua, Chan Kan, and Mani are largely astrological in content, and the rest focus

  on medicine (as does the second half of the Kaua) (Miram 1994:213, Table 1).

  Some scholars regard these Books as major sources on Precolumbian Maya culture, unlike the legal

  documents considered above, which were clearly produced to serve a Colonial purpose. However, much

  of the content of the Books of Chilam Balam is of European origin, and many of the texts are demonstra-

  bly Maya translations of Spanish sources (V. Bricker and Miram 2002; Hanks 2010; Knowlton 2010). In this

  respect, the Books of Chilam Balam are just as problematical as the dictionaries, grammars, and legal

  docu ments that were also affected by Spanish culture.

  INTRODUCTION 3

  The Books of Chilam Balam are all late Colonial copies of earlier manuscripts, and even though some

  of the Maya texts in them may ultimately be of Prehispanic origin, this does not mean that the variety of

  the language represented in them is similarly archaic (e.g., 2.4.1. and note 3 in Chapter 15). Furthermore,

  because the temporal provenience of the texts from which they were copied is usually not mentioned,

  they cannot be used for an examination of grammatical changes in the language over time. Instead, they

  became useful for fleshing out the historical record after the basic patterns of pronominal and aspec-

  tual inflection of verbs had been detected in documents whose temporal provenience was not in doubt

  (e.g., 5.2. in Chapter 5).

  There are, of course, many dialects of Modern Yucatec, only a few of which have been documented

  in
detail. In the 1930s, Manuel Andrade (1940) carried out the first research on Maya using modern tech-

  niques, including the recording of texts on aluminum discs (see McQuown 1979 for a transcription, analy-

  sis, and translation of one of those texts). The next significant research on Maya was that of Robert Blair

  (1964), who produced a description of noun and verb morpho-syntax and a three-volume textbook (Blair

  and Vermont-Salas 1965, 1967, 1993) and associated reels of magnetic tape. He was followed by Michael

  Owen (1969), whose dissertation on the semantic structure of verb roots and a small root dictionary (1971)

  have also been useful, as has the dissertation of Marlys McClaran Stefflre (1972) on lexical and syntactic

  structures. More recently, the work of William Hanks (1990) on deixis, John Lucy (1992, 1993) on numeral

  classifiers and quotative particles, and Yoshiho Yasugi (2005) on adverbial focused constructions has

  informed my understanding of Yucatecan Maya grammar.

  In 1967, Marshall Durbin, my predecessor at Tulane, decided to teach a course in Spoken Yucatecan

  Maya, with the assistance of Eleuterio Poʔot Yah, a native speaker of Maya from the town of Hocaba near

  Merida. Durbin worked with Poʔot Yah for a number of years on a root-and-stem dictionary of this dialect.

  His research resulted in the publication of several articles (Durbin 1970, 1973; Durbin and Ojeda 1978a,

  1978b, 1982), but the dictionary was never completed.

  Durbin left Tulane in 1969, and I replaced him as the instructor of the Maya language course. Poʔot Yah

  continued to come to Tulane to assist with the course, and he and I worked together on the grammar of his

  dialect, publishing a series of articles (V. Bricker 1970, 1978, 1979a, 1979b, 1981, 1999).

  Durbin eventually gave up his plan to publish a dictionary, leaving us free to produce, first, a small

  book on verbs for use by the students in our course and interested scholars (Poʔot Yah and V. Bricker 1981)

  and, more recently, a root-and-stem dictionary of the Hocaba dialect of Modern Yucatec accompanied

  by a grammatical sketch (V. Bricker, Poʔot Yah, and Dzul de Poʔot 1998). This work serves as my point of

  reference for Modern Yucatec and the source of the phonetic spellings of the examples in the chapters