The Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions

C u r r e n t A n t h r o p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 q 2000 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/2000/4103-0002$3.00 The Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions 1 by Stephen Houston, John Robertson, and David Stuart Recent decipherments of Classic Maya hieroglyphs (ca. a.d. 250 to 850) reveal phonological and morphological patterns that, through epigraphic and historical analyses, isolate a single, coherent prestige language with unique and widespread features in script. We term this language “Classic Ch’olti’an” and present the evidence for its explicable historical configuration and ancestral affiliation with Eastern Ch’olan languages (Ch’olti’ and its still-viable descendant, Ch’orti’). We conclude by exploring the possibility that Ch’olti’an was a prestige language that was shared by elites, literati, and priests and had a profound effect on personal and group status in ancient Maya kingdoms. s t e p h e n h o u s t o n is University Professor of Anthropology at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah 84602, U.S.A.). Born in 1958, he was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1980) and at Yale University (M.Phil., 1982; Ph.D., 1987). He is the author of Reading the Past: Maya Glyphs (London: British Museum, 1989) and Hieroglyphs and History at Dos Pilas, Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) and a coeditor (with Oswaldo Chinchilla and David Stuart) of The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, in press). j o h n r o b e r t s o n is Professor and Chair of Linguistics at Brigham Young University. He was born in 1943 and received his B.A. (1967) and M.A. (1970) from Brigham Young University and his Ph.D. (1976) from Harvard University. His publications include The Structure of Pronoun Incorporation in the Mayan Verbal Complex (New York: Garland Press, 1980), The History of Tense/Aspect/Mood/Voice in the Mayan Verbal Complex (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), and “The Origins and Development of the Huastec Pronouns” (International Journal of American Linguistics 59[3]). d a v i d s t u a r t is Assistant Director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Project, Peabody Museum, and Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University. Born in 1965, he received his B.A. (1989) from Princeton University and his Ph.D. (1995) from Vanderbilt University. He has published Ten Phonetic Syllables (Washington, D.C.: Center for Maya Research, 1987), (with Stephen Houston) Classic Maya PlaceNames (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1994), and “A New Decipherment of the ’Directional Count’ Glyphs” (Ancient Mesoamerica 1:213–24). The present paper was submitted 12 vii 99 and accepted 5 viii 99. The hieroglyphic texts of the ancient Maya constitute the most detailed record of any pre-Columbian language. Several elaborate writing systems existed in ancient Mesoamerica, including Zapotec and so-called Epi-Olmec, but only the Maya tradition has come down to us through thousands of inscriptions on monuments and various portable media. Not surprisingly, therefore, Maya writing is the best understood of the pre-Columbian scripts, its essential structure and featural system now being generally accessible to modern students as a consequence of several decades of decipherment. Work within the past two decades has shown that the script was fully capable of representing subtle phonological features and grammatical patterns (e.g., Bricker 1986, MacLeod 1987, Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998), which leads us to reconsider an essential but still debated question: What was the language of the Classic inscriptions? More pointedly, how can the linguistic evidence encoded in the ancient script be used to situate the written languages(s) within the historical development of the Mayan language family? Beginning some two decades ago, specialists in Maya decipherment and language history began to set the language of the ancient inscriptions within a broader context of Mayan historical linguistics. Generally speaking, the language of the glyphs began to be seen as having a close association with the Ch’olan and Tzeltalan subfamilies of Mayan, with the former having a more direct role (e.g., Campbell 1984, Justeson and Campbell 1997). Yukatekan languages, spoken throughout much of the Maya lowland region, were also considered by many to be reflected in the ancient script (Bricker 1986, 1995; Hofling 1998). It is therefore fair to say that despite the increased sensitivity to linguistic analysis, most Maya epigraphic research has adopted a “multilingual” approach, recognizing a general presence of Ch’olan or Yukatekan languages in the glyphs without offering a more specific identification. But which of the languages within these families most closely approximates the specific lin1. This paper has been in development since 1994, with many useful comments and criticisms along the way from numerous colleagues. Alfonso Lacadena and Barbara MacLeod are hereby thanked for their continuous input. Victoria Bricker and Robert Wald also have been constructive and challenging commentators, and we thank them, along with our students at Brigham Young and Harvard, for responding to the arguments herein. Søren Wichmann and David Killick helped with criticism and sources. Other helpful comments came from anonymous reviewers. The usual disclaimers apply. Unless otherwise noted, linguistic data and reconstructions are taken and construed by John Robertson from his extensive field notes. Houston and Stuart organized much of the glyphic evidence on grammar in the course of writing a collaborative book on Maya hieroglyphs, now in preparation. An initial, much shorter version of this paper was given by Houston and Robertson at a seminar entitled “Classic Maya Religion,” held at Sundance, Utah, in 1997, and in a session entitled “Language and Dialect Variation in Maya Hieroglyphic Script,” organized in 1998 by Martha Macri and Gabrielle Vail for the 63d annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The three authors together presented basic features of their argument at the 1999 Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas. This research was supported in part from funds generously provided by Dean Clayne Pope, College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences, Brigham Young University. 321 322 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 guistic features evident in the ancient texts? Can we best approach ancient Maya inscriptions through specific and attested descendant languages within these families? We answer this last question with a strong affirmative and present evidence that Classic Maya inscriptions, composed in the six centuries between about a.d. 250 and 850, convey a single, coherent prestige language ancestral to the so-called Eastern Ch’olan languages—the historically attested Ch’olti’ language and its descendant, modern Ch’orti’ (fig.1).2 Furthermore, we agree with Alfonso Lacadena (1998b) that Yukatekan lan2. Robertson doubts that “Eastern Ch’olan” and “Western Ch’olan” are useful labels. In some respects, Acalán Chontal (the colonialera form of Chontal) is closer to Ch’olti’ than to Ch’ol, with which it is usually grouped (as “Western”). Ch’ol appears to be highly innovative and, with respect to other Ch’olan languages, an outlier. guages have little representation in the Classic script and thus challenge a widely held operating principle in Maya epigraphic research. We propose the term “Classic Ch’olti’an” for the language represented by the hieroglyphic system of the Classic period, given its position in time within the overall trajectory of Mayan linguistic change. The existence of Classic Ch’olti’an, as it is documented in Maya script and situated within historical developments, has obvious implications for hieroglyphics decipherment and, more broadly, for interpretations of elite culture and society during the Classic period. By providing early, written attestations that can be compared with reconstructions from historical linguistics, its identification should offer Maya archaeology a firmer linguistic base, much as the discovery of Tocharian did for Fig. 1. Mayan languages and their relationships (modified from Robertson 1992: fig. 1.1). Boldfaced linguistic descent highlights ancestry, descendants, and overall context of Classic Ch’olti’an. h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 323 Indo-European studies. The ideas expressed here should be subjected to further review and will no doubt be modified, but we hope that they will prove useful and interesting to those working in many subfields of Maya research. We begin with a review of prior arguments for the language(s) of Maya texts and a list of the premises that ideally should underlie the study of language affiliation. We proceed to a description of the predicational classes of Mayan languages and how they change through time and, finally, to a discussion of how these patterns relate to the glyphs and a proposal that the Classic Maya script be viewed as an expression of a prestige language. Maya Glyphs and Language Affiliation Previous arguments for language affiliation have generally relied on geographical, lexical, and morphological types of evidence, with a chronological trend generally running from the first type to the last (table 1). The first epigraphic scholars with a linguistic orientation tended to make distributional or geographical assertions—that is, the location of an inscription was taken as indicating which language was being recorded. According to this common line of reasoning, if one finds an inscription at Chichén Itzá or in the Puuc region (where Yukatek is and long has been spoken), then the text is likely to record that language.3 Throughout most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Yukatek held a dominant role among the contenders. Among lowland languages only Yukatek had received significant attention and study since the initial Spanish conquests of the northern Yucatán Peninsula in the mid16th century. For generations and into the early years of the 20th century, the northern city of Mérida was the focal point of Mayanist scholarship. Northern Yucatán was the major regional