Mayathan

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Mayathan, Yucatec Maya (Màaya t'àan)

Spoken in

Mexico ( Yucatán , Quintana Roo , Campeche ), Belize
speaker 805,000
Linguistic
classification
Official status
Official language in National language in MexicoMexicoMexico 
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

myn (Maya)

ISO 639-3

yua

Distribution area of ​​the Mayathan in Mexico

Mayathan (own name Màaya t'àan 'Maya language' ) or Yucatec Maya ( Spanish Maya yucateco ) is a Maya language spoken in Mexico on the Yucatán Peninsula , in northern Belize and in northern Guatemala .

History of language, writing

The Mayathan language was derived from the classical Maya language . Before the Spanish conquest, Mayathan was written in Maya script and was also used as a written language by non-Mayathan-speaking Maya. Since the Spanish conquest of the Yucatán, it has been written in the Latin alphabet and was used, for example, to write the Chilam Balam books (16th to 19th centuries) and the songs of Dzitbalché (El libro de los cantares de Dzitbalché) from the 18th century ( originally from around 1440). In the 20th century, the traditional, Spanish- based orthography was replaced by a modern spelling, which instead of the previous spellings c / qu, k, hu and h, the letters k (uniform, since [q] has become [k]), w and the apostrophe 'are used for ejectives .

Phonology

Mayathan has five vowels , which can be short or long: aeiou (and aa-ee-ii-oo-uu as a long form).

In contrast to other Maya languages, Mayathan is a tonal language and has five different pitches of the vowels. This quality was in all likelihood acquired in the history of the language and not lost by the other Mayan languages.

A distinctive feature of the Maya languages ​​and thus also of Mayathan is the use of ejectives , which have been expressed in writing by an apostrophe after the letter since the 20th century , for example k'ux k'a k'al (it is hot outside).

Mayathan has the following consonants :

  Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal
normal ejective normal ejective normal ejective normal ejective normal
Plosives p   [p] / b  [b] p '  [p'] t   [t] t '  [t']   k  [k] k '  [k']  '   [ʔ]
Affricates   ts  [ʦ] ts '  [ʦ'] ch  [ʧ] ch '  [ʧ']      
Fricatives   s  [s] x  [ʃ]   h  [h]
Nasals   m  [m]   n  [n]     n (k)   [ŋ]  
Liquids   l  [l]      
Half vowel       y  [j]   w  [w]  

The uvular plosive [q] or [q '] , as it occurs in Quiché , Cakchiquel and Kekchí , coincides with the velar [k] or [k'] in Mayathan (as well as in Lacandonian ) .

Grammar, syntax

Mayathan, like all Maya languages, is an agglutinating language , using both prefixes and suffixes , and an ergative language .

While the Maya languages ​​have the sentence order VSO ( verb - subject - object ) as their original syntactic characteristic , the Mayathan (like the Quiché language ) is an SVO language. The sentence order is not strictly defined, so that the VSO sequence is often used.

As in all Maya languages, the original numerals of Mayathan are consistently based on a system of twenty . Nowadays, however, numerals from four or five onwards have mostly been forgotten, so that even monolinguals usually count in Spanish.

Sociolinguistic situation today

Loss of speech at the Mayathan in the Mexican state of Yucatán: Percentage of speakers among the elderly and children in comparison (2000 census data)

When Mexico became independent, almost the entire rural population of Yucatán spoke only Mayathan. During the Caste War from 1847 to 1901, Mayathan was the only tolerated language in the eastern part of Yucatán, which was controlled by the Mayas - today Quintana Roo ; however, the Maya script was no longer used because it had already been forgotten.

After a century, the situation has changed significantly: Despite its relatively high number of speakers (of the indigenous languages ​​of Mexico , Mayathan is the second largest after the Nahuatl ), the language is threatened because it is no longer passed on to children and young people in large parts of the language area. In some remote areas of the Yucatán - particularly along the border between the states of Yucatán and Quintana Roo - it is still vital.

According to the 2000 census across Mexico, Mayathan was spoken by 800,291 people ages 5 and up, compared to 786,113 people ages 5 and up in 2010. Of these, 721,530 (91.78%) also spoke Spanish. The number of speakers aged 3 and over was 795,499. There were 492,297 speakers (26.72% of the state's population) in Yucatán, 181,781 (14.81%) in Quintana Roo, and 86,406 (11.21%) in Campeche. 45,093 children between the ages of 3 and 9 spoke Mayathan, which is 5.67% of all Mayathan speakers aged 3 and over, while 14.71% of Mexico's total population are 3–9 years old aged 3 and over. For all indigenous languages ​​in Mexico , the proportion of children aged 3–9 is 12.35%, so Mayathan is one of the more endangered languages ​​in Mexico than the average.

In the state of Yucatán, a majority still speaks the indigenous language in 52 of 106 municipalities ; The proportion is still over 90% (starting with the highest proportion) in Tahdziú (98.98%), Mayapán , Chikindzonot , Chacsinkín , Tixcacalcupul , Chankom , Chemax (90.75%, with a total of 33,490 inhabitants the largest among these municipalities), Chichimilá , Tixmehuac and Tekom .

