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The history of the Poqomchi’ language description
Abstract
This article presents an overview of linguistic efforts aimed at a description of the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, Guatemala). This language remains one of the least documented languages in the Mayan family despite the almost 500-year history of description, which was initiated by Spanish missionaries in the second half of the 16th century. The next attempt at description was associated with European travellers and ethnographers in the second half of the 19th century, followed by the efforts of American and European missionaries in the 20th century. Finally, native Guatemalan linguists who trained under the American descriptive tradition continue to work on Poqomchi’ at present. This paper seeks to describe the variety of approaches and to analyse the possible causes of imperfections in the descriptions.
Abbreviations
3: third person; dat: dative; def: definite article; nmlz: nominalization; sg: singular.
... Siempre en relación con las tierras altas de Guatemala, los diccionarios Pocomchí, atribuidos al fraile Dionisio de Zúñiga y al religioso Pedro Morán, que vivieron en Guatemala a inicios del siglo diecisiete y la primera mitad del siglo dieciocho respectivamente (Acuña 1979;Vinogradov 2019), registran las palabras "cayal" [¿k'aay'al?] y "caybal" [k'aayb'al] (Acuña 1991:354;Feldman 1981Feldman :12, 2000Kaufman con Justeson 2003:792, 794). La primera de estas palabras significa "vender" y/o "plaza", en tanto que la segunda denota "mercado". ...
Datos históricos, lingüísticos y etnográficos muestran que, cuando se utilizan para apoyar la existencia de mercados durante la época prehispánica en el área maya, demandan una interpretación más cautelosa y crítica. En este trabajo se argumenta que fue hasta finales del período posclásico cuando las plazas funcionaron exclusivamente como lugares de mercado de forma cotidiana, ya que antes de ese período las plazas fueron los espacios donde se celebraron numerosos eventos sociales donde también ocurrió un intercambio de mercado, aunque de manera periódica. Además, ciertos términos económicos del lenguaje maya sugieren que transacciones de compra y venta, así como el intercambio por trueque, canje o permuta, pudieron haberse utilizado desde el período preclásico en esos acuerdos económicos. Ambos tipos de transacción forman parte de los intercambios de mercado y, en este artículo, se profundiza en la explicación de cómo pudo haber operado el trueque o canje, tomando en cuenta que, hasta hoy día, la permuta de bienes y/o servicios continúa jugando un papel importantísimo en las transacciones económicas que se realizan en diferentes mercados de México. Un tercer tema analizado en el presente artículo se enfoca en mercaderes quienes concurrían o reunían con otros mercaderes en “puertos francos” o centros de comercio o trasbordo para el intercambio de mercancías, ya sea por trueque o por compra y venta. Estos mercaderes parecen haber sido proveedores de productos que pudieron haber vendido al por mayor a otros mercaderes, o bien, los vendieron a otros comerciantes quienes a su vez realizaron ventas al por menor.
El manuscrito que se conoce bajo el nombre informal “Título del barrio de Santa Ana” fue creado en 1565 en San Cristóbal Verapaz, Guatemala. Está escrito en idioma poqomchi’ (familia maya, subgrupo k’iche’ano) y relata algunos acontecimientos de las primeras décadas después de la llegada de los misioneros dominicos. Es un título de propiedad, un género específico de documentos indígenas que se elaboraban en Mesoamérica con el objetivo de obtener una herramienta para defender los derechos históricos sobre ciertos territorios. Este artículo presenta las características principales del “Título del barrio de Santa Ana” y destaca su importancia para estudios históricos y lingüísticos. Con base en un análisis comparativo con otros documentos indígenas escritos en las Tierras Altas de Guatemala durante el periodo Colonial, se argumenta que el “Título del barrio de Santa Ana” inició la tradición literaria maya-poqomchi’.