focus of Maya field archaeology before 1930, and this, coupled with the wide availability of Yukatek dictionaries and grammars, contributed to the assumption that some ancestral form of Yukatek was the principal language of the ancient glyphs. The Yukatek “bias” in Mayan linguistics was gradually remedied by contributions from Starr (1902), Gates (1920), Wisdom (1950), and others who began to publish or compile basic lexical and grammatical data on Ch’olan languages. Even so, the Yukatek model continued to be dominant and was forcefully argued by J. Eric S. Thompson throughout his influential career in Maya epigraphy and archaeology. He nevertheless saw the relevance of 3. We employ the spellings of Mayan language names advocated by some linguists and certain activist groups (e.g., England and Elliott 1990:vii). We do so with reservations, however, since traditional spellings often have several centuries of use by the Maya themselves. Following well-established practice, words taken from lexical sources preserve their original spellings. Glyphic transcriptions (in boldface) accord with a useful system developed by George Stuart (1988); upper-case terms represent logographs, lower-case ones syllables. Linguistic reconstructions follow common conventions in Mayan linguistics. Ch’olan languages long before any internal evidence of such a connection was apparent or widely accepted; rather, his ideas seem to have been based on linguistic geography. He confidently stated that “the inventors of glyphic writing spoke a language closest to sixteenthcentury Yucatec” and that the language that the script represented was “very close to [the] modern Yucatec and . . . Chol-Chorti-Mopan, who now occupy such lands” (Thompson 1950:16). In his view, the script later spread southward “to the territories in which Tzeltal, Tzotzil, and Chaneabal now live, and never reached the highland peoples” (1950:16, see also Campbell 1984:5). In a later work Thompson (1972:23–24) reasserted the relevance of Yukatek- and “Choloid”-speakers, but his efforts at decipherment continued to demonstrate an almost exclusive reliance on colonial (Classical) Yukatek sources. This tendency is understandable to some extent, given the focus of much of Thompson’s work on the three codices then known (Thompson 1972), whose texts seem to show a closer affinity to Yukatekan languages than the Classic inscriptions.4 The strong connection to Yukatekan and Ch’olan languages was also advanced by Kelley (1976:13) and, as we shall see, was soon widely acknowledged in the epigraphic literature (MacLeod 1987:1; Bricker 1995:215). Tracing the ancient distribution of these two language groups across the lowlands was a natural outgrowth of this perspective. Thompson suggested that archaeological features or distinctive dates in texts signaled language boundaries between the Petén and central Yucatán (Thompson 1978:7–10). Few people agreed about the nature of this boundary, which might or might not have divided Yukatekan- and Ch’olan-speakers (Bricker 1986: 17; Potter 1977:91). Yuri Knorosov’s celebrated breakthrough in recognizing a CV (consonant-vowel) syllabic component of the script opened the door, at least potentially, to a more refined linguistic approach to decipherment (Knorosov 1952, 1955), although he likewise seems to have assumed that the codical texts exclusively recorded Yukatek Maya (1955:60). Knorosov’s proposals were notable also in that they were quickly applied to the issue of grammar. By deciphering one sign -ah, the “past-tense” verbal suffix in Yukatek, Knorosov established a morphological rather than a purely lexical linkage to a particular language (Kelley 1976:196–297). His proposal gained considerable 4. Perhaps because Thompson’s career was so long, his statements can seem complex or even contradictory. In an early essay he refers to the famed Ch’olan “belt” concept but, rather unusually from recent linguistic perspectives, asserts that there is a “transition” from Yukatek to Ch’ol and then from Ch’orti’ to “highland Maya divisions” (1938:585). This early piece makes no reference to hieroglyphs. A later essay, published posthumously (Thompson 1978: 9), emphatically identifies the hieroglyphs with Ch’ol, again from a geographical perspective. A few points, such as his referencing of glyphic te rather than Yukatek che’, remain valid as links between hieroglyphic texts and Ch’olan languages; these data do not, however, serve as exclusive markers of Ch’ol per se (Thompson 1978: 9). At times, it is uncertain precisely what Thompson meant by “Ch’ol”—a particular language, a dialect, or, in today’s terms, the Ch’olan language family as a whole. 324 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 table 1 Sampler of Prior Views of Language Affiliation Date Scholar 1828 1876 1950 C. Rafinesque L. de Rosny J. E. S. Thompson 1955 1976 1982 1984 1986 1987 1988 Y. Knorosov D. Kelley L. Schele B. MacLeod V. Bricker M. Closs J. Justeson, W. M. Norman, and N. Hammond A. F. Chase, N. Grube, and D. Z. Chase M. Macri R. Wald A. Lacadena M. Ayala F. Lounsbury C. Hofling 1991 1991 1994 1996 1997 1997 1998 Type of Argumenta Proposed Affiliation G G G/L M G M M M L M “Tzendal” Yukatek Modern Yukatek and Ch’ol-Ch’orti’, Mopán; later Tzeltal,Tzotzil, and Q’anjob’al Yukatek Yukatek and Ch’olan Ch’olan Ch’olan Yukatekan and Ch’olan Yukatekan Yukatekan in Early Classic Belize L Yukatekan at Caracol, Belize M M M L L M Ch’olan Eastern Ch’olan Eastern Ch’olan Tzeltal at Toniná, Chiapas Possible Kaqchikel or K’iche’an input Yukatekan sources: See references cited, with the proviso that some papers were prepared or presented formally long before their date of publication. a G, geographical; L, internal evidence, lexical; M, internal evidence, grammatical and morphological. support among epigraphers (e.g., Bricker 1995:215; MacLeod 1987:65). Thompson, possibly in reaction to Knorosov, expressed doubt whether any “tense” (aspect) markers were represented in the Mayan script (Thompson 1972:55). By the late 1970s, then, most specialists had accepted geographical arguments that limited the language affiliation of the texts to the languages historically spoken in the lowland region of the Yucatán Peninsula. A few epigraphers continued to entertain the possibility of highland Maya connections (Justeson 1978:245–73; Lounsbury 1997:34–35; Macri 1982:56), but their evidence incorporated glyphic readings that have not withstood review (Justeson and Campbell 1997:65). Increasingly, Ch’olan languages became the target of intensive research (Schele 1982:8; Campbell 1984; Josserand, Schele, and Hopkins 1985), resulting in the rise of a new school of decipherment centered around the analysis of texts at Palenque, Chiapas, in the Ch’ol region.5 As noted, Ch’olan languages were by this time far better documented than before. MacLeod (1984, 1987) brought epigraphic studies to a higher level of linguistic analysis 5. For example, in their seminal work on the Late Classic Palenque dynasty, Mathews and Schele (1974) employed Palencano Ch’ol names for some of the rulers (e.g., “Chan Bahlum”; the name is surely misdeciphered, to judge from phonetic complements such as ka before KAN, not chan). Many of their linguistic interpretations, such as the identification of supposed Ch’ol “auxiliary verbs” in hieroglyphic texts (Josserand, Schele, and Hopkins 1985), are now regarded as epigraphically invalid. For example, forms thought to be verbal—the “auxiliary verbs”—are almost certainly possessed nouns referring to “portraits” or “images” (Houston and Stuart 1998). through her crucial identifications of specific verb suffixes in the script. Building in part on MacLeod’s work, Schele (1982) forcefully and eloquently asserted the geographical relevance of Ch’olan languages and, even more important, laid out morphological arguments for such a language affiliation. In separate publications, MacLeod, Schele, and Bricker (1986) began to formulate systematic verbal patterns, as opposed to scattered elements, that were unlikely to result from random lexical diffusion.6 MacLeod’s key discovery was that the Ch’olan verb suffix -wan occurred in glyphic spellings throughout the corpus of Maya texts, particularly in Classic accession 6. Such lexical evidence and occasional glyphic misspellings or incomplete spellings have been used to identify certain sites as Ch’olan, others as Yukatekan (Houston 1988:129; Justeson et al. 1984:14–15; Ringle 1985:158; Morley, Brainerd, and Sharer 1983: 504). The supposition is that errors or incomplete renderings resulted from the errors of scribes speaking different languages, the signs being recorded without any real understanding of their linguistic underpinnings. Nonetheless, they probably overvalue lexical data as markers of underlying language. Latinate or French loans do not place English among the Romance languages, nor is Yiddish made Semitic by its use of Hebrew terms. Misspellings or incomplete spellings have other motivations, including aesthetic manipulation and the transformation of syllabic groupings into near-logographs, in which the presence of elements is more important than their order (Houston 1988:129). Some defective spellings, such as K’IN-il- ni at Chichen Itza, do not make sense in any Maya language (e.g., Chichen Itza Temple of the Four Lintels, E7). This is not to say that this kind of argument is irrelevant, since systematic patterns in phonology (or at least their representation in glyphs) diagnose certain groups of languages, but words cannot be treated in isolation. h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 325 expressions that closely resembled parallel phrases in Acalán Chontal (MacLeod 1984; 1987:16; Mathews and Justeson 1984:231; Ringle 1985:158). By this time specialists had begun to recognize the value of grammatical evidence in determining language affiliation (Bricker 1986:123, 186). Nonetheless, Justeson also proposed that, because “Mayan literacy was interlingual,” forms distinctive to any one language would have been avoided or “generalized for related grammatical functions marked differently in the two subgroups” (Justeson 1986: 453). He cited little glyphic evidence to support this intriguing hypothesis, and the extensive distribution of spellings of the -wan verb suffix, inherently dismissive of Yukatekan affiliation, may cast doubt on his overall claim. Garcı́a