that follow.
3. METHODOLOGY
3.1. PALAEOGRAPHY. The legal documents and native books that served as the principal sources for this
study were written in various hands by Maya scribes with different educational backgrounds. Some of
them were clearly well trained in calligraphy and spelling. Others seem to have had a more rudimentary
education. Accordingly, there is considerable variation in the spelling of both Maya and Spanish words in
the manuscripts.
In transcribing the texts on which this work is based, I decided to preserve the original spelling as
much as possible. My decision was influenced by an experience I had many years ago, in the mid 1960s,
when I was training native speakers of Tzotzil in Zinacantán, Chiapas, to write texts in their language. For
4
INTRODUCTION
that purpose, I introduced them to a phonemic alphabet that members of the Harvard Project with which
I was then affiliated had developed for writing Tzotzil. Most of the Zinacantecs who were learning to write
Tzotzil understood immediately the need to use a consistent orthography and system of word division for
representing utterances in their language. However, a few did not grasp the principle of the phoneme and
continued to represent the allophones of a single phoneme with different letters.
A case in point was the Tzotzil bilabial ejective, which has two allophones [b’] and [ʔm]. In intervocalic
position, this consonant is realized as [b’], as in [čob’in], ‘take possession of planted cornfield.’ However,
when it appears at the end of an utterance or is followed by another consonant, it is pronounced as [ʔm]:
[čoʔm] ‘planted cornfield’ and [čoʔmtik] ‘region of planted cornfields’ (Laughlin 1975:122). Most of the
Zinacantecs I trained used /b’/ in all environments: /čob’, čob’in, čob’tik/. However, a few always distin-
guished between “čob’in,” on the one hand, and “čoʔm” and “čoʔmtik,” on the other.
In preparing texts for concordances, there is obviously an advantage in using canonical spellings for
roots and affixes, because only in that way will all instances of a single morpheme be brought together in
an alphabetical list. However, canonical spellings do not preserve phonological distinctions of the kind I
have described for the Tzotzil word for ‘planted cornfield.’ Because my ultimate goal in producing the con-
cordances was to use them for a grammatical rather than a strictly content or context analysis, I resisted
the temptation to regularize the spellings of the words that I encountered in the manuscripts, choosing,
instead, to preserve the original spellings as faithfully as possible, even when I was virtually certain that
they were not correct. Later, when it came time to analyze the phonological structure of the language, the
discrepant spellings proved to be very helpful sources of information on such phonological processes as
assimilation, metathesis, deletion, and epenthesis.
3.2. CONCORDANCES. My concordances differ from those of other scholars (e.g., Arzápalo Marín 1987;
H.-M. Miram and W. Miram 1988; Owen 1970a, 1970b) in the sense that they focus on the morpheme rather
than the word as the unit of analysis. After transcribing the texts, I separated the morphemes in the words
with hyphens. Each word is separated from the one preceding or following it by a space. I then used a pro-
gram written in the SNOBOL language by William R. Ringle for producing an alphabetized concordance of
all the morphemes in the texts. My concordances include every morpheme, even those of very high text
frequency, which have been excluded from other concordances of Maya manuscripts in order to reduce
their length (Arzápalo Marín 1987 is an exception). Because most of the high frequency morphemes have
multiple grammatical functions, the concordances would have been much less useful for my purposes had
I excluded them.
The first concordances I produced were based on the Books of Chilam Balam of Chumayel and Tizimin
(V. Bricker 1990a, 1990b) in connection with my study of the grammar of Maya hieroglyphs (V. Bricker
1986). Since then, I have prepared separate concordances for each century of the Colonial period, as well
as concordances of documents from individual towns. The latter have permitted me to track grammatical
changes in space as well as time.
The western part of the peninsula is better represented in my sample than the east (Figure 1-1). For
the northwest, I have 512 documents from the town of Tekanto, covering the period 1590–1835. The Puuc
region is attested by two collections, one from the Hacienda Tabi (52 documents) and the other known
as the Xiu Chronicles (39 documents; Quezada and Okoshi Harada 2001). Together they span the years
1557–1830. In the east, near Valladolid, the Titles of Ebtun are an important source of information for the
years 1600 to 1835 (125 documents; Roys 1939). The southeast is represented only for the late eighteenth
century by seven documents from Chunhuhub.