In the state of Quintana Roo, Felipe Carrillo Puerto is the municipality with the highest proportion of Mayathan speakers and, along with José María Morelos, the only one of eleven with a Mayathan- speaking majority. In Felipe Carrillo Puerto, according to the 2010 census, 46,663 out of 69,208 people aged 3 and over, i.e. 67.42%, spoke the indigenous language. 5,999 people (12.86% of all Mayathan speakers or 8.67% of the total population) did not speak Spanish. Of all 12,260 children aged between 3 and 9 in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, only 5,800 or 47.31% spoke their indigenous language; 1,363 of these children (23.50% of all Mayathan-speaking children or 11.12% of all children in this age group) did not speak Spanish. The use of the Mayathan language correlated in this region apparently with belonging to the cult of speaker Cross , which originates from the time of war box, so that in the traditional villages Cruzoob such. B. Tixcacal Guardia (Municipio Felipe Carrillo Puerto) or Xocén (Municipio Valladolid ) the Maya language is most strongly represented. However, even in these communities, interest in the Maya religion is declining among the younger generations, whereby a direct connection between the abandonment of religion and a change of language to Spanish could be demonstrated.

There is also a full Mayathan Bible translation completed in 1992. According to research from 2007, this Maya Bible, which was realized by Protestant translators, is not used in the Catholic Church and is only read occasionally elsewhere. The greatest obstacles to reading are mentioned as the lack of Mayan reading skills and complicated, difficult to understand sentences in the Bible texts. The Jehovah's Witnesses completed in 2012 a New World Translation of the New Testament ; they also run a Mayathan version of their website.

Example of a modern Mayathan text. Note also the Nahuatl loan word Máasewal .

Since 2003 Mayathan has been recognized as the “national language” in Mexico together with 61 other indigenous languages and the state is obliged to promote it. For some years now there has also been “ Intercultural Bilingual Education ” (Educación Intercultural Bilingüe) EIB at some schools , for which some materials have been created on Mayathan for the primary school for Mayan speakers as well as for language acquisition as a second language.

Literature on Mayathan

Written evidence of Mayathan, written down in Maya script , can be traced back to the centuries before the Conquista . While inscriptions carved in stone - written in other Maya languages - probably go back to the time before the birth of Christ, only four of the Maya codices remain after the book burnings by the bishop of Yucatán, Diego de Landa , in the 16th century : The Paris Codex with 22 pages, the Dresden Codex with 74 pages, the Madrid Codex with 112 pages and the Codex Grolier with 10 of the original 20 pages. These four codices were written between the 13th and 15th centuries in the early forms of Mayathan on Amatl paper.

A significant pool of pre-colonial literature is important to us in the form of inscribed ceramics obtained by archaeological and illegal excavations of science were known. Above all, the formulaic dedication inscriptions on drinking vessels should be mentioned here, but also the inscriptions on ceramics in the so-called Codex style , which probably depict the format of the codices of the Classical period and give us an impression of what the folding books of the Classical era looked like to like. The Maya self-name for their books and the paper made from ficus bark was "Huun".

The Popol Vuh , the creation myth in the language of the Quiché -Maya, which in its older parts goes back to the pre-classical period, explains a number of mythological scenes in the architectural sculpture and visual arts of the pre- Hispanic Maya as one of the brilliant achievements of the Maya narrative art and mysticism and gives an impression of the lost literature in Mayathan.

The books Chilam Balam (16th to 19th centuries) and the songs of Dzitbalché from the 18th century are among the most important testimonies of Mayathan from colonial times .

Even at the beginning of the 21st century there are individual authors who write on Mayathan. These include the poet Jorge Miguel Cocom Pech (* 1952), of whom, in addition to poems, a volume with stories as a bilingual edition (Mayathan and Spanish) 2001 under the title Mukult'an in nool - Los secretos del abuelo (The secrets of the grandfather) has appeared. The writer Marisol Ceh Moo (* 1968) is the author of several original prose works in Mayathan with a Spanish translation, including the novel X-Teya, u puksi'ik'al ko'olel - Teya, un corazón de mujer , published in 2009 . Your novel El llamado de los tunk'ules, partly in Mayathan, partly in Spanish . T'ambilák men tunk'ulilo'ob from 2011 is set in the time of the caste war .

Trivia

In 2006 Mel Gibson shot his film Apocalypto in this language without using native speakers of Mayathan in the lead roles. So it happened that the actors first had to learn the language or spoke dialogues without in-depth knowledge of Mayathan. Professor Nikolai Grube from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn , who is married to a Maya woman from Yucatán, emphasized that the Yucatec Maya, as spoken in the film, has a strong accent and is incomprehensible to a native speaker. In addition, the film is very different from reality, such as the depiction of Mayan peoples who lived in the forest. The portrayal of the Maya as a primitive people who massacred people was also flawed.

literature

Web links

Test Wikipedia on Mayathan
Wiktionary: Mayathan  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c INEGI 2010: Censo de Población y Vievienda 2010 , accessed on March 25, 2011
  2. ^ Carsten Otto (2009): Bilingualism in Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Dissertation, University of Hamburg
  3. ↑ Maya, Yucatec: A language of Mexico . M. Paul Lewis, Gary F. Simons, Charles D. Fennig (eds.), 2014: Ethnologue: Languages ​​of the World, Seventeenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International.
  4. ↑ Maya Bible on YouVersion
  5. ↑ a b Michal Brody: Un panorama del estatus actual del maya yucateco escrito . Desacatos - Revista de Antropologia Social, No. 23, pp. 275-290. Here p. 278. Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Ciudad de México 2007.
  6. ↑ Kili'ich Ts'íibo'ob I Griego - U Sutt'aanil Túumben Lu'um. Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, Máaxoʼob Jóoʼsik: La Torre del Vigía, AR, México (Distrito Federal) 2012.
  7. ↑ U j-jaajkunajoʼob Jéeoba (Jehovah's Witnesses, language version in Mayathan)
  8. ↑ Gibson film is full of mistakes. In: Focus.