and Lacadena (1990:164), for example, detected this exclusively Ch’olan suffix as far north as Oxkintok, Yucatán, an area historically occupied solely by Yukatekan-speakers. As work continued, MacLeod (1987:65, 72) and others, including Bricker (1986:186), focused the grammatical discussions on three suffixes: (1) the Ch’olan -wan ending, found on a special class of intransitive verbs known as “positionals”; (2) another positional verb suffix, the completive form -lah, attested in Yukatekan languages; and (3) the so-called perfective marker -ah, also present in Yukatekan. As MacLeod observed, the geographical distribution of these three morphemes did not display any clear and neat patterns. The supposedly Yukatekan -lah and -ah suffixes occurred in areas distant from the sites thought to have been occupied by Yukatekan-speakers (MacLeod 1987:72). More confusing still, both the “Yukatekan” -lah and the Ch’olan -wan sometimes appeared in the same texts, for example, on the Copan Hieroglyphic Stairway and in the inscription of Tikal Temple I, Lintel 3 (Schele 1982:252, 294). We do not concur with the supposedly exclusive “Yukatekan” character of the so-called past-tense -ah and -lah endings, however (these may be considered together because the latter suffix consist of the same -ah ending preceded by the derivational morpheme -l-, used to form a positional verb stem). Following suggestions by MacLeod (1984: 238), we believe that the -ah suffix on verbal glyphs may sometimes have an inchoative function, conforming to its attested roles in both Yukatekan and Ch’olan languages. Moreover, Lacadena has recently elaborated on the role of -ah in Eastern Ch’olan and in the Classic inscriptions as an element deriving intransitive verbs from transitive roots, with evidence that it also served homophonically as a particle deriving verbs from nouns (Lacadena 1998a). The -ah suffix is therefore firmly grounded in the larger Ch’olan verbal system. Other significant work on the linguistic morphology of Classic inscriptions has continued over the past decade or so. To cite just a few of many examples, Macri (1991:271–72) documented clear and important patterns in the use of the Ch’olan preposition or complementizer ta-, paying special attention to its regionally restricted distribution. In another important study, Wald (1994) outlined the structures of transitive verb morphology as reflected in the inscriptions. More recently Wald (1998), in collaboration with MacLeod, has developed a nuanced study of the ubiquitous suffix -i:y, earlier identified as the completive (or perfective) aspect on verbs in Ch’olan languages (Stuart 1987:48) and serving perhaps also as a deictic particle in varied contexts (this suggestion is now under active discussion [Stuart, Houston, and Robertson 1999]). From these representative studies it is apparent that Ch’olan languages have overtaken Yukatekan as the principal linguistic setting for epigraphic analysis. Operating Premises At this point, by way of orientation, it is useful to consider the three types of arguments that have been used to support claims for the linguistic affiliation of Classic Maya writing. Over the decades, and in their general order of appearance, these have emphasized either (1) geographical associations between texts and certain modern or colonial languages, (2) lexical evidence, usually of isolated words, or (3) grammatical or morphological features that are unique to known languages. These approaches inspire varying degrees of confidence. The geography of colonial and modern languages is relevant but hardly very direct evidence. As a matter of principle, we would emphasize that the identification of an ancient script’s language depends on its proper decipherment. In other words, internal evidence is key. Ventris’s celebrated decipherment of Linear B writing as representing an early form of Greek involved the discovery of structural patterns among that script’s constituent signs and overturned his own initial supposition that the language was Etruscan (Chadwick 1967:48). If, then, we focus on internal evidence derived from the deciphered portions of Classic Maya texts, we are left with the second and third types of arguments, in which lexical and grammatical evidence are brought to bear on the issue. Lexical items (that is, isolated words in the glyphs that can be linked to one or another attested language) are highly significant for certain kinds of linguistic analysis (phonological change, for example), but they are limited if we are intending to consider language as a whole. The appearance of a distinctively Ch’olan or Yukatekan word in a text might at first be taken as direct evidence of affiliation for the entire written text, but lowland Mayan languages contain a considerable number of loanwords. Yukatekan and Ch’olan, “genetically” distant from one another, nonetheless exhibit significant borrowing because of their close geographical proximity (Brown 1991; Justeson et al. 1985:21–28; Kaufman and Norman 1984) and therefore present a great deal of ambiguity with regard to the language affiliation of texts.7 Some studies use glottochronology to hypothesize which language is likely to have been spoken at a certain 7. Phonological evidence for linguistic affiliation will prove important for some discussions to come but is generally too ambiguous for our purposes here. Phonological patterns capable of being represented in the script can certainly aid in assigning a particular word to either the Ch’olan or the Yukatekan language group (e.g., Yukatekan keh or Ch’olan chih, “deer”). 326 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 time (Grube 1994b:185; Justeson et al. 1985:14, 58, 61–62; cf. Campbell 1984:4), but this approach is fraught with difficulties. Glottochronology offers at best imprecise results and at worst spurious certainty of chronology. As decipherment advances, epigraphic reliance on glottochronology in studies of linguistic history during the Classic period should diminish. Datable inscriptions will provide far better information on the timing of language change.8 A more secure line of evidence for language affiliation is the third, which makes use of internal patterns that are specifically grammatical in nature.9 Such evidence centers on the distinctive inflectional and derivational markers that can be linked to certain languages or branches of the Mayan linguistic family. Grammatical structures are more wide-ranging, multifaceted, and interconnected than geographical and lexical lines of evidence and therefore more useful in formulating testable hypotheses about the language(s) written in the Maya script. We have already seen, for example, that certain features of verb morphology evident in Classic script, such as the positional ending -wan, point unquestionably to the Ch’olan languages. Morphological patterns distinctive to certain languages or branches need to be evaluated against the glyphic evidence. If such patterns occur systematically from site to site, then those languages are plausibly recorded in script; if not, then glyphs may record dialect or language differences (Macri 1988:35–37). Methodologically, such comparisons raise the practical point that such studies must increasingly rely on collaboration between linguists and glyph specialists. The data are too voluminous and complex to be mastered comprehensively by any one person. The problem of determining the language(s) of script must be distinguished from the question of discerning the identity and content of local vernaculars. It need not be assumed that a correspondence exists between written and spoken languages of contemporary date or that the inscriptions may not reflect a prestige or “ritual” language such as Medieval Latin (Macri 1988:34). The restricted phrasing and formulaic expression of glyphic discourse would seem far from everyday language. Historical linguistics must play a role in any discussion of language affiliation. As we have noted, Maya epigraphers in the past have cast wide linguistic nets while trawling for possible fits between script and language. Although necessary, at least at an initial stage of research, this exploration runs the risk of becoming ad hoc, as though the language or languages of the script represented a devised system of communication drawn from several linguistic sources—a Yukatekan verb appearing alongside a Ch’olan for reasons of scribal caprice. It is more judicious to assume that a glyphic text records a 8. Macri (1988:33) advocates equal attention to syntax and discourse, but these features tend to be more general than the particulars of inflection and derivation—the VOS (verb-object-subject) word order of script does not securely implicate any one language or branch (see Robertson 1980:180–81). 9. One reviewer suggests that the assumptions underlying comparative linguistics are potentially as weak as those used in glottochronology. The fact that comparative linguistics has flourished and produced solid results for over a century and a half of scholarship belies this claim. Linguists working in other parts of the world, such as Africa, view glottochronology and its claims for absolute dating with extreme suspicion (Nurse 1997:366). In our opinion, Mayan linguistics should approach this method with equal skepticism, although it has not done so in the past (e.g., Josserand 1975:500–501; Kaufman 1976). Fig. 2. Examples of Ch’olan phonology in Classic Maya texts. a, chi-hi, chih, “deer” (Robicsek and Hales 1981:191); b, a-k’-a-TA and AK’-TAJ, ’ak’ta(-aj), “dance” (Edzna Stela 18, A2-B2; Collections, Bruxelles, F4); c, yi-cha-ni, y-icha:n, “maternal uncle” (Yaxchilan Lintel 58, C1); d, o-chi, och-i, “enter” (Palenque Palace Tablet, R13); e, pa-ti, pa:t, “back, behind” (Collections, Emiliano Zapata); f, UH-ti-ya, uht-i:y, “it finished, happened” (Tortuguero Monument 6, E2); g, nichi, nich, “flower” (Tortuguero Monument 6, H1); h, ch’a-ma, ch’am, “take, grasp, receive” (La Pasadita Lintel 2, zA2). h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 327 language with a place somewhere in the family tree of Mayan languages. If not languishing in a linguistic culde-sac, that language will lead to later forms and will possess historical idiosyncrasies not present in other Mayan languages. On occasion, a study disciplined by comparative linguistics may suggest that the language of Mayan