This paper revisits the role that evangelization may have played in the diachronic development of Amerindian languages, with a focus on grammatical changes. Based on an analysis of written materials dating back to the colonial period and first‐hand fieldwork data, it discusses the semantic transition from the progressive aspect to the future tense that occurred similarly in the verbal systems of Q'eqchi’ and Poqomchi’, two Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. Although the diachronic path is shared, the morphemes and constructions involved are clearly different in the two languages. The spread of this particular change from one language to the other is attributed to contact between their speakers that could be reinforced by the considerable number of translations of authoritative religious texts made by Dominican missionaries during the colonial period. Este artículo revisa el papel que la evangelización pudo haber jugado en el desarrollo diacrónico de las lenguas amerindias, con un enfoque en los cambios gramaticales. Basado en un análisis de fuentes escritas que provienen del período colonial y en los datos de trabajo de campo, este escrito discute la transición semántica del aspecto progresivo al tiempo futuro que ocurrió de manera similar en los sistemas verbales de Q'eqchi’ y Poqomchi’, dos lenguas mayas habladas en Guatemala. Aunque la ruta diacrónica se comparte, las marcas y construcciones involucradas son claramente distintas en las dos lenguas. La difusión de este cambio de una lengua a la otra se atribuye al contacto entre sus hablantes que pudo haber sido reforzado por un número considerable de traducciones de autoritarios textos religiosos que los misioneros dominicos realizaron durante el período colonial. [SPANISH]
One of the first written sources containing information about the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, Guatemala) is the trilingual Poqomchi’-Spanish-Latin dictionary dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its author was a Dominican missionary, Dionisio de Zúñiga, although his work is based on earlier dictionaries of his predecessors. This paper analyses Zúñiga’s dictionary in the context of Dominican evangelizing tradition. Whereas the descriptions of certain lexical entries prove that the author was familiar with the culture and customs of the Poqomchi’ people, some other terms, specifically those denoting pre-Columbian deities and native religious concepts, seem to be derived from earlier missionary texts including Domingo de Vico’s famous Theologia Indorum. These intertextualities confirm the intellectual continuity among Dominican missionaries in Highland Guatemala during the early colonial period.
Some missionary texts written during the Colonial period in the Poqomchi’ language (Mayan family, K’ichean subgroup) attest the verbal proclitic a, that is being lost in the modern language. It was added to verb forms in the completive aspect marked by the prefix x- and indicated, roughly speaking, the relevance of a past event at the moment of utterance. The same proclitic with similar meaning is also registered in two Mayan languages of the Cholan subgroup: Chontal of Tabasco and Chontal of Acalán. The Poqomchi’ people, despite their origin in the Guatemalan highlands, were neighbors of the Cholan groups for a considerable period of time. It is probable that the proclitic a was introduced to Poqomchi’ during the Postclassic period thanks to language contacts with some Cholan group, possibly the Acalá, who spoke a variety of Chontal, that is, a western Cholan language.
The alphabets that Spanish missionaries developed in the sixteenth century to record Amerindian languages were intimately tied to the evangelizing and civilizing projects of colonialism. This article highlights the consequences of missionaries’ alphabetic ideologies for engagement, in writing as well as speech, with native speakers of highland Mayan languages in Guatemala. In their alphabetic metadiscourse, missionaries juxtaposed Spanish‐speaking learners and indigenous speakers in different and unequal roles for linguistic participation. Through close examination of missionary sources, I demonstrate that missionary ideologies of written language not only articulated script with speech but also delineated knowledge circulation and shaped the power dynamics implicated in language’s actual use in colonial Guatemalan society.
En este trabajo se analizará de manera sucinta la vida y obra de tres viajeros alemanes que llegaron en el siglo XIX a Guatemala: Erwin Paul Dieseldorff (1898-1945), Karl Sapper (1866-1945) y Karl Hermann Berendt (1817-1878). Dieseldorff y Sapper hicieron extensos recorridos por el área maya recopilando, describiendo y comparando las diversas lenguas mayenses. Dieseldorff fue un estudioso de la lengua kekchí y recuperó importantes documentos coloniales escritos en esta lengua. Por su parte, Berendt no sólo recopiló incontables cuadernos de notas sobre diversas lenguas mayas, sino que además realizó copias manuscritas de cientos de documentos coloniales escritos en lenguas indígenas de Mesoamérica. La aportación de estos tres investigadores al conocimiento de la lingüística e historia mayas es incomparable.
In this paper we briefly analyze the biography and works of three German travelers who arrived in Guatemala in the XIX century: Erwin Paul Dieseldorff (1898-1945), Karl Sapper (1866-1945) and Karl Hermann Berendt (1817-1878). Dieseldorff and Sapper made extensive expeditions throughout the Maya area, collecting, describing and comparing the various Mayan languages. Dieseldorff was a scholar of the Kekchí language and recovered important colonial documents written in this language. For its part, Berendt not only collected countless notebooks on various Mayan languages, but also made handwritten copies of hundreds of colonial documents written in several indigenous languages of Mesoamerica. The contribution of these three scholars to the knowledge of Mayan history and linguistics is incomparable
Procedente de la Collection Americain de Brasseur, después adquirida por Alphonse Pinart (ver Brasseur 1871; Pinart 1883), el manuscrito titulado Bocabulario de solo los nombres de la lengua pocoman ... puede consultarse actualmente en la Biblioteca Bancroft, situada frente al carril16n del campus de la Universidad de California, Berkeley.
