AND FOREIGN SIGNS in MAYA WRITING Erik Boot

LOANWORDS, “FOREIGN WORDS,” AND FOREIGN SIGNS IN MAYA WRITING Erik Boot Introduction The script now generally referred to as Maya writing had its origin in southeastern Mesoamerica, in an area encompassing the present coun- tries of Mexico (the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatan, and Quintano Roo), Belize, Guatemala, and the western parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The earliest now known example of Maya writing dates from circa the fourth to second century bce and was discovered in April of 2005 at the site of San Bartolo, Guatemala (Saturno et al. 2006). Classic Maya writing (circa 250–1000 ce) represented the different Classic Mayan languages through a mixed writing system or script that contained both syllabograms and logograms, i.e., signs that represented syllables (e.g., ’a, ba, ma) and complete words (e.g., K’IN, TUN, YOPAT).1 In total some 650 to 700 signs were developed. In 1 In this essay the following orthography will be employed: ’, a, b, ch, ch’, e, h, j, i, k, k’, l, m, n, o, p, p’, s, t, t’, tz, tz’, u, w, x, and y. In this orthography the /h/ represents a glottal aspirate or glottal voiced fricative (/h/ as in English “house”), while /j/ represents a velar aspirate or velar voiced fricative (/j/ as in Spanish “joya”) (Grube 2004a). In this essay there is no reconstruction of complex vowels based on disharmonic spellings (compare to Houston, Stuart & Robertson 1998 [2004] and Lacadena & Wichmann 2004, n.d.; for counter proposals see Kaufman 2003 and Boot 2004, 2005a). In the transcription of Maya hieroglyphic signs uppercase bold type face letters indicate logograms (e.g., TUN), while lowercase bold type face letters indicate syllabic signs (e.g., ba). Queries added to sign identifications or transcribed values express doubt on the identification of the assigned logographic or syllabic value. Items placed between square brackets are so-called infixed signs (e.g.,po [mo]); order of the transcribed signs indicates the epigraphically established reading order. All transliterations are placed in italics (e.g., uyum); reconstructed sounds in transliterations are placed within square brackets (e.g., yune[n]). All reconstructions (i.e., transliterations) in this essay are but approximations of the original intended Classic Maya (“epigraphic”) linguistic items (Boot 2002: 6–7), a written language which was employed by the various distinct language groups already formed in the Classic period. Stress in Mayan words is not indicated in this essay, unless it does not fall on the last syllable (e.g., *pátah). The occasional citing of so-called T-numbers (e.g., T12) refers to the hieroglyphic signs as numbered and cataloged by Thompson (1962). 130 erik boot the early phase of the Classic period the number was some 125 to 300 signs were in use, during the middle phase of the Classic period some 300 to 360 signs, while in the late phase of the Classic period some 200 to 300 signs were being used. In the late Postclassic period (circa 1250–1525 ce) the Maya screenfold books employed close to 300 different signs (see Grube 1990a). While there is a tendency to employ more syllabic signs towards the late Postclassic period, Maya writing was and always remained a mixed script. The last hieroglyphic manu- scripts were probably composed at the Itza’ island capital of Tayasal (*Ti-Ah Itza’-il “At the Itza’ People Place”), at the end of the seven- teenth century in the central Peten, Guatemala, just before the Spanish conquest in 1697 ce.2 At present some 30 different Mayan languages are still spoken in the same area once covered by Classic Maya civiliza- tion. In total some five million people speak a Mayan language as their first language; some languages are represented by only a few speakers (e.g., Itza’, only 10–12 speakers), while others have many hundreds of thousands of speakers (e.g., Yucatec, over 750,000 speakers). The basic syllable structure of Mayan words is monosyllabic and of the form CVC (Campbell & Kaufman 1985: 193),3 consonant-vowel-consonant; less common is CVCVC. Thus generally words in Mayan languages end in closed syllables (i.e., the final sound is a consonant). Mayan languages are synthetic and agglutinative. Syntactic relations within sentences are indicated through inflection and suffixes of all type are attached to the root of an expression (e.g., bak “bone,” ubakel “his bone”; chum “sit,” chumlajijiy “he sat [long ago]”). Stress is mostly on the last syllable. Word order is predominantly VOS (verb-object-subject). The different Mayan languages evolved from the proto-Mayan language (Kaufman 2 On April 10, 1699, in a sworn testimony now at the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, two Yucatecan clergymen named Morales and Mora referred to “books made of tree-bark, and their pages of betun [stucco page coating], in which they kept their prophecies, and which are presently in the possession of Señor Don Martín de Ursua [conqueror of Tayasal]” (Jones 1994: 106–107). 3 The root shapes are CVC, CVVC, CV’C, CVV’C (or CV’V1C), CVhC, and CVVhC (e.g., Kaufman 1976: 106; compare to Brown & Wichman 2003: 139; Houston, et al. 1998; Lacadena & Wichmann 2004, n.d.). Whether there were hieroglyphic spelling conventions, established early on and/or developed gradually as the writing system and languages evolved, that guarded and guided vowel complexity during the course of the development and evolution of Maya writing is a matter of debate. See note 1..

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