glyphs preserves archaic forms lost in daughter languages (e.g., Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998). Regional differences in phrasing may or may not register dialect or language variation. Some variety probably results from individual scribal or rhetorical preference rather than differences in underlying language (Macri 1988:34–35; Stuart 1995). An awareness of distinct media and “genres” of scribal practice is key here, since the phrasing in painted glyphs on a ceramic vessel may be different from a more formal statement on a carved public monument. We believe that there is now considerable evidence that a single language is represented in the inscriptions of the Classic period. This language, which we call “Classic Ch’olti’an,” employs distinctive morphological elements that exist only in Eastern Ch’olan languages, in a line from Classic Ch’olti’an to Ch’olti’ to Ch’orti’. Such elements appear in texts throughout the Maya region, from Early Classic monuments to Postclassic codices, establishing a pattern that calls for explanation in view of the rich linguistic diversity of the Maya region. Phonology, Lexemes, Morphology, and Classic Ch’olti’an A tenet of historical linguistics is that any language descended from another language will exhibit certain systematic, paradigmatic relationships to its ancestor. In terms of phonology, for example, the descent of the Common Wasteko-Ch’olan languages from their Common Mayan ancestor involves specific and predictable sound changes; Common Mayan ∗k(’) becomes ch(’) in Common Wasteko-Ch’olan, and, subsequently, ∗q(’) becomes k(’). Several scholars have commented on this systematic shift as it appears in hieroglyphic texts (e.g., Campbell 1984; Justeson et al. 1985:57–59), signaling a strong Common Wasteko-Ch’olan and specifically Ch’olan connection with words appearing in the Classic inscriptions. The following glyphic spellings, examples of which are illustrated in figure 2, point to clear associations with a Common Wasteko-Ch’olan or specifically Ch’olan phonology and to a lesser degree their Yukatekan cognates (reconstructions are persuasive ones by Kaufman and Norman 1984; see also Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998:279–84): ’a-k’a-ta, ’ak’ta, “dance” (cf. Ch’olti’ ’ak’ta; CCTz ’ak’ot; Yuk ’ok’ot) b’i-hi, b’ih, “road, path” (cf. CCh ∗b’i:h; Yuk b’eh chi-hi, chih, “pulque” (cf. CWCh chih; Yuk ki[h]) Fig. 3. Primary and secondary categories of Mayan verbs in Common Mayan. 328 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 chi-hi, chih, “deer” (cf. CWCh chi:j; Yuk ke:h) chi-ki-ni, chikin, “ear” (cf. WM chikin; Yuk xikin) ch’a-ma, ch’am, “take, grasp, receive” (cf. CCh ∗ ch’am; Yuk k’am) ni-chi, nich, “flower blossom” (cf. CWCh nich; Yuk nik) ’o-chi, ’och, “enter” (cf. CWCh ’och; Yuk ’ok) pa-ti, pa:t, “back, behind” (cf. CWCh pa:t; Yuk pach) sa-ku, sakun, “elder brother” (cf. CCh sakun; Yuk sukun) su-tz’i, su:tz’, “bat” (cf. CCh ∗su:tz’; Yuk zotz’) yi-cha-ni, y-icha:n, “maternal uncle” (CWCh ’icha:n) ’u-ti, ’uht, “happen, finish” (CCh ∗uht; Yuk ’uch) In addition to the consonant sound change from Common Mayan ∗k(’) to Common Wasteko-Ch’olan ch(’) (seen in chih, chij, ch’am, ’ichan), glyphic spellings display certain vowels characteristic only of Ch’olan languages. Kaufman and Norman (1984:87) note that the majority of Common Mayan long mid-vowels (∗e: and ∗ o:) became high vowels (∗i: and ∗u:) in Ch’olan, a feature evident in Classic Ch’olti’an terms such as b’ih (b’i-hi), “road,” tu:n (TUN-ni), “stone,” and su:tz’ (su-tz’i), “bat.” These systematic sound changes make a strong case for a Ch’olan and more general Common WastekoCh’olan affiliation for Classic Ch’olti’an spellings. But the evidence thus far is imprecise in determining where Classic Ch’olti’an might be placed within the historical development of Ch’olan languages, all of which share these phonological features. The recent detection of complex vowels in certain words in Classic script (Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998) is also insufficient to elucidate this point. We should note that in the inscriptions of Palenque and surrounding sites one finds a few select spellings that defy the expected phonological shift of Common Mayan ∗k(’) to Common Wasteko-Ch’olan ch(’). Examples include ka-b’a, kab’, “earth,” k’a-ma, k’am, “take, receive,” k’u-hu, k’uh, “god,” and su-ku, sukun, “elder brother.” These exceptional forms are rare and geographically restricted to the extreme western lowlands. All four lexemes would fit comfortably within Yukatekan, but they cannot be taken as evidence of an ancient Yukatekan affiliation for Palenque. We find kab’, for example, attested in modern Ch’ol for “earth,” where the expected form, in fact reconstructable for Common Wasteko-Ch’olan, would be chab’ (Kaufman and Norman 1984:89). Ch’olan kab’ is, as Kaufman and Norman surmise, certainly a later borrowing from Yukatekan. The restricted distribution of these words may indicate a region of unusually close contact and interaction between Ch’olan- and Yukatekan-speakers, but further research will be needed to clarify the situation. The lexical evidence for language affiliation is more in keeping with a Ch’olan placement for Classic Ch’olti’an. In addition to the distinctively Common Wasteko-Ch’olan or Ch’olan spellings given above, other words are attested in one or more Common WastekoCh’olan languages yet, significantly, have no Yukatekan cognates whatsoever: b’i-xi, b’ix, “go away” (cf. CCh ∗ b’ix), ch’o-ko, ch’ok, “youth, unripe” (cf. CCh ∗ch’ok), ’i-ka-tsi, ’ika:ts, “bundle, cargo” (cf. Tz ’ikatz), and julu, jul, “shoot; spear” (cf. CWCh jul). Several words in this list and the earlier one have been deciphered since the initial suppositions about a Ch’olan affiliation were made (e.g., Campbell 1984) and strengthen that connection considerably. The lexical origins of certain CV syllables in the writing system may arguably provide significant clues for narrowing the language of the script, but there are once more ambiguities in the evidence. The hieroglyphic signs for many CV syllables are clearly derived from pictorial images that cue words of similar phonological shape but in which the last consonant is usually a simple glottal stop (’) or a “glide” (w, or y) but at times also a velar stop (k or k’). For example, the syllable b’a can be written with a pocket gopher, the Common Mayan word for which is ∗b’ah. The ko syllable seems to originate from a type of turtle carapace and is likely to be explained by ∗ kok, “turtle.” Other examples can be traced to Common Mayan, but others seem more restricted to Common Wasteko-Ch’olan or even Common Ch’olan: b’a ! CM ∗b’aah, “pocket gopher” hu ! CCh ∗huj, “iguana” ka ! CM ∗kar, “fish” ko ! CWCh ∗kok, “small turtle”(?) k’u ! CM ∗q’uu’, “nest” ch’o ! CM ∗ch’o’, “mouse, rat” lu ! CM ∗luk, “hook, to fish”(?) mo ! CWCh ∗mo’, “macaw” na ! CCh ∗na’, “mother” ne ! CM ∗neh, “tail” no ! CM ∗nooq’, “cloth”(?) pu ! CWCh ∗puj, “cattail” to ! CM ∗tyooq, “mist, cloud” tzu ! CM ∗tzu’, “gourd” wi ! CCh ∗wi’, “root” we? ! CWCh ∗we’, “eat”(?) It can be seen that some syllables derive from lexemes traceable to Common Mayan (see Kaufman and Norman 1984 for sourcing) and are therefore too imprecise to serve as evidence of linguistic affiliation. However, others are significant for phonological study, such as the fish or fish fin ka from Common Mayan ∗kar, “fish,” whereas the Common Wasteko-Ch’olan reflex is ∗chay. This could point to the innovation of the ka sign outside of Common Wasteko-Ch’olan or before the ∗k 1 ch innovation occurred in it. Other syllables such as wi and possibly we seem to be Ch’olan innovations, but again the evidence is not sufficiently detailed to point to a specific affiliation. The issues of sign and script origins involve a complex set of linguistic, cultural, and historical variables, many of which are probably unknowable on the basis of current evidence. Just as the reconstruction of the phonological system makes possible the identification of certain innovative changes shared by groups of related languages, so it is h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 329 table 2 Positionals in Mayan Languages Language ∗ Common Mayan Classic Ch’olti’an Ch’olti’ Ch’orti’ Tzendal Tzeltal Kaqchikel (Sololá) K’iche’ Poqomchi’ Mam Positional Stem ∗ CV1C- V1l chum-ul-i:y (CHUM[mu]-li-ya) tzuc-ul jaw-ar nac-al hutz-ul k’aw-äl pak’-al-ek chun-l-ek pak’-l Translation Gloss “sitting” “sitting” “lying face “sitting” “sitting” “lying face “lying face “sitting” “lying face up” up” up” up” possible to make similar observations with respect to morphology. These diagnostic features involve, in our view, three major predicational types that are universally present in all Mayan languages: the positional, the intransitive, and the transitive. The morphology that characterizes these three classes constitutes a well-defined grammatical system whose pattern is readily reconstructable back to Common Mayan (fig. 3), a historical trajectory that has not hitherto been charted. The positional predicates are “statives”—that is, adjective-like—and regularly do what their name implies: signal positions such as sitting, standing, crouching, and so on. The reconstructed canonical form for this class is ∗ CV1C root, with a suffix ∗-V1l, where the root and suffix vowel are identical. In effect, the root vowel determines the vowel of the suffix, a process known as vowel harmony (table 2). The translation would roughly be, for example, “I am [in a] sitting [position].” The canonical ∗ CV1C-V1l form is preserved in all the Common WastekoCh’olan languages. It is also necessary to reconstruct in Common Mayan a non-vowel-harmonic suffix, -an, which probably occurred when the root vowel of the positional contained an -l, as preserved in Kaqchikel k’ul-an, “married.” In other words, if the positional root vowel contains an l, the regular suffix -V1l cannot occur; -an then takes its place. This is technically known as dissimilation, since unattested ∗k’ul-ul would otherwise result in two l’s in the same word, one in the root and one in the suffix. The Q’anjob’alan subgroup has generalized ∗-an (displacing -V1l) as the only positional marker. Finally, the adjectival positional is like all noun and adjective predicates in the Mayan languages; it tends not to take aspect markers. Transitives and