3.3. DATING GRAMMATICAL CHANGES IN THE WRITTEN RECORD. A significant problem for assigning dates
to the first appearance of grammatical changes in the written record is how to distinguish original docu-
INTRODUCTION 5
Figure 1-1. Location of Towns that Provided Maya Examples Quoted or Mentioned in the Grammatical Analysis When
Known. Roads Shown on the Map Are Among Those of the Late Twentieth Century.
ments from later copies bearing early dates but altered in some ways. The documents in the Tabi collection
were helpful in this regard because they include both originals and copies of the same documents, whose
handwriting conventions varied by century. In some cases, the documents contained a series of dated
postscripts in different hands, suggesting that they were added at different times. In others, the text and
its postscripts were in the same hand, indicating that the document in question was a later copy. The same
criteria were used for distinguishing between originals and copies in the Titles of Ebtun.
Another way of approaching the question is in terms of where a document appears in a collection. If it
is a testament in a dense group of such documents, then it is likely to be an original. The 373 testaments
bearing dates from the first half of the eighteenth century in Tekanto were clearly originals because they
appeared together in chronological order, and the handwriting changed whenever a new notary came into
office. On the other hand, a single testament filed with other documents in connection with a dispute over
land tenure that took place in a later year, but in the same handwriting as the later documents, is likely to
be a copy of an earlier document.
6
INTRODUCTION
Finally, there is the question of how closely the dates for the introduction of grammatical changes in
the written sources correspond to the dates when they first appeared in the spoken language. Because
what appears in the written record often has a more conservative grammatical structure than in speech,
it is probably best to regard the dates for the introduction of grammatical changes inferred from written
documents as a terminus ante quem for the spoken forms.
4. SCRIBES
Literacy has deep roots in the Yucatan peninsula, beginning as early as the third century AD and continu-
ing into modern times. Before the conquest of Yucatan by the Spaniards in 1545, the Maya recorded their
/>
language in a hieroglyphic script that contained a mixture of logographic, syllabic, and semantic signs.
The word for “scribe” was ah ɔib (= phonetic [ʔax ȼ’íib’]) in Colonial Yucatec, a title that also appeared in
hieroglyphic texts (Stuart 1987:1–8). The term continued to be used after the Conquest for the notary who
served in the local town government established by the Spaniards during the second half of the sixteenth
century, along with the Spanish term escribano (often abbreviated as ess.no). By the beginning of the seventeenth century, escribano had completely replaced ah ɔib as the title for this official.
The indigenous residents of Colonial Maya communities belonged to one of two strata: nobles
( almehenob) and commoners (maseualob). Thompson (1999:278–279, 407n55) has shown that scribes
came from both strata in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Tekanto. In a study of the large corpus
of 373 testaments dated to the first half of the eighteenth century, I discovered that the higher-ranking
scribes limited their output to the testaments of elite Maya who had significant amounts of property to
bequeath to their descendants, whereas the purely formulaic testaments of poor Maya were recorded by
commoner scribes (V. Bricker 2015).
Perhaps because of their long tradition of literacy, the Maya scribes of Yucatan rapidly adopted the
Latin-based alphabet introduced by the Spanish priests not long after the Conquest. The earliest known
document written in this alphabet was the Crónica de Mani, a land survey, which bears a date of 1557, only
twelve years after the Conquest.
The documents penned by many scribes suggest that they had been trained to use canonical spellings
of Maya words that were often not exact reflections of their actual pronunciation. A few scribes, however,
either because of poor training or a desire to record the spoken language more faithfully, departed from
the norm and recorded the language as it was actually spoken; their documents provide essential informa-
tion on the phonological processes that must have been in effect in Colonial times.
NOTE
1. There is strong evidence in the example sentences in the Calepino de Motul that it was compiled in
Merida or nearby. More than 80 example sentences in the Calepino refer to going to, coming from,
residing in, or, in a few cases, activities taking place in Conkal (cumkal), a town now a suburb of Merida,
suggesting that the region to the north and east of Merida accounts for the principal dialect of Colonial
Yucatec reported in the Calepino (Figure 1-1). In addition, there are references to Motul (mutul) in four
example sentences. The two sets of data suggest that the Calepino represents the dialect spoken in the
region northeast of Merida itself. In addition, a few entries in the Calepino refer to examples typical of
other dialects: “in the language of the coast,” “in the language of Campeche,” and “in the language of
Mani and Tekax.” They indicate that the Calepino contains examples of multiple dialects.
