Ch'orti Maya Area: Past and Present

3. Most Maya Glyphs Are Written in Ch′olti′an

3 Most Maya Glyphs Are Written in Ch′olti′an Danny Law, John Robertson, Stephen Houston, and Robbie Haertel Classifying the language of Maya hieroglyphic texts is much more than just a linguistic exercise.1 It has far-reaching implications for the interpretation of the content of these inscriptions as well as for our understanding of time-depth in the Mayan language family, not to mention ethnic and cultural issues surrounding the Classic, and even modern, Maya. Underlying the question of proper linguistic affiliation is the fundamental matter of methodology, for without the right methodology, linguistic affiliation is at best uncertain. An Analogy Imagine a city park with a large number of people congregated under the sign “Jones Family Reunion.” Outward similarities (nose shape, eye color, hair color, and so on) reveal possible genetic relationships, but specifying exact relationships would be impossible. Who are the siblings, the cousins, the aunts and uncles, the in-laws and even those with no genetic filiation whatsoever? Observing external similarities and differences is not enough to determine relationships. The only sure way would be to identify the common ancestor of the family and then to trace each individual’s lineage. This would provide (1) the genetic relationship between each individual and the common ancestor; and (2) explicit labels of the various relationships among all of the descendants. Similarly, a haphazard perusal of Mayan language data produces enough similarities to show that the language of the inscriptions is Mayan—and 29 30 · Danny Law, John Robertson, Stephen Houston, Robbie Haertel even Ch′olan (e.g., Houston, Robertson, and Stuart 2000; Lacadena 2004; MacLeod 1984). The relationship between the hieroglyphic language and the members of its subgroup is however discoverable only by reconstructing the appropriate ancestral forms and functions, and then by tracing each lineage to its proper descendant outcome. As with family genealogy, this method establishes the relationships among family members, explicitly characterizing the nature of each relationship. In the following, we apply this methodology to two grammatical categories universally attested in the Maya hieroglyphic corpus: the markers of the intransitive positional and the passive.2 Following these lineages from their reconstructed forms to their logical outcomes leads to a single conclusion: The hieroglyphic script references Ch′olti′an (Houston, Robertson , and Stuart 2000), not Proto-Ch′olan, as Mora-Marín, Hopkins, and Josserand argue in Chapter 2. The Common Ancestor of the Intransitive Positional and the Passive in Common Ch′olan-Tzeltalan We first reconstruct the common ancestors found in Common Ch′olanTzeltalan : *-V 1 y (vowel-y ending), *-h- . . . aj ‘intransitive positional,’ and *-h- ‘passive’ (Figure 3.1).3 Both *-V 1 y and *-h- . . . -aj begin as intransitive positional markers in Common Ch′olan-Tzeltalan. The positional, which is a grammatical category found in all Mayan subgroups, is a predicate that prototypically denotes stance, such as sitting, standing, squatting, leaning, and so on. Passives signal the absence of agent from the core of a transitive sentence , promoting the logical patient to the syntactic subject. In Common Ch′olan-Tzeltalan the passive was the infix *-h-. Figure 3.1. The Common Ch′olan-Tzeltalan forms of the functions intransitive positional and passive. (By Danny Law) Most Maya Glyphs Are Written in Ch′olti′an · 31 The Tzeltalan Languages The Tzeltalan languages conserve the reconstructed forms, but with some modification.A new passive, -e, was introduced, displacing the original infixed *-h-. The original *-h- took on the meaning ‘mediopassive,’ whose function is a focus exclusively on the patient, with no possible hint of the agent, as in the Spanish se cerró la puerta ‘the door closed.’ We reconstruct *-h- and *-e for CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) transitives and *-at for CVC+ transitives (Figure 3.2a).4 Because -at currently appears on both CVC and CVC+ transitives in modern Tzotzil, we assume that in Tzeltal a variant of *-at (namely, -ot) replaced the *-e entirely ; -at is now the only CVC passive marker (Figure 3.2b). In sum, Tzotzil has CVC-e, CVC-at, and CVC+-at, and Tzeltal has CVC-ot and CVC+-ot. Because *-Vt started as CVC+ -Vt, CVC-ot was an innovation . The mediopassive form CV-h-C came from the historical passive, as explained in detail later. Tzendal (colonial Tzeltal) had both positionals : one, a productive, primary -V 1 y and the other, a secondary -h- . . . -aj. The -h- functioned as a mediopassive with CVC transitives, and...