intransitives typically are marked for aspect. Intransitive verbs have no direct object (e.g., “I sit down,” “I lie down,” and so forth). They have only one associated argument (I in the two sentences above), in contrast to transitives, which have two, as in “I set it down” or “I lay it down.” In Mayan languages, verbs that have a single argument take the absolutive pronoun and are inflected for aspect (table 3). They also take the suffix derived from Common Mayan ∗-ik in the indica- tive (declarative) mood and ∗-oq in the optative (subjunctive) mood (compare K’iche’ declarative ka-war-ik, “he sleeps,” with the optative ka-war-oq, “would that he sleep”). It is noteworthy that in many of the Mayan languages (e.g., Q’anjob’alan, Tojolab’al, Yukatek, and Tz’utujil), ∗-ik lost its final k∗ and became -i. Furthermore, the optative ∗-oq changed to ∗-ok and then to -ik by analogy with the declarative -i; for example, in Ch’olti’ x-pacx-ic, “I will return,” the optative -ic has become a future marker. Classic Ch’olti’an probably preserved the declarative ∗ -ik as -i. Intransitive verbs and other single-argument predicates (excluding CV[h]Caj passives and -laj positionals) display glyphic spellings with root 1 i (ta-li 1 tal- i; UH-ti 1 uht-i) or root 1 yi (PUL-yi 1 pul-uy-i; tsu2yi 1 tsuts-uy-i). A similar pattern occurs with positionals using -wan (CHUM-[mu]- wa-ni 1 chum- wan-i), an antipassive10 form detected by Lacadena (1988a; CH’AMwi 1 ch’am- w-i), and a distinctively Ch’olti’ verb detected at Naj Tunich by Barbara MacLeod (pa-ka-xi 1 pak-x-i; MacLeod and Stone 1994:178; Morán 1935:21). The final -i registers a particle that descends from the Common Mayan ∗-ik, a marker of single-argument predicates. By the time Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’ were in use, the particle had disappeared altogether. That it does not occur after velar -aj or -laj, also marking intransitive predicates, may reflect a poorly understood phonological process. Interestingly, when marked aspectually or deictically these suffixes take an unequivocal glottal h, as in -laj 1 -lah-i:y. Transitive verbs, in contrast to intransitives, have a direct object (e.g., “I set it down, I found the paper,” and so on). The primary division in Mayan transitive verbs is between root transitives (verbs with a single, short vowel, CVC, e.g., ∗-muq-, “to bury”) and derived transitives (verbs that are otherwise more complex, either by vowel length or additional consonants or by derivational morphemes, e.g., ∗-ts’ihb’-, “to write” [table 4]). We propose that the root transitives in Common Mayan took 10. An antipassive is a form that signals the absence of a direct object, for example, “The lion kills for sport.” table 3 Intransitives in Mayan Languages Language ∗ Common Mayan Classic Ch’olti’an Ch’olti’ Ch’orti’ Tzendal Tzeltal Akatek Kaqchikel (Sololá) Cunén K’iche’ K’iche’ Poqomchi’ Mam Intransitive Translation k-in-war-ik tal-i (ta-li) vixi en in-wayan u-tal on b’aht chin-wey an nk-i-wär k-in-wor-ek ka-war-ik wir-ik n-ch-in-ta:n-e “I sleep” “he comes” “I went” “I sleep” “I came” “he went” “I sleep” “I sleep” “I sleep” “he sleeps” “he slept” “I sleep” ∗ 330 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 ∗ table 4 Transitives in Mayan Languages Language ∗ Common Mayan Classic Ch’olti’an Ch’olti’ Ch’orti’ Tzendal Tzeltal Akatek Kaqchikel (Sololá) Cunén K’iche’ K’iche’ Poqomchi’ Mam a Transitive ∗ ka-ru-muq-u ’u-chok-ow (‘U-choko-wa) in-kux-u in-mak-i q-magh-at la-h-mil xx-in-ma’ naja x-in-tz’et x-in-ch’y-o x-at-in-ch’ey-o x-at-ni-k’oj n-w-il-e Translation “he buried it” “he scatters it” “I “I “I “I “I “I “I “I “I “I ate it (meat)” covered it” beat you” killed him” hit him” saw him” hit him” hit you” hit you” see it” The xx signals an alveolopalatal retroflex. the vowel-harmonic ending ∗-V1w in the declarative mood and ∗-V1’ in the optative mood. Vowel-harmonic ∗ -V1w in active transitives from Classic Ch’olti’an (rendered ERG-ROOT-wa) support this reconstruction (Wald 1994). The derived transitive class is so diverse that morphological reconstruction is less secure than for the root transitives. The reflexes (descendants) of the ∗-V1w suffix are found throughout all the Mayan subgroups. Classic Ch’olti’an is a precise preservation of Common Mayan. It is also found in a reduced form in Ch’olti’ and, as -V1, in Ch’ol. It has been further reduced to -e (after a root with e) and -i (elsewhere) in declarative sentences (but stays as -V1 in the subjunctive). It has been further reduced simply to -i in Ch’olan. But the point is that the Ch’olti’ and Ch’ol similarity here is due to a preservation and therefore does not place them in the same lineage any more than i-muk-u (he-bury-transitive), “he buried it,” and xu-muq- u (completive-he-bury-transitive) place Ch’ol and Kaqchikel in the same lineage. These primary categories—positional, intransitive, transitive—intersect, creating three secondary verbal categories: intransitive positionals, transitive positionals, and “intransitive transitives” (fig. 3). The intransitive positional describes not a stative position but a position a being takes. Such intransitive verbs might translate, for example, “I sat down,” “I stood up,” and so on. We assume that the intransitive positionals had these forms in Common Mayan: ∗CVC-er and ∗ CV-h-C. By Common Wasteko-Ch’olan times, -aj was added to ∗CV-h-C, yielding ∗CV-h-C-aj, a form that appears in Classic Ch’olti’an as a passive (Lacadena 1998a).11 With the innovation of ∗CV-h-C-aj, the original 11. Kaufman and Norman (1984:109) propose that an -aj intransitivizer was suffixed to the root transitive passive CV-h-C to form the bipartite passive -h-. . .-aj in Ch’olti’an. We do not, of course, believe this, but it is a possible etymology for the intransitive positional that we reconstruct from Common Wasteko-Ch’olan. CV-h-C migrated to the function “passive” in Common Wasteko-Ch’olan.12 The transitive positional describes not a position a being takes but a position a being imposes on another, for example, “I sat him down,” “I stood him up,” and so on. We constructed ∗CVC-b’a’ for the transitive positional. Tzendal illustrates the three kinds of positions: the “stative” positional nac-al (sit-posit.), “sitting,” the transitive positional nac-ay-on (sit-intrans.posit.-I), “I sat down,” and the transitive positional q-na-[h]-c-an (I-set[trans.posit.]-sit-trans.posit.), “I set.” The “intransitive transitive” category is determined by voice, which includes passives and antipassives—the former being a crucial focus for our discussion. For root transitives we reconstruct ∗CV-h-C for the passive in Common Wasteko-Ch’olan. The passive in Ch’olti’an (Ch’olti and Ch’orti’ [Lacadena 1998a]) is an innovation, -h-. . .-a(j), firmly linking the Ch’olti-an subgroup with the language of the script, Classic Ch’olti’an. The passive occurs in Ch’olti as -h-. . .-a(h) and in Ch’orti’ as -h-. . . -a (the final -j having been lost). The script also registers a second kind of passive, -V1y, a so-called medio-passive. The medio-passive typically signals intransitive actions that are wholly self-contained and strongly signal a change of state, as with the transitive verb burn, “the house burned,” or close, “the door closed.” With medio-passives, the agent is typically unknown. The English word get is quite effective in translating medio-passives: “It got cut,” “it got full,” and so on. The etymology of both the Classic Ch’olti’an passive -h-. . .-aj and the medio-passive -V1y is the intransitive positional. The original function of these two passive morphemes is readily found in Tzendal (Colonial Tzeltal) and Tzeltal; nac-ayc-otan (calm.down-intrans.posit.myheart), “my heart calmed down” (Tzendal), and hu-h-tzah (sit.down-intrans.posit.-sit.down-intrans.posit.), “he sat down” (Tzeltal). What is unique to Classic Ch’olti’an, Ch’olti’, and Ch’orti’ is the following facts of diachronic change: the migration of the intransitive positional suffixes ∗V1y (earlier) and -h-. . .-aj (later) to become passive forms in pre-Classic Ch’olti’an and the displacement of the earlier passive ∗V1y to the status of medio-passive. The History of Classic Ch’olti’an Table 5 provides evidence for the direction of change hinted at above. It contains the data underlying our reconstructions. The positionals, intransitives, transitives, and passives figure most prominently here. Mere inspection reveals the probable accuracy of these reconstructions, although the table goes beyond the scope of this paper by giving detailed data implicating historical developments in language families other than Ch’olan. The most complete demonstration of several changes readily found in Mayan languages is the comparison of 12. See below for a further discussion of the movement of intransitive positionals to the function of passive. h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 331 table 5 Comparative Data on Verbal Categories Language Positional ∗ ∗ Common Mayan Common Wasteko-Ch’olan ∗ Common Ch’olan Classic Ch’olti’an Ch’olti’ Ch’orti’ Acalán (Classical Chontal) Ch’ol ∗ Common Tzeltal-Tzotzil Tzendal Tzeltal Tzotzil Tojolab’al ∗ Common Q’anjob’alan Q’anjob’al Akatek ∗ Common Mamean-K’iche’an Kaqchikel Poqomchi’ Sakapultek Mam Tektitek Awakatek Ixil ∗ -V1l/-an -V1l/-an ∗ -V1l -V1l -V1l -V1r -V1l -V1l ∗ -V1l -V1l -V1l -V1l -an ∗ -an -an -an ∗ -V1l/-an -V1l/-an -l -V1l -l/č -l/č -l -l-éle ∗ Intransitive Positional ∗ -er/-h-V1y/-h-. . .-aj ∗ -V1y/-h-. . .-aj -wan [late]/-laj -uan -wan -van -täl ∗ -V1y/-h-. . .-aj ∗ -V1y -h-. . .-ah -ı́ -an ∗ -Vy -a’ -na(dv) ∗ -e:’ -e’ CV-h-C -V1b’ -e:’/CV:C-et -l-et -e:’ -[a,e]b’ ∗ Transitive Positional Passive ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ -b’a: -b’a: ∗ -b’a: -b’u/-b’a?a/-chokon -b’u/-chokon -b’u/-b’a ? -chokon ∗ -an -an -h-. . .-an -an -a’CVC-an ∗ -ba’ -b’a’ -b’a’ ∗ -b’a’ -b’a’ -a:’ -V1b’a’ -b’a’ -b’a’ -b’a:’ -b’a’ -ax-h∗ -h-h-?. . .aj -h-. . .-aj -h-. . .