CHAPTER 2
ORTHOGRAPHY
Grammars of Modern Mayan languages, for which data can be obtained through elicitation and sound
recordings, frequently begin with a chapter on phonology (e.g., Andrade 1955; Attinasi 1973; Dayley 1985;
Edmonson 1988; England 1983; Hofling 2000), whereas a grammar documenting a language that is known
primarily from written sources must first address the orthographic conventions and their variations, as
well as their limitations, that may mask the phonological patterns that once characterized it. Only when
the relationship between the orthographic system and the phonetic segments in this language is well
understood will it be possible to specify the phonological rules that characterized the Colonial manifesta-
tion of this language and to determine how they are related to such rules in the modern spoken daughter
language(s), a task that has necessarily been postponed until Chapter 3.
1. PHONETIC SEGMENTS
Colonial Yucatec had 21 consonants and six vowels (a, e i, o, u, and schwa) (V. Bricker and Orie 2014). The
consonant system is shown in (1) using the modified International Phonetic Alphabet employed for writing
Modern Yucatec.
(1)
Labial
Alveolar
Palato-alveolar
Palatal
Velar
Laryngeal
Stops
p
t
k
ʔ
Ejectives
p’ b’
t’ ȼ’
č’
k’
Fricatives s
š
x h
Affricates
ȼ
č
Nasals
m n
Approximants w
l
y
2. ORTHOGRAPHIC CORRESPONDENCES
2.1. CONSONANTS. Beginning in the Colonial period, Maya scribes used a different orthography, based
on the Latin alphabet, that the Spanish priests had adapted for writing their language. Correspondences
between the letters of that alphabet and the phonemes of their language are given in (2):
7
8 ORTHOGRAPHY
(2)
Phongetic
Colonial
ʔ
ˊ or ˋ (on antecedent vowel), k, c, t
b’
b
ȼ
ɮ, tz
ȼ’
ɔ, dz
č
ch
č’
cħ
h
h, j
k
c, qu
k’
k, g
l l
m m
n n
p p
p’
p, pp, ƀ
s
ç, z, s
š x
t t
t’
tħ, th, d, đ
w
u, v
x
h, j
y
i, y, ll
Because Colonial Yucatec survives only in written form, it is not possible to describe the phonetic seg-
ments in detail. However, variations in spelling may serve as clues to pronunciation, as I show in Chapter 3.
The table in (1) suggests that stops and affricates can be grouped into two series: plain and glottalized.
Furthermore, the non-sonorant consonants are generally voiceless, except glottalized [b’], which does not
have a plain counterpart. There are two nasals ([m] and [n]) and two glides ([w] and [y]). [l] is the only pho-
nemic liquid.
Colonial Maya texts often include Spanish loans that required the use of seven additional letters, rep-
resenting three voiced stops (b, d, and g), a voiceless labiodental fricative (f), a palatalized nasal (ñ), a flap
(r), and a trill (rr). The voiced bilabial stop contrasts with the voiced bilabial ejective in Modern Yucatec, but
the same symbol (“b”) represented both consonants in Colonial Yucatec. [r] is an allophone of [l] in Modern
Yucatec, occupying the medial position in disyllabic roots; it varies freely with [l] in Spanish loans in both
Colonial and Modern Yucatec (see 2.1.5. below).
2.1.1. VELAR AND LARYNGEAL “H.” It should be noted that the Colonial Maya used “h” to represent both
velar [x] and laryngeal [h] at the beginning of words (see Kaufman 1983:210). The Calepino de Motul de-
scribes the velar “h” as “strong” (rezia) and the laryngeal “h” as “weak” (si
mple), characterizing the weak
“h” as one that is only lightly fricative and that is often lost after pronouns (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 202r),
and it groups words beginning with the two “h’s” separately. In medial and final positions, it represents
[x] with “h” and [h] with “Ø.” For example, the Calepino lists hun ‘one’ (phonetically [xun]) under words
beginning with strong “h” and huun ‘paper’ (phonetically [húʔun]) under words beginning with weak “h.”
Other ex amples of initial strong and weak “h” are listed in (3) and (4) below:
ORTHOGRAPHY
9
(3)
Strong “h”
Phonetic Spelling
Gloss
hach
xač
very
halach
xaláʔač
true
hanal xanal
eat
hat xat
burst
hay
xay
how many?
hel
xèel
replacement, successor
het xet
split
hex
xéʔeš
however
hij1
xiʔ
file
hicħ
xič’
tighten, knot
hil xíil
picket
hobón
xob’on
cavity
hoch
xoč
harvest maize
hool
xóʔol
head
hucħ
xuč’
grind
hup xup
insert
(4)
Weak “h”
Phonetic spelling
Gloss
haa
haʔ
water
haab
háʔab’
year
hacħ
hač’
chew
haaz
háʔas
banana
hé
heʔ
egg
hec
A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan (1557-2000) Page 4