This book offers a study of long-term, intensive language contact between more than a dozen Mayan languages spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Southern Mexico and Belize. It details the massive restructuring of syntactic and semantic organization, the calquing of grammatical patterns, and the direct borrowing of inflectional morphology, including, in some of these languages, the direct borrowing of even entire morphological paradigms. The in-depth analysis of contact among the genetically related Lowland Mayan languages presented in this volume serves as a highly relevant case for theoretical, historical, contact, typological, socio- and anthropological linguistics. This linguistically complex situation involves serious engagement with issues of methods for distinguishing contact-induced similarity from inherited similarity, the role of social and ideological variables in conditioning the outcomes of language contact, cross-linguistic tendencies in language contact, as well as the effect that inherited similarity can have on the processes and outcomes of language contact.
This paper examines one specific syntactic construction in Q’eqchi’ (Mayan, K’ichean group). This construction involves a bare intransitive verb stem (with the suffix-k/-Vk that is optional in most contexts), and a dative pronoun cross-referencing the semantic subject. Therefore, this is an instance of noncanonical subject marking in a Mayan language. Although there is no specific morphological marker of tense/aspect, the entire construction conveys the prospective meaning. It refers to a preparatory state related to some subsequent event that is relevant at the moment of utterance. The suffix-k/-Vk displays optionality in a word-final position, which is typical of realis status suffixes of nonverbal predicates in Q’eqchi’. A similar construction (although less semantically specific) also exists in Poqomchi’, another K’ichean language closely related to Q’eqchi’.
Acknowledgements.- Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Definition and Goals of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork.- Chapter 3. The History of Linguistic Fieldwork.- Chapter 4: Choosing a Language.- Chapter 5: Field Preparation: Research, Psychological and Practical.- Chapter 6: Fieldwork Ethics: the Rights and Responsibilities of the Fieldworker.- Chapter 7: Native Speakers and Field Workers.- Chapter 8: Planning Sessions, Note Taking, and Data Management.- Chapter 9: Lexicography in Fieldwork.- Chapter 10: Phonetic and Phonological Fieldwork.- Chapter 11: Morphosyntactic Typology and Terminology.- Chapter 12: Grammar Gathering Techniques.- Chapter 13: Semantics, Pragmatics, and Text Collection.- Index.
After “discovering” a New World at the end of the 15th century, missionaries soon began to produce grammars of the languages spoken there. It can be said that ‘missionary linguistics’ was born and thus the nature of the American languages was becoming known. In this paper the author proposes to analyse a corpus of fifty-six grammars from Mesoamerica, i.e., the central region of the American continent. In the analysis, the author distinguishes five schools according to the established religious orders in New Spain: Franciscan, Dominican, Jesuit, Augustinian, and the secular Church. Although the grammars written in these schools are almost exclusively based on the Latin tradition, many of them contain innovative descriptions of the specific structures found in these Mesoamerican languages.
In the course of twelve years at the end of the nineteenth century, Karl Sapper (1866-1945) carried out the first extensive geological exploration of Central America and southern Mexico. Despite his fragile health and frequent attacks of malaria, he did this almost entirely on foot, covering hundreds of miles through the dense rain forest and over mountainous trails. At the same time, he recorded the languages and folklore of the indigenous tribes, and described ancient Mayan ruins he discovered in the Peten and Yucatan. For nearly half a century, his maps and reports remained the principal source of geological information for the entire region between Tuantepec and Panama, and his notes on the native languages are even now the only records we have for several Mayan dialects. On his return to Germany Sapper taught at the University of Strasburg until the city reverted to France after the First World War. He eventually took a position at the University of Wuerzburg, where he established the Institute for American Studies and fostered scientific research throughout Latin America.
1. Translations of quotes from Cojtí Cuxil and of statements from the XI Mayan Linguistics Workshop are mine.
2. My thinking about these issues is heavily influenced by my work with Mayas over the last twenty years, but especially in the last five years. I have benefitted from many critical conversations with my students, colleagues, and co-researchers. I would especially like to recognize the contributions of the members of the classes Jun Iq' and Jun Ajkem to my thinking on these matters; of my research colleagues Pakal, Saq Ch'en, Nik'te', Waykan, and Saqijix of the group Oxlajuj Kej; and also that of Guillermo Rodríguez Guaján, Demetrio Rodríguez Guaján, Irma Otzoy, Luís Enrique Sam Colop, and Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil. Needless to say, they are not responsible for what I have done with our conversations and would not necessarily agree with me. Cojtí Cuxil's 1990 article, 'Lingúística e idiomas Mayas en Guatemala', is an extraordinarily clear and profound work on the politics of Mayan linguistics. It is the principal publication by a Maya in this field, but it reflects, I think, the thoughts of many other individuals as well.
Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q'eqchi' Experiences. Richard Wilson. Norman; University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.373 pp.
Mayas in Guatemala have been involved in a cultural reaffirmation movement that seeks both to promote cultural values and open political space that has been closed to them since Spanish contact. Language has played a central role in the definition of Maya identity and in the demands, both implicit and explicit, for Maya cultural and political autonomy. Mayas who are linguists offer expertise to the Maya movement in at least three areas: 1) in the construction and implementation of the political platform of the movement with respect to language, 2) in the formulation and modification of language ideologies, and 3) in the practice of linguistics and its applications to language preservation and the education of Maya children. Guatemala is one of the few American states with a near majority indigenous population. Estimates place the Maya population variously between 40 and 60 percent of the total, or conservatively at over five million people. Twenty-one Mayan languages are spoken in Guatemala. The largest, K'ichee', has over a million speakers, while the smallest, Itzaj, has only a few dozen fluent speakers. Most of the languages are robust in population, but all show at least some signs of language shift, especially in the last twenty- five years. The majority of all Mayas still speak a Mayan language as their first language and most of the languages are being actively learned by children, although in some areas the number of children learning a Mayan language is decreasing. The language family has over 4,000 years of time depth and six major separate branches, of which five are represented by languages of Guatemala. Since the arrival of the Spanish in 1524, Guatemalan Mayas have suffered brutal subordination to first a Spanish colony and then a Ladino state. They have been politically, socially, economically, and linguistically marginalized, but have never, in the almost 500 years of colonial history, lost their sense of nationhood and community cohesion, nor indeed, their languages. Most recently, between 1978 and 1984, Mayas were the principal targets of a genocidal war waged by the government of Guatemala against its own citizens, as the culmination of a long conflict that began in 1954, with the 1 Parts of this paper were previously delivered in a paper titled "Contributions of Maya Linguists to Identity Politics and Linguistics", given at the University of Iowa in 1996 in the conference "Language Communities, States, and Global Culture: The Discourse of Identity in the Americas". Similar issues have also been discussed in England 1995, 1996, 1998 and 2001.
Most recent linguistic work on indigenous American languages has been done by foreign scholars. Speakers of all American languages who have been politically and economically marginalized since European contact are now, however, gaining some greater access to higher education and political power. Mayas have become increasingly interested in learning linguistics in order to take control of language decisions that affect them. They have both benefited from training from foreign scholars and criticized the foreign linguistic effort. An examination of this relationship provides a case study of the emergence of new patterns of cooperation between outside linguists and speakers.
National Foreign Language Resource Center
Abstract In this essay I examine the emergence and transformation of linguistic analysis as an authoritative field of knowledge in the context of competing nationalists agendas in Guatemala. I show how various social actors including missionary linguists, North American secular linguists, and Maya linguists are implicated in the struggle for authority in “science of language.” I argue that in these intellectual and political struggles, the awareness and participation of the “native speaker” is central to the efficacy of such analytic work and its corresponding projects of national inclusion and exclusion. Keywords: Native speaker awareness, Linguistics, Mayan languages, National identity, Guatemala.
Typewritten - carbon copy. Summary in pocket inside back cover. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Radcliffe College, 1955.
The extent of speech variation attested by the Q'eqchi' community is described. The past tendency to emphasize Q'eqchi' homogeneity is corrected by a demonstration of variation at all levels of linguistic description. In particular, four variable elements of Q'eqchi' speech are identified and characterized: the past tense verb inflections, the relative order of verbs and their dependent nominals, the occurrence of stops before semivowels, and the affrication of t before i. These phenomena are examined in terms of a number of linguistic and extralinguistic factors which have precipitated language change or reinforced linguistic diversity. This quantitative study features speech data gathered over a three-year period in the Chisec and Livingston municipios of Guatemala and in the Toledo district of Belize. Of some theoretical interest is the development of the concept of metaphonemicity in connection with the sociolinguistic and dialectal normalization of script. A transcription of a Q'eqchi' monologue is included as an appendix.
Tesis (Doctor of Philosophy) University of Chicago. Copia xerox.
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