-aj ? -h-. . .el -ot -ot -ot -at -(a)h ∗ -l -le -l∗ -h∗ -Vh- 1 -V: Vr/-j/-h-l/-b’ -et -et -l -ax. a Nicholas Hopkins (personal communication, 1999) hypothesizes a connection between the Ch’ol “relative particle” b’a and these forms. If we understand him correctly, this interpretation is mistaken, since the forms have different etymologies. Tzutujil (Dayley 1985) with Q’eqchi’, with the data from Tzutujil representing Q’eqchi’s original state of affairs. We see here a double “migration,” wherein first the transitive positional marker -e’ becomes the passive marker and then the -V1l of the adjectival category moves to the intransitive positional (but is transformed to -l-a, the provenance of the -a being uncertain). Finally, the adjectival form (-V1l) is replaced by the sequence C1VCC1-o, where the last consonant is the same as the first: k’ojk’o, “sitting,” xakxo, “standing,” etc. The cognate structure in Tzutujil is C1V1CV1 C, as, for example, sanas-, “lying down,” -b’olob’-, “cylindrical.” The final observation regarding the Q’eqchi’ innovations is that certain intransitive verbs of motion take the same -e’ marker: -nume’, “to pass by,” -taq-e’, “to go up,” -t’an, “to fall down.” These same shifts—the markers from the intransitive positional moving to the passive, the adjectival form influencing the marker of the intransitive positional, and the passive marker attaching to certain intransitive verbs of motion—occur in other Mayan languages. The important point for Mayan epigraphy is that the self-same historical processes found in Q’eqchi’ are also found in Classic Ch’olti’an, placing it expressly in the ancestral line of development of Ch’olti’ and then Ch’orti’. By implication, other languages, such as Ch’ol, may be less directly relevant to Maya decipherment than previously thought (cf. Josserand 1991:12), since Ch’ol preserves -h-, the Common Wasteko-Ch’olan passive. This descent indicates that Ch’orti’ deserves renewed attention by epigraphers, since Ch’olti’ is so poorly documented. Figure 4 gives a chronological overview of the several changes that brought Common Mayan to the stages discussed in this paper: Common Mayan, Common Wasteko-Ch’olan, Common Ch’olan, pre-Classic Ch’olti’an, Classic Ch’olti’an, Ch’olti, and Ch’orti’. These changes occur in several distinct contexts: (1) The alteration of intransitive positional from Common Mayan ∗-er to Common Wasteko-Ch’olan ∗-V1y. (2) The migration of Common Wasteko-Ch’olan ∗-V1y from the intransitive positional function to the passive function in pre-Classic Ch’olti’an. (3) The migration of Common WastekoCh’olan ∗-h-. . .-aj from the intransitive positional function to the passive function in pre-Classic Mayan, with the concomitant change of V1y from the passive function to the medio-passive. (4) The analogical innovation of intransitive positional ∗-l-aj based on the adjectival positional ∗-V1l and the intransitive positional ∗-h-. . .-aj. the shift from ∗ - er to ∗ -v 1 y The alteration of ∗-er to ∗-V1y is readily accounted for by the facts that (1) Common Mayan ∗r became y in Wasteko-Ch’olan by regular sound change and (2) the ∗V1 of Common Mayan adjectival positional ∗-V1l analogically influenced the e of Common Mayan: ∗-er 1 ∗-ey 1 ∗-V1y. The possibility that ∗-V1l influenced other forms is ap- 332 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 Fig. 4. Chronological overview of changes from Common Mayan to Ch’orti’. Bracketed numbers indicate order of changes. parent in the fact that the K’iche’ transitive positional ∗ -b’a became ∗-V1-b’a, by analogy with the adjectival positional ∗-V1l (compare Mam -k’ul-b’a, “to meet someone,” with Kaqchikel -k’ul-ub’a’, “to marry someone”). the migration of ∗ -v 1 y from intransitive positional to passive Just as the pre-Q’eqchi’ intransitive positional marker -e’ became the new passive marker, so the Common Wasteko-Ch’olan intransitive positional ∗-V1y became a passive marker in pre-Classic Ch’olti’an. As evidence for this claim there is the fact that -er is reported by Rosales (1748:71) to be a secondary passive in Colonial Kaqchikel: t-in-chap (incompletive-I-take), “I take it,” k-i-chaper (incompletive-I-take-passive), “I was taken.” Furthermore, just as ∗-ey (! Common Mayan ∗-er) went to ∗-V1y in pre-Classic Ch’olti’an, so K’iche’an -er is -V1r for the San Cristóbal Poqomchi’ passive: -muq-ur, “be buried.”13 Furthermore, Mam has an -et passive as well as a secondary (pre-Mam) ∗CV-h-C. . .-er intransitive positional that is functionally analogous with Tzeltal CV-h-C. . . -aj. The pre-Mam form became CV-:-C-et by regular sound change, since ∗VhC 1 V:C and r 1 t. For example, ∗ 13. What happened in Mamean-K’iche’an was that (1) the Common Mayan intransitive positional ∗-er (-V1r in some languages) became a passive marker, as it is in Poqom, when Mamean-K’iche’an innovated with a new intransitive positional marker ∗e:’ and (2) in K’iche’-Kaqchikel, -h- moved from the intransitive positional to become a passive marker, restricting -er (or -V1r) to a secondary function, as indicated in the colonial grammars (e.g., Rosales 1748). in the San Ildefonso Ixtahuacán dialect of Mam, the adjectival positional ch’ub’-l, “pursed lips,” has an intransitive positional form n-ch’u-:- b’-et. The new, innovative Tzeltalan form ∗-V1y ! ∗-er is extensively attested in Tzendal: adjectival positional chubul, “sitting,” intransitive positional chub-uy, “to sit down,” adjectival positional chot-ol, “squatting,” intransitive positional chot-oy, “to squat.” Tzendal also had a secondary marker for the intransitive positional, [-h-]. . .-agh (gh being a velar fricative), which undoubtedly corresponds to modern Tzeltal -h-. . .-aj; in Tzendal VhC was written simply VC by the colonial scribes. Observe the following in Tzendal: adjectival positional tonol, “fallen,” intransitive positional to-[h]-n-agh, “to fall down.” The Tzendal -V1y, which was replaced by ’-h-. . .-aj in modern Tzeltal, is no longer the unmarked morpheme for the intransitive positional. Note Tzeltal: adjectival positional tek’-el, “standing,” intransitive positional te-h-k’-ah, “to stand up.” It is not uncommon in languages of the world for markers of voices to appear on verbs of motion. For example, when the old intransitive positional ∗-e’ came to mark the passive in Q’eqchi’, it immediately spread to a class of verbs of motion: taq-e’, “to ascend,” num-e’, “to go by,” t’an-e’, “to fall down,” uq-e’, “to run over [like a river overflowing its banks].” Similarly, in Tzeltal, the Common Tzeltalan passive marker ∗-h- is now a mediopassive (e.g., pas, “to do,” pa-h-s, “to get done,” but’, “to fill,” bu-h-t’, “to fill up” [Kaufman 1968:87]). For intransitive verbs we find b’aht’, “to go,” k’oht’, “to arrive,” suht’, “to return,” ’sohl, “to go by” (McQuown 1957). A h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 333 similar phenomenon is apparent with the ∗-V1y of preClassic Ch’olti’an. There is a series of intransitive verbs of motion, which take ∗-V1y: lok’-oy, “to come out,” t’abay, “to rise, ascend,” hub-uy, “to descend.” This same ∗-V1y morpheme is found in Ch’olti’, but for semantic reasons its domain is expanded to include not only intransitive verbs of motion but also intransitives that signal change of state, for example, cham-ay, “to die,” van-ay, “to sleep.” Although we do not know how widespread the ∗-V1y morpheme was in Colonial Ch’olti’, we know that by modern times it had expanded even further in Ch’orti’ to include such verbs as numuy, “left,” ok’-oy, “was rotted,” tob’-oy, “jumped,” tz’am-ay, “was wetted,” kar-ay, “was made drunk,” putz’-uy, “fled” (Wisdom 1950). This shift—from intransitive positional (Common Ch’olan-Tzeltalan) to passive (pre-Classic Ch’olti’an) to medio-passive (Classic Ch’olti’an) to verb-of-motion marker (Classic Ch’olti’an) to a more general marker for intransitive change-of-state verbs (Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’)—is unique to the Ch’olti’an subgroup. Classic Ch’olti’an is a “new” Mayan language—new at least to the Mayan family tree as it has been formulated up to this point. the shift of ∗ - h -. . .- aj from intransitive positional to passive Once again an intransitive positional marker—in this case ∗-h-. . .-aj—migrated to the passive. As a result the old pre-Classic Ch’olti’an ∗-V1y passive became a mediopassive. The form -[h]-. . .-aj as the main passive marker and ∗-V1y as a medio-passive marker is the state of affairs attested in the script. This phenomenon—a new passive restricting an earlier passive to a medio-passive function—is readily found in other Mayan languages. In Yukatek Maya, for example, there is a regular passive with a glottalized vowel and a medio-passive with rising tone on the vowel: tz’o’on, “to be shot,” tz’ó:n, “to get shot.” In pre-Yukatek the passive was ∗tz’o-h-n, which subsequently changed to rising tone tz’ó:n, since by regular sound change in Yukatek all sequences of the type VhC became long vowels with rising tone (Hironymous 1982). Thus, a similar process occurred in the development of Classic Ch’olti’an, where an original passive (∗-V1y) was displaced by a new passive (-h-. . .-aj), restricting the function of the original to a medio-passive. Similarly, in Tzeltal the original passive (∗-h-) was displaced by a new passive (-ot), restricting the original to a medio-passive function (pa-h-s, “to get done” (Kaufman 1968:87), pasot, “to be done.” The medio-passive -V1y form is ubiquitous in Classic Maya inscriptions, occurring throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, heedless of distributional arguments for Yukatekan in texts to the far north (see below). For example, the -h-. . .-aj morpheme occurs at such quintessentially northern sites as Xcalumkin and Xkombec, Campeche, and Chichén Itzá, Yucatán (Lacadena 1994b:319, 329, 339); -V1y verbs also occur as far north as Uxmal and Ikil, both in Yucatán (Andrews and Stuart 1975:70). It is evident in early monuments such as Balakbal Stela 5, at 8.18.10.0.0 (ca. a.d. 406) in the Maya Long Count. The fact that -V1y is found in both Classic Ch’olti’an and Ch’olti’ is readily documented: lok’?-oy-i (LOK’?-yi) 1 locoi, “leave”; pul-uy-i (pu-lu-yi) 1 pului, “burn”; t’ab’-ayi (T’AB’-yi) 1 tabai, “ascend, begin.” Classic Ch’olti’an had other examples of this verb class: hom-oy-i (ho-moyi), “?”; hub’-uy-i (hu-b’u-yi), “fall”; jats’-ay-i (ja-ts’a-yi), “strike”; koh-oy-i (ko-ho-yi), “go down”?; k’a’-ay-i (K’Aa-yi), “finish” (a euphemism for “death”); naj-ay-i (naja-yi), “fill up”?; sat-ay-i (sa-ta-yi), “lose” (Grube 1996: 5); tsuts-uy-i (TSUTS-yi), “finish”; wol-oy-i (wo-lo-yi), “make round”? (see fig. 5). the provenience of the intransitive positionals -l-aj and -wan The intransitive positional -l-aj is a new form, analogically derived, that probably came into existence when the form ∗-V1y moved to become a passive marker in preClassic Ch’olti’an times. We propose that it developed from the l of the positional ∗-V1l and the -aj of the bipartite morpheme -h-. . .