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

by Victoria R. Bricker

  These are the only examples of bey or bei from Tekanto during the eighteenth century. However, in 1782,

  a town in the hinterland of Tekanto produced a document containing, in addition to the three instances of

  ley illustrated in (60a–c), nine instances of bey:

  (76a) bey bic he tene t u mascab ca yumil ti dios yanene

  ‘thus how I here, I am in the armor of our Lord who is God’ (KAN782A)

  (76b) bey bic tan ynu uyic bicil chiħy yn kohanil

  ‘thus how I am perceiving how strong my illness is’ (KAN782A)

  (76c) bey bic v mul tiallobe

  ‘thus how common it is’ (KAN782A)

  (76d) bey bic tan yn toh olal ca t i(n) kubah v hunil v solar

  ‘thus how happy I was when I delivered the document for the house plot’ (KAN782A)

  (76e) bey xan t u lacal hecex yn pakalobe

  ‘thus also, all those plantings of mine’ (KAN782A)

  (76f) bey ci bey ya bey abal v mul=tzentic u baob

  ‘thus sweets, thus sapotes, thus plums are what they collect to feed themselves’ (KAN782A)

  (76g) bey xan t in kubah hun pet solar ti

  ‘thus also, I delivered one house plot to him’ (KAN782A)

  (76h) bey xan t in kubah hun pet lum ti ynu ix mehen

  ‘thus also, I delivered one plot of land to my daughter’ (KAN782A)

  (76i)

  bey xan t in kubah hun pet lum ti yn mehen Gregorio Flota

  ‘thus also, I delivered one plot of land to my son, Gregorio Flota’ (KAN782A)

  Furthermore, neither bay nor lay was present in this document. In other words, the notary who wrote the

  document had apparently completely accepted the bey and ley spellings of these words.

  A similar pattern can be documented for Tekanto and its hinterland during the first two decades of

  the nineteenth century. Sentences containing examples of bey and bei (but not bay) appear in a document

  written in 1804:

  (77a) bey bic yn mul nun=ya y v nae

  ‘thus how I suffer with his house’ (KAN804A)

  (77b) bei ytzmal coot v pach t u lacal

  ‘Izamal is completely surrounded by a wall like this’ (KAN804A)

  416

  DEICTIC PARTICLES

  The five sentences in this document with ley are shown in (66a–e). Likewise a document written in 1808

  has, in addition to the four examples of ley illustrated in (67a–d), one example of bey:

  (78)

  bey tun hele la tune

  ‘thus, then, today then’ (TK808A)

  There are no examples of bay in this document.

  A document originating in Xoccħel in 1812 had, in addition to the four examples of ley shown in (69a–

  d), two examples of bey:

  (79a) bey xan Felipa Couoh cimen

  ‘thus also, Felipa Couoh, who is deceased’ (KAN812E)

  (79b) bey xan Pedro Couoh cimen xan

  ‘thus also, Pedro Couoh, who is also deceased’ (KAN812E)

  There are no examples of bay in this document either.

  Another document, this time originating in Tekanto in 1819, had one example of bey:

  (80)

  bey talajanilen lae

  ‘thus I have come’ (TK819C)

  The same document had five instances of ley (68a–e) and one of bay.

  From Yobain in the hinterland of Tekanto comes a document dated to 1825 with two instances of bey

  in the same sentence:

  (81a) bey bey bic ma inv ohel ɔibe

  ‘thus, as I do not know how to write like this’ (KAN825B)

  No examples of bay or ley occur in this document, but there is one example of leyli ... e:

  (81b) leyli v chucan in kax lae

  ‘now my forest is complete’ (KAN825B)

  Thus, in Tekanto and its hinterland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there

  were notaries who employed only ley and bey in the documents they wrote, but others also included lay

  and bay in their writings. Although both ley and bey appeared first in provenienced documents from Ebtun,

  no notaries in that town used them as consistently as some notaries did in Tekanto and nearby towns.

