A Dictionary of the Maya Language As Spoken in Hocaba, Yucatan (review)

Yucatec Maya is spoken by some 750,000 people in Mexico and Belize. In contrast to many other indigenous languages of the Americas, it is fairly well documented, both in its earlier and more recent stages. The present volume thus enters a fiercely competitive field of similar projects. What are its principal advantages or disadvantages?

Extant dictionaries of Yucatec, however meticulously compiled, suffer from a major shortcoming. Based on the work of colonial lexicographers who approached the language from the angle of Latin grammar, they invariably fail to do justice to its characteristic wealth of derivations. It is the main objective of the present volume to redress these deficiencies. Thus, the authors have taken pains to elicit all possible stems which can be traced to a given root.

Identifying such derivations, in itself no minor feat, would be a well-nigh interminable task if it were to be accomplished for all varieties of Yucatec. Hence, the attempt to cover the full range of grammatical forms available in the language had the unfortunate, if inevitable, consequence that only a single dialect could be taken into account. For various reasons, the authors’ choice fell on the town of Hocabá.

In many respects, present-day Yucatec is noticeably different from the language spoken in the 1970s or earlier: the past three decades have seen a major reshuffling of the lexicon in particular, with the number of Spanish loans steadily on the increase. Generally, such items have not been taken into account except for words which exhibit Yucatec root structure or form part of compounds combining words of Spanish and Yucatec origin. As a result, the number of foreign lexemes incorporated in the dictionary amounts to merely 156, 135 of which are Spanish. The central focus of the work, however, is on some 1940 Maya roots and their derivations. Numerous sample sentences are provided which illustrate how the respective words are used. The dictionary proper is complemented by a brief sketch of Maya grammar (focusing on morphology and inflections) as well as a botanical index and a bibliography.

Quite apart from its usefulness for linguists and language learners, the book is to be recommended for the insights it offers into everyday life. The cultural domains covered include education, ritual, humor, medical prescriptions, and culinary practices, to mention just a few. Finally, surveying the rich stock of metaphorical and other types of nonliteral expressions makes for highly entertaining reading. Who, for example, would have guessed at the interconnection between brushing one’s teeth and consuming alcohol, as reflected in the euphemism ‘I am brushing my teeth a little’ (i.e. ‘I am drinking beer’)?

In sum, the dictionary under review is an essential, indeed an indispensable, contribution to Amerindian linguistics which scores both for its wealth of cultural information and for opening up a new perspective on Mayan morphology.