-aj. It will be recalled that the Q’eqchi’ intransitive positional -l-a developed independently of Ch’olti’an -l-aj, but the developmental path was identical with very similar results. Furthermore, the intransitive positional for Tektitek is -l-et, which replaced an earlier ∗-e’. This is an innovation, since historically the intransitive positional was ∗ -e:’ for Mamean-K’iche’an. Just as in Mam there is a functional correspondence between -et and WastekoCh’olan -aj (∗-h-. . .-aj = -h-. . .-et) as shown above, there is similar correspondence between the Tektitek -l-et and the Classic Ch’olti’an -l-aj as markers of the transitive positional. The intransitive positional -wan has a particularly interesting history. It came into the Classic Ch’olti’an lineage after the suffix -l-aj was formed, which logically would have been at about the same time that -h-. . .-aj moved from the intransitive positional to the passive voice. Unlike ∗-V1y and -h-. . .-aj, -wan is cognate with Acalán Chontal -wan. In all likelihood, the -wan (or -wan-i) of the positional intransitive did not originally belong to Classic Ch’olti’an. As explained above, -l-aj is earlier than -wan (fig. 4). The form -wan can be shown to exist first in the inscriptions of Tabasco and northern Chiapas, perhaps in Chontal-speaking areas from which it percolated into glyphic discourse (Zachary Hruby, personal communication, 1996). By the end of the Late Classic period, it had diffused throughout the region with hieroglyphic texts. In Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’ it had completely replaced the -l-aj of Classic Ch’olti’an. tzeltalan, ch’olan, and southern classic ch’olti’an The most salient evidence situating Classic Ch’olti’an, Ch’olti’, and Ch’orti in the same lineage is found not in phonology but in morphology. So far we have listed a 334 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 Fig. 5. Examples of ROOT-V1y intransitive verbs. a, LOK’?-yi, lok’?-oy-i(?), “leave, exit?” (Bonampak Panel 5, E6); b, pu-lu-yi, pul-uy-i, “burn” (Piedras Negras Stela 23, E8); c, T’AB’?-yi, t’ab’-ay-i, “ascend, begin” (Kerr Catalog 4388); d, ho-mo-yi, hom-oy-i, “?” (Copan Stela 11, B1); e, hu-b’u-yi, hub’-uy-i, “fall” (Tikal Temple I, Lintel 3, A4): f, ja-ts’a-yi, jats’-ay-i, “strike?” (Collections, Orono, Maine, A16), g, ko-ho-yi, koh-oy-i, “go down”? (Naj Tunich Drawing 88, G6); h, K’A’-yi, k’a’-ay-i, “finish” (Pomona undesignated panel, zB2): i, na-ja-yi, naj-ay-i, “fill up?” (Palenque Temple XVIII stucco); j, sa-ta-yi, sat-ay-i, “lose” (Palenque Temple of the Inscriptions, east, O8); k, TSUTS-yi, tsuts-uy-i, “finish”; l, wo-lo-yi, wol-oy-i, “make round?” (Kerr Catalog 793). series of crucial shifts: the movement of ∗-V1y from intransitive positional to passive, the subsequent movement of ∗-h-. . .-aj from intransitive to passive, and the ensuing shift of ∗-V1y from passive to medio-passive. These important grammatical changes are unique to the Classic Ch’olti’an lineage. No other explanation we are aware of can account for the comparative and epigraphic data. One point deserves emphasis. The Classic Ch’olti’an lineage differs substantially from both Ch’ol and Chontal, the other two Ch’olan languages. Simply put, Ch’ol morphology does not accord with Classic Ch’olti’an in the same way that the Ch’olti’an lineage does, since Ch’ol preserves the Common Ch’olan passive ∗-h-, whereas Ch’olti’an has innovated. Chontal does not preserve the Common Ch’olan ∗-h- (it uses the suffix -k-), but it certainly has no evidence of the -h-. . .-aj passive or anything like the -V1y middle voice. It simply is not plausible that, within the time since Common Ch’olan, Chontal could have gone through ∗-h-, ∗-V1y, and ∗ -h-. . .-aj to end up with -k-, leaving no vestige of any of the earlier passives. Furthermore, no other Mayan language has, for example, lexical items such as pul-uy, “to burn,” or pakxi “to return,” which continue through time in all three Ch’olti’an languages. These examples are a part of the fingerprint that identifies Ch’olti’an as inclusive of Classic Ch’olti’an, Ch’olti’, and Ch’orti’ but exclusive of Ch’ol and Chontal. the relationship between ch’olti’ and ch’orti’ Although the full details of the lineal relationship between Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’ are beyond the scope of this paper (see Robertson 1998), the data presented here demonstrate that Ch’orti”s colonial ancestor is Ch’olti’ or at least a dialect close to it. The indicative marker of a simple CVC-transitive was ∗-V1w in Common Mayan. It marks only the imperative in modern Ch’orti’ (Ch’olti’, indicative: u-col-o-et, “God saves/saved you,” imperative: a-cub-u, “obey it”; Ch’orti’, indicative: u-pas-i, “he opens/opened it,” imperative: pas-a, “open it”). In this instance, vowel harmony in the indicative was reduced to e if the stem vowel was e and i elsewhere. The ∗-V1w of the transitive CVC remains from Common Mayan times to Classic Ch’olti’an. From Classic Ch’olti’an to Ch’olti’, the final -w disappears. The Ch’orti’ -i, whose function is identical to that of Ch’olti’ -V1, regularizes the original vowel-harmonic ∗-V1w, but the imperative preserves -V1. Discussion We have presented evidence that Classic Maya writing records an ancestral form of Ch’orti’ and its immediate parent language, Ch’olti’. This conclusion is more precise than previous assessments of a general Ch’olan or Common Wasteko-Ch’olan language affiliation. The evidence has been morphological, focusing on the forms and historical developments of passives, middle-voice verbs, and transitive positionals. Some of this information, especially that on passives, comes from other scholars (Lacadena 1998a) or has been developed independently of their contributions. These data would seem to contradict geographical arguments, which perceive a natural linkage between sites in northern Yucatán and Yu- h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 335 katec Maya or a tight bonding between Ch’ol and the texts of Palenque (Josserand 1991:12) or between Yukatek and inscriptions near present-day speakers of Itzaj or Mopan (Hofling 1998). Yet not even Chichén Itzá, that majestic exemplar of northern archaeology, displays much evidence of Yukatekan. Its inscriptions employ lexemes that are Ch’olan (ti’, “mouth,” -oto:t, “house”) or duplicate morphology found throughout the southern lowlands (y-ita-hi, perhaps a nominalized expression of uncertain meaning, pertaining to a class that always records bisyllabic roots [fig. 6]). As mentioned before, a nearby site, Ikil, contains t’ab’-ay-i, a -V1y verb; Oxkintok, Yucatán, records a verb with the -wan suffix. Nonetheless, it would be imprudent to argue that substrate languages—vernaculars very different from Classic Ch’olti’an—did not make an occasional appearance in local inscriptions. A Yukatekan word, -otoch(yo-to-che), definitely occurs at Xcalumkin, Campeche (Grube 1994a:fig. 28c). Glyphs from the northern site of Yulá spell what appears to be an early version of a Yukatekan word for “deer” (ke:h), although it may simply preserve an archaic term (Common Mayan ∗kehj) embedded in a place-name (fig. 7). These examples may well represent “capillary” movement from the linguistic substrate of Yukatekan languages into Classic Ch’olti’an. The possibilities before us can be conceptualized in terms of a prestige language and script. The term “diglossia” refers to the coexistence of two dialects or related languages, each performing a distinct social function. Typically, one language is considered “high” or more formal (e.g., Hochdeutsch and Classic Arabic), the other “low” or informal (e.g., Schweitzerdeutsch and Colloquial Arabic). High languages are more likely to be liturgical or literary and to be acquired through formal schooling; low languages are everyday, commonplace, conversational (Gair 1996:409). High languages tend to arch above localisms; vernacular influence may carry powerful stigmas, to be eradicated through periodical renovations (Belnap and Gee 1994:144). Through them bonds develop between educated minorities (usually but not always elites) that happen to live in different political zones. High language ossifies through convention and pronounced attention to decorum, with periodic interest in purification, as in the Medieval Latin of the Carolingian period (Wright 1982:ix, 260–61).14 Above all, high language emphasizes a written form, low language an 14. In his study of late Latin and early Romance, Wright shows how complex the relation of script to language can be (1982:261–62). No fewer than four stages of development occur, in which script at first closely mirrors language (proto-Romance) and later records traditional spellings that were nonetheless read, despite archaic orthography, in local vernaculars. According to Wright’s hypothesis, true bilingualism did not exist until 200 years after the Carolingian reforms that standardized liturgy and formal language for purely official settings (Wright 1982:104). Yet any parallels with Maya script are limited. The languages involved (Old French, Old Spanish) are far more closely related than Ch’olan and Yukatekan, which involve highly contrastive morphology and, as a result, radically different orthographic accommodations. Verbal forms were simply too distinct to be housed comfortably within the same or similar spellings. Fig. 6. Ch’olan terms in the texts of north-central Yucatán. a, ti-i, ti’, “mouth, doorway” (Chichén Itzá Las Monjas, Lintel 4, E1); b, yo-to-ti, y-oto:t, “his house, dwelling” (Chichén Itzá Temple of the Four Lintels, Lintel 2, F1); c, yi-ta-hi, y-ita-hi, “?” (Halakal Lintel 1, A8); d, t’a?