Yucatec Maya language

History

Yucatec Maya forms part of the Yucatecan branch of the Mayan language family. The Yucatecan branch divides into the subgroups Mopan-itza and Yucatec-Lacandon, which in turn split into four languages: Itza, Mopan, Yucatec Maya, and Lacandon. All the languages in the Mayan language family are thought to originate from an ancestral language that was spoken some 5,000 years ago, known as Proto-Mayan.

Christopher Columbus traded with Maya merchants off the coast of Yucatán in 1502, but never made landfall. Arriving in Yucatán during the decade following Columbus' first contact with the Maya, the first Spanish to set foot on Yucatán soil did so by chance, the survivors of a shipwreck in Caribbean. Most of the shipwrecked men were sacrificed, leaving just two survivors. In 1519, one of these men (Gerónimo de Aguilar) accompanied Hernán Cortez to the Yucatán island of Cozumel, also taking part in the conquest of central Mexico. The other survivor (Gonzalo Guerrero) became a Mexican legend as father of the first Mestizo: by Aguilar’s account, Guerrero "went native"- he married native women, wore traditional native apparel, and even fought against the Spanish. Francisco de Montejo's military incursion of Yucatán took three generations and three wars of heavy fighting that lasted a total of 24 years.The Maya Empire, which had been around since 1500 BC, was on a stable decline when Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1517 AD. From 200 to 800 AD the Maya were thriving and making great technological advances and created a system for recording numerals and hieroglyphs that was more complex and efficient than what had come before. They migrated Northward and Eastward to the Yucatán peninsula from Palenque, Jaina, and Bonampak. In the 12th and 13th centuries, a coalition emerged in the Yucatán peninsula between three important centers, Uxmal, Chichen Uitza, and Mayapan, where they were able to grow and practice intellectual and artistic achievement during a period of peace, but then war broke out and both intellectual and artistic achievements came to end. By the 15th century Mayan Toltec fell. In the 18th century the Spanish turned the lands to large maize and cattle plantations with luxurious haciendas and exported natural resources. The Maya where subjects of the Spanish Empire from 1542 to 1821.

During the colonization of the Yucatán peninsula, the Spanish believed that in order to evangelize and govern the Maya they needed to reform Yucatec Maya and shape it to serve their ends of religious conversion and social control. Spanish missionaries undertook a project of linguistic and social transformation known as reducción (from Spanish reducir), a term not widely recognized by historians. The linguistic aspect of this process involved the reformulation of Yucatec Maya, primarily through the translation of religious texts from Spanish into Yucatec Maya and the creation of neologisms needed to express Catholic religious concepts. The result of the process of reducción was Maya reducido, a semantically transformed version of Yucatec Maya. Along with the attempted eradication of all Maya religious practices and associated written works, the missionaries thus shaped a language that was used to convert, subjugate, and govern the Maya population of the Yucatán peninsula. Notwithstanding, Maya reducido was appropriated by its Maya speakers for their own purposes and served efforts to resist colonial domination. The oldest written records in Maya reducido (which used the Roman alphabet) were written by Maya notaries between 1557 and 1851. These works can be found in the United States, Mexico, and Spain in libraries and archives

Phonology

A characteristic feature of Yucatec Maya (and all Mayan languages) is the use of ejective consonants – /pʼ/, /tʼ/, /kʼ/. Often referred to as glottalized consonants, they are produced at the same place of oral articulation as their non-ejective stop counterparts – /p/, /t/, /k/. However, the release of the lingual closure is preceded by a raising of the closed glottis to increase the air pressure in the space between the glottis and the point of closure, resulting in a release with a characteristic popping sound. These sounds are written using an apostrophe after the letter to distinguish them from the plain consonants (e.g., t'àan "speech" vs. táan "forehead"). The apostrophes indicating these sounds were not common in written Maya until the 20th century but are now becoming more common. The Mayan b is also glottalized, an implosive /ɓ/, and is sometimes written b', though this is becoming less common.

Yucatec Maya is one of only three Mayan languages to have developed tone, the others being Uspantek and one dialect of Tzotzil. Yucatec distinguishes short vowels and long vowels – indicated by single versus double letters (ii ee aa oo uu) – and between high- and low-tone long vowels. High-tone vowels begin on a high pitch and fall in phrase-final position but rise elsewhere, sometimes without much vowel length; in either case this is indicated in writing by means of an acute accent (íi ée áa óo úu). Low-tone vowels begin on a low pitch and are sustained in length; they are sometimes but not always indicated in writing by means of a grave accent (ìi èe àa òo ùu). Also, Yucatec has contrastive laryngealization (creaky voice) on long vowels, sometimes realized by means of a full intervocalic glottal stop and written as a long vowel with an apostrophe in the middle, as in the plural suffix -o'ob.

Overall notes on child acquisition

Phonology acquisition is received in an idiosyncratic manner. While one child seems to have severe difficulties with affricates and sibilants, another might have no difficulties with these, but significant problems with sensitivity to semantic content, which the first child might show no issue with.