  The Xiu Chronicles or Libro de Probanzas (n.d.; Quezada and Okoshi Harada 2001) from the southern

  part of the modern state of Yucatan present a very different picture of what happened to lay and bay

  during the eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth. The 52 documents in this collection span

  the period from 1608 to 1817. According to Alfred M. Tozzer (1921:204), “[t]his collection contains petitions

  and evidences and decrees certifying the lordship of the heads of the Xiu family established near Oxkutz-

  cab.” As such, the Chronicles contain documents emanating from both Merida in the north and Oxkutzcab

  and its neighbors in the south.

  DEICTIC PARTICLES

  417

  The documents coming from Merida were attributed to bilingual men with Spanish surnames called

  ah tzol tħan ‘general interpreters,’ who must have been the ones who translated them from Spanish into

  Maya. In 1759, the first examples of ley and lei appeared in documents penned by Pedro Servera in Merida:

  (82a) lei t u men ca noh ahau

  ‘this because of our great ruler’ (XIU759B)

  (82b) y oklal ley u libroil pr...bansas

  ‘because this is the book of evidences’ (XIU759B)

  (82c) y ley peticion yan canala

  ‘with this peticion that is above’ (XIU759B)

  (82d) y t uy alah ca tacunchahac ti ley katancaloba t u lacal ley tziculob

  ‘and he said that these petitions and all these privileges should be protected’ (XIU759B)

  (82e) t u lacal ley tziculob v...ben u tacunchahalob ti y oklal ydalgoob

  ‘all these ancient privileges should be protected because they are nobles’ (XIU759B)

  (82f) ua ma chen ley u tial ...

  ‘if not only this for ...’ (XIU759B)

  There are no examples of lay or lai in this document, but there is one example of bay.

  The first examples of bey appeared in 1793 in a document for which Esteban de Castro served as gen-

  eral interpreter:

  (83a) ‘t u lacal ley ɔabilah payben tiob bey bic ydalgoobe

  ‘all these antecedent grants to them as nobles’ (XIU793B)

  (83b) bey t uy ala ca t u ɔa u firma

  ‘thus he said and certified’ (XIU793B)

  There are no examples of bay or lay in this document, but there are four examples of ley (including the one

  in [83a]):

  (84a) ti ley prov.a lae

  ‘in this province’ (XIU793B)

  (84b) ca tu ...llila ley u libroil provanzas y ley kata...cal yan tanilo[b]e

  ‘upon seeing this book of evidences and this petition that was before them’ (XIU793B)

  On the other hand, none of the documents in the Xiu Chronicles that were produced by notaries in

  Oxkutzcab and nearby towns contained examples of ley or bey. In every case, they used lay and bay or their

  variants, lai and bai. Obviously, the men who were responsible for producing official documents in Merida

  were using the forms of these initial deictic particles that were common in the northwestern corner of the

  peninsula as a standard while notaries in the south were still using the earlier forms.

  418

  DEICTIC PARTICLES

  The other large collection of Maya documents from the Puuc region —  the Hacienda Tabi papers —  is

  similarly deficient in examples of ley and bey. Only three documents in that collection have examples of ley.

  The earliest one, from Oxkutzcab, was written in 1772:

  (85a) lay u chun betah ley carta de benta lae

/>   ‘this is the reason he made this bill of sale’ (OX772-020A-B)

  (85b) ley t u men c u ɔabal ley carta de benta ti lae

  ‘this is because this bill of sale is given to him’ (OX772-015A-B)

  (85c) bicil ɔocan y etel u hunnil ley kax lae

  ‘how it ended with the document of this forest’ (OX772-018A-C)

  (85d) ley oklal mu ɔabac u carta de bentail ti

  ‘for this reason the bill of sale will not be given to him’ (OX772-013A-B)

  There are three examples of lay in this document (including the one in [85a]) and none of bey.

  The other two documents were written in 1791, one in Dzan and the other in Pustunich. The example

  in the Dzan document is given below:

  (86)

  ley lae h conic y oklal lahu ca kal peso taknil

  ‘as for this one, we sell it for 50 monetary coins’ (DZ791A-005A-C)

  There are also four examples of lay in this document, but none of bey.

  The document from Pustunich contains two examples of ley:

  (87a) ca t con v xetħel ley kax tie

  ‘that we might sell the piece of this forest to him’ (PS791A-008A-B)

  (87b) ley t u men c conic ti ua ti ɔule

  ‘this because if we sell it to this Spaniard’ (PS791A-010A-B)

  It also has three examples of lay (but none of bey).

  It seems that lay and bay persisted longer in the Puuc region than elsewhere in the Yucatan peninsula.

  This may be why láayliʔ ... eʔ has survived in this region and nowhere else (see 2.3. in Chapter 4).

  Thus, the history of the shift from lay to ley began in Ebtun in 1675. Then it moved westward, showing

  up for the first time in Tekanto in 1739, in Merida by 1759, and in Dzan in the south by 1772. The shift from

  bay to bey followed a similar course, perhaps spurred on by the gradual change from lay to ley. It began

  in Ebtun in 1711, moving to Tekanto by 1752, and to Merida by 1793. There are no examples of bey in the

  most recent documents I have from the Puuc region (from Chapab and Pustunich), which are dated to

  1812 and 1813. The shift from bay to bey must have happened sometime between 1813 and 1971, when

  I recorded the following examples of b’eyoʔ and b’ey ... oʔ in a story about the Caste War recounted by a

  native speaker from Pencuyut in that region:

  (88a) ȼ’ u máan k’ìin b’eyoʔ ʔúučk e b’áʔalóʔob’ b’eyoʔ

  ‘time finished passing like that since those things happened like that’ (PEN971:7)

  DEICTIC PARTICLES

  419

  (88b) le káʔah ʔúučeʔ le le letíʔeʔ u b’isáʔalóʔob’ b’ey u tyáʔal séerbirsyo k uy áʔáláʔaloʔ

  ‘when it happened that they were recruited like that for what is called military service’ (PEN971:7)

  Although the general pattern is one of lay shifting to ley before bey began competing with bay in much

  of the peninsula, there is at least one town in which the shift occurred in the opposite direction. That town

  was Hocaba, which lies about 30 kilometers southwest of Tekanto, 45 kilometers southeast of Merida, and

  60 kilometers north of the Puuc region (Figure 1-1). The evidence comes from the book maintained by the

  cofradía in Hocaba between 1769 and 1784. The cofradía was a religious brotherhood or sodality that was

  responsible for carrying out rituals and festivals in honor of the patron saint of a community. It had its own

  agricultural land, from which it derived income. Expenses pertaining to the activities of the cofradía were

  recorded in this book and certified by notaries, thereby providing a detailed record of the use of lay, ley,

  bay, and bey over a period of ca. 15 years.

  The cofradía book is not in good condition, and portions of some pages are no longer legible. However,

  enough remains of the text and the names of the notaries to indicate that bey was well established as an

  alternative to bay some years before ley appeared as an alternative to lay in Hocaba.

  In all, 23 examples of bey are legible in the cofradía book (in every case in the expression, bey xan ‘thus

  also’): five each in 1770 and 1772, four in 1773, one in 1777, four in 1779, and four in an undated context.

  Examples from each of those years appear below:

  (89a) bey xan c in hahcunic ca pel ps

  ‘thus also, I verify two pesos’ (1770)

  (89b) bey xan c in hahcunic lay takin lae

  ‘thus also, I verify this money’ (1772)

  (89c) bey xan hun tumin t in manah taman

  ‘thus also, with one coin I bought cotton’ (1773)

  (89d) bey xan k ilah u taknil u kab ley cab lae 2 ps f

  ‘thus also, we saw the money for this honey: 2 pesos’ (1777)

  (89e) bey xan ca pel botijuela cab tin kubah

  ‘thus also, two small jars of honey that I delivered’ (1779)

  (89f) bey xan c in hahcunic buluc pis tumin yala takin lae

  ‘thus also, I verified eleven coins is the rest of this money’ (undated)

  (89d) is of special interest because it contains examples of both bey and ley dated to 1777. The first

  examples of ley appeared in 1776, six years after the first appearance of bey in the cofradía book:

  (90a) c in hahcuntic ley v takin ca yum Anipros lae

  ‘I verify this money of our father Ambrose’ (1776)

  (90b) ley ɔiban ychil libro lae

  ‘this is written in the book’ (1776)

  420

  DEICTIC PARTICLES

  Six examples of ley are documented for 1777 and five for 1779, of which the following are representative:

  (90c) ley tun yn yum cura Dn Antto Ramon lae

  ‘this then, my father curate Don Antonio Ramon’ (1777)

  (90d) ley bin ylac t u kinil t u tanil mayordomosob ley lae

  ‘this will be seen on the day before the stewards, who are these’ (1779)

  There was no turnover in the members of the cofradía whose names are mentioned in the book, nor in

  the notaries who certified them, suggesting that bey really did appear before ley.