-b’a-yi, t’ab’-ay-i, “ascends” (Ikil Lintel 1, B1). unwritten one. The medium of script retards change in written language by recording, in tomes of acknowledged prestige, the linguistic habits of previous generations. In contrast, low speech is often a localized phenomenon, conditioned by slang and invigorated by changing usage. A prestige language is one that is preponderantly high, written, employed by trained scribes and exegetes, and suitable for formal or liturgical settings. Its use confers prestige but not necessarily to elites alone—an overemphasis on social distinction can blur understanding of its other properties, including its tendency to be sacred. Its appeal is not only to those of wealth and power, although this does seem to have been the case with Mixtec iya vocabulary. The Mixtec of Oaxaca conceived of such 336 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 Fig. 7. A Yukatekan spelling of ke:h, “deer,” in ka-lake-hi-TOK’, kal-ke:h-tok’, a possible place-name (Yulá Lintel 1, G1-H1). words as the primordial language of elites and as embodiments of “true words,” timeless, potent, and sacred (King 1994:104). Diglossia and prestige languages are abundantly attested in the past. Good examples include Sumerian and Middle Egyptian, although there are many other possible illustrations, including Hebrew and Medieval Latin as a high residue of vernaculars spoken in late antiquity (Tuttle 1996:633). As early as 2400 b.c., Akkadian, a Semitic language, began to displace Sumerian, a linguistic isolate with no known descendants (Cooper 1973:242–43). Nonetheless, Sumerian persisted as a literary and ritual language for millennia thereafter. As long as Sumerian was a living language, influence from Akkadian remained relatively small and the need for learning aids insignificant. When Sumerian became extinct, Akkadian interference intensified, as did the necessity for grammatical explications (Vanstiphout 1979:124–25); a similar process probably occurred with Ch’olti’an in the Postclassic Yucatán Peninsula. Scribal schools clearly regarded Sumerian as a foreign language, although they probably spoke it within their academies for at least another 1,000 years (Cooper 1973:244). Akkadian too persisted in this fashion: long after the population had shifted to Aramaic, letter writing continued in Akkadian (Cooper 1973:241). Ironically, the very last cuneiform writing, dating to the first century a.d., recorded Sumerian word signs (Walker 1987:17). So, too, the latest texts at Copán, Honduras, recorded long vowels in glyphs even though the language had evidently shifted to short vowels—a momentous change in Classic Ch’olti’an (Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998:285). As for Middle Egyptian (also known as Classical Egyptian), it served as a living, if high, language from 2000 to 1300 b.c., recording wisdom texts, hymns, adventure narratives, and funerary invocations (Loprieno 1995:6). By the New Kingdom and until the expiration of Egyptian civilization it existed as a religious language alongside spoken forms of later Egyptian. John Baines suggests that, as the spoken language evolved, various scripts, hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic, preserved earlier languages (1983:582). The archaic quality of Middle Egyptian made it attractive in a civilization that self-consciously sought and strengthened continuities with the past. In our view, the Maya case is not dissimilar; local ver- naculars can, in certain contexts, “seep” into the high script, sometimes as lexical items (-otoch or some month names), more rarely as grammatical forms such as -wan, which seems to have originated in Acalán Chontal and swept up the Usumacinta Basin during the height of the Classic period.15 We presume that Maya script was a marker of social distinction that helped to establish horizontal linkages between the elites of the Classic period, forging a linguistic community of greater lateral than vertical solidarity (see Hopkins 1985:3 for similar views). In Brown and Gilman’s (1960) terms, its use can simultaneously establish closeness (solidarity) and distance (formality), depending on who is doing the reading, listening, and responding (see also Errington 1985:14). Lateral closeness or solidarity—that enjoyed between people of roughly equal station—likely formed along multiplex networks, including those facilitated by scribal ties and family alliances crossing political boundaries (Chambers 1995:72–73). Unfortunately, we can never know, from our limited evidence, the nuances of linguistic interactions between vertically disposed individuals, despite the fact that these subtleties constitute the essence of social distancing and language etiquette in comparable palace societies (e.g., Errington 1985:12–21; 1988:194).16 Nor can we forget that the forms reconstructed from historical linguistics probably reflect vernaculars rather than the high forms expressed in script. Depending on the stage of written language, relations between script and vernacular were likely to vary tremendously, and no single model of that relationship will suffice for the Maya region. In some areas, especially to the south of the Yucatán Pen15. John Justeson proposes an alternative explanation (personal communication, 1999), namely, that the -wan form was always present locally both in Tabasco and in the Usumacinta. However, it did not come to be expressed in hieroglyphs until local scribes in Tabasco, previously illiterate, learned to spell the form under the impetus of a new way of recording month signs, especially MUWA:N-wa-ni. This orthographic innovation was then transmitted to scribes up the Usumacinta drainage, with the result that the new use of -wan as a verbal suffix came not from morphological diffusion but from orthographic innovation. There are many problems with this argument, if, indeed, we have understood the claim and its requisite assumptions. First, a local scribal tradition is demonstrably present in the supposedly “illiterate” zones, a point shown by Early Classic glyphs from Palenque and Bellote. Second, the syllables wa and ni are evident in Usumacinta texts at an early date. Why, then, would local scribes be unable or disinclined to record -wan by using precisely these elements? For us, the more economical—and preferable—argument is one that posits an infusion of -wan into Classic Ch’olti’an from a substrate that is ancestral to modern Chontal. 16. The Classic Maya did perceive distinctive speech styles in a very few inscriptions. These are characterized by quotative formulae beginning with first- and second-person statements and ending with a verb phrase that alludes to speech acts (“he said it”) and identifying interlocutors (Houston and Stuart 1993). Such statements typically appear in mythological contexts on decorated ceramics relating parables or exemplary actions. One historical speech act may be recorded on Piedras Negras Panel (Lintel) 3, but its content is difficult to discern. From their rarity and marked nature, it would seem that the Classic Maya regarded such statements metapragmatically as distinctive speech events (Silverstein 1976:48). h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 337 (Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998), transitive positionals of a certain form, a distinct pronominal set, an aj nominal absolutizer (Robertson and Houston 1997), and, as suggested before, a declarative suffix for intransitives. We also find isolated lexical items that may reflect Common Mayan or pre-Common Wasteko-Ch’olan pronunciations, such as the word for “god,” k’uh, spelled k’u-hu at Yaxchilan (Lintel 37, D7; the Ch’olan spelling is ch’uh), or “house,” y-ato:t at Rı́o Azul, both from the Early Classic period (fig. 8). Much work remains to be done on these unexpected forms, but such archaizing—if that is indeed what it is—reflects the status of Classic Ch’olti’an as a high or prestige language, although it may equally express our poor knowledge of other, contemporary Mayan languages. What deserves greater caution in the future is any assertion that Eastern and Western Ch’olan diverged as late as the middle years of the Classic period (Justeson et al. 1985:60; Kaufman and Norman 1984:82–83) or by Postclassic times (Hopkins 1985:3). Our information signals that these approximate dates are far too late—that Ch’olan languages began to diverge centuries before. Conclusion Fig. 8. Spellings of k’uh, “god,” and -ato:t,“house, dwelling.” a, b, K’UH and k’u-hu in the spelling of ’o:l-is k’uh,“center? deity” (Palenque Palace Tablet, E14-F14, and Yaxchilan Lintel 37, C7-D7); c, d, yoOTO:T-ti, y-oto:t, contrasted with ya-ATO:T-ti, y-ato: t, “his house, dwelling” (Palenque Tablet of the Cross, D12, and Rı́o Azul Tomb 6 painting). insula, there was probably a clinal relationship between spoken and written language. Areas to the north and west doubtless exhibited more disjunctive patterns between the two, with different sociolinguistic consequences for all concerned. To a striking degree Classic Ch’olti’an is, on current evidence, archaic or “conservative,” preserving many elements from Common Mayan including vowel length It is impossible in this paper to address all the features that substantiate an Eastern Ch’olan affiliation of Classic Maya script or to undertake a site-by-site statistical analysis of locally expressed verb morphology. Such tasks would need monographic treatment. Suffice it to say that the spatial pattern of morphological elements points to the widespread presence of Eastern Ch’olan throughout Classic Maya script, regardless of region, regardless of period. We invite other scholars to test this assertion against the many hundreds, if not thousands, of texts that form our corpus of evidence. The diagnostic attributes of Classic Ch’olti’an are attested from nearly the earliest texts to the latest, from Honduras to northern Yucatán. From this one can draw methodological and substantive conclusions. Methodologically, scholars must now concentrate on Ch’orti’, the sole living language of Eastern Ch’olan, and extract fully what can be retrieved of its ancestral form, Ch’olti’. Ethnohistoric documents may yet be found that contain additional examples of this second, poorly attested language (deVos 1988:159–63). Necessarily, this research will continue to be comparative, albeit in a more disciplined fashion. The rich lexical sources in Yukatekan and other Mayan languages remain important, provided that their linguistic relation to Eastern Ch’olan is understood and their comparison done in appropriate perspective. With an Eastern Ch’olan view—if that is even a good label for it (see n. 1)—scholars can begin to research subtle dialect differences such as those registered in variant patterns of vowel shortening (Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998). Substantively, there remains some disagreement about aspectual morphemes and discourse patterns in script (