Consonants

There seems to be no incremental development in phonology patterns. Monolingual children learning this language have shown acquisition of aspiration and deobstruentization, but experience difficulty with sibilants and affricates, while other children exhibit reverse relation. In the same vein, children have been observed fronting palatoalveolars, while others retract lamino-alveolars, while others retract both.

Glottalization was not found to pose an articulatory problem any more difficult than aspiration does. This is significant with Yucatec Mayan languages' use of ejectives. Glottal constriction is high in the developmental hierarchy, in which features like [fricative], [apical], or [fortis] are found to be later acquired.

Vowels

Neutral vowels [-tonality] are far less subject to mishearing than any long high, broken high, and long low vowels (all[+tonality]). Long vowels appear to be mutually confusable. Possible reason for this phenomenon of high confusion for long nuclei is that the nuclei themselves are more complex. There is a tendency for back vowels to be misheard more often than front vowels in children acquiring the language.

Vowel quality seems to stabilize much earlier than other associated prosodic variations, though the neutral tone version of the vowel is typically the first to be stabilized and secure than the tonal variants, especially back vowels.

Grammar

Like almost all Mayan languages, Yucatec Maya is verb-initial. Word order varies between VOS and VSO, with VOS being the most common. Many sentences may appear to be SVO, but this order is due to a topic–comment system similar to that of Japanese. One of the most widely studied areas of Yucatec is the semantics of time in the language. Yucatec, like many other languages of the world (Kalaallisut, arguably Mandarin Chinese, Guaraní and others) does not have the grammatical category of tense. Temporal information is encoded by a combination of aspect, inherent lexical aspect (aktionsart), and pragmatically governed conversational inferences. Yucatec is unusual in lacking temporal connectives such as 'before' and 'after'. Another aspect of the language is the core-argument marking strategy, which is a 'fluid S system' in the typology of Dixon (1994) where intransitive subjects are encoded like agents or patients based upon a number of semantic properties as well as the perfectivity of the event.

Orthography

The Maya were literate in pre-Columbian times, when the language was written using Maya script. The language itself can be traced back to proto-Yucatecan, the ancestor of modern Yucatec Maya, Itza, Lacandon and Mopan. Even further back, the language is ultimately related to all other Maya languages through proto-Mayan itself.

Yucatec Maya is now written in the Latin script. This was introduced during the Spanish Conquest of Yucatán which began in the early 16th century, and the now-antiquated conventions of Spanish orthography of that period ("Colonial orthography") were adapted to transcribe Yucatec Maya. This included the use of x for the postalveolar fricative sound (often spelled as sh in English), a sound that in Spanish has since turned into a velar fricative nowadays spelled j.

In colonial times a "reversed c" (ɔ) was often used to represent [tsʼ], which is now more usually represented with ⟨dz⟩ (and with ⟨tz'⟩ in the revised ALMG orthography).

The Maya do not use or recognize the ALMG. Unfortunately, some academics have imposed the ALMG—an orthographic convention created by Guatemalan Maya for Guatemalan Mayan languages—on Maya orthography. While this seems to be a politically correct move, it is actually highly incorrect in both linguistic and political senses. To state what should be obvious, the Maya, who reside in Yucatán Mexico, are not native Guatemalans, are not Guatemalan Mayans, and do not live in Guatemala, and thus have not recognized or accepted the conventions established by Guatemalan Maya. Indeed, within the Yucatán Peninsula, there are three to six different groups of Maya revitalization scholars and intelligentsia that have been each developing and asserting their own specific version of a "definitive, authoritative" convention for writing Maya.

There is no consensus among these groups. There is no single orthodoxy; and thus books and other publications continue to be published in heterodox conventions. The main points of dispute are with regard to the representation of glottalization of consonants, tone and accent of vowels, the spacing of compound words and prefixing or other conjoining of clitics and morphemes, punctuation, and the actual spelling of words. It is not infrequent to find two publications might use the same contemporary orthography, but because writers often spell according to their own dialectical pronunciation, the spellings of words can be quite varied and inconsistent.

Consonants

† the letter w may represent the sounds /w/ or /v/. The sounds are interchangeable in Yucatec Mayan although /w/ is considered the proper sound.

Use in modern media and popular culture

Yucatec-language programming is carried by the CDI's radio stations XEXPUJ-AM (Xpujil, Campeche), XENKA-AM (Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo) and XEPET-AM (Peto, Yucatán).

The 2006 film Apocalypto, directed by Mel Gibson, was filmed entirely in Yucatec Maya. The script was translated into Maya by Hilario Chi Canul of the Maya community of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who also worked as a language coach on the production.

In the video game Civilization V: Gods & Kings, Pacal, leader of the Maya, speaks in Yucatec Maya.

In August 2012, the Mozilla Translathon 2012 event brought over 20 Yucatec Mayan speakers together in a localization effort for the Google Endangered Languages Project, the Mozilla browser, and the MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Baktun, the "first ever Mayan telenovela," premiered in August 2013.