  On the other hand, although ley also appeared for the first time in 1776 in a series of documents span-

  ning the years 1744 to 1789 from Tahmek, a town only six kilometers north of Hocaba (Figure 1-1), bey is

  not attested at all in the 13 dated documents from that town. There is one document in the collection that

  has three instances of bey; whether it was contemporaneous with the others or was produced later in time

  cannot be ascertained because it is undated. The spotty distribution of ley and bey in towns that were (and

  still are) only a few kilometers apart and within easy walking distance of each other is evidence that the

  spread of the /e/-medial forms of these deictics during those decades was not uniform and that they were

  not readily accepted either within or between neighboring towns.

  The shift of way to wey in Hocaba seems to be a more recent development because, as of the 1990s,

  when I and my co-authors were still working on our dictionary, wey was simply an occasional variant of way

  (V. Bricker et al. 1998:84, 118, 153, 180, 301). It is, nevertheless, the last of the three initial deictics in which

  the medial vowel /a/ preceding /y/ is being raised to /e/.

  Thus, the shift from lay to ley, bay to bey, and way to wey involves two vowels, ai or ay, becoming ei or

  ey. In this context, low vowel /a/ is raised to a mid front vowel [e]. This raising can be viewed as a type of

  vowel assimilation, because the derived vowel [e] becomes a front vowel like /i/, a high front vowel.5

  2.4.2. RETENTION OF /L/ IN TERMINAL DEICTICS THAT IMMEDIATELY FOLLOW INITIAL DEICTICS ENDING

/>   IN A LARYNGEAL CONSONANT. The Calepino de Motul contains evidence that lay and lai are variants of the

  initial deictic la:

  (91)

  la bin a cħab la

  ‘this is what you will take’ (Ciudad Real 1600?:fol. 255v)

  la survives today in laʔ loʔ ‘the’ in Itsaj (Hofling and Tesucún 1997:405) and in laʔ eh ‘that one’ in San Quintin

  Lacandon (Canger 1995), suggesting that it was phonetic [laʔ] in Colonial Yucatec. It is therefore likely that,

  because le is historically derived from la, it also ended in a glottal stop: [leʔ].

  Although, in order to reduce the consonant clusters resulting from placing the proximal and distal ter-

  minal deictics, la and lo (phonetic [laʔ] and [loʔ]), after words ending in consonants, the initial /l/ consonant

  in these deictics was gradually eliminated over time (cf. 1.3. above), there is one set of contexts in which

  it has been retained in Modern Yucatec, namely when the terminal deictics immediately follow an initial

  deictic ending in a laryngeal. In such cases, the consonant clusters resulting from the concatenation of ini-

  tial with terminal deictics are handled in one of two ways: (1) by inserting a copy of the vowel in the initial

  deictic between the two consonants (e.g., [92a–b] below) or (2) by deleting the laryngeal consonant at the

  end of the initial deictic (e.g., [92c–d] below). The example sentences documenting these adjustments in

  Modern Yucatec already given in this chapter are flagged by number in the fourth column of (92a–d):

  DEICTIC PARTICLES

  421

  Input

  Output

  Gloss

  Examples

  (92a) heʔ laʔ

  héʔe laʔ

  here it is

  (29b)

  heʔ loʔ

  héʔe loʔ

  there it is

  (29c)

  (92b) téʔ laʔ

  téʔe laʔ

  right here, here

  (34b)

  téʔ loʔ

  téʔe loʔ

  there

  (34d)

  (92c) leʔ laʔ

  le_ laʔ

  this one

  (31a)

  leʔ loʔ

  le_ loʔ

  that one

  (31c)

  (92d) toʔ loʔ

  to_ loʔ

  (out) there

  (36b)

  When the initial deictic does not end in a laryngeal, /l/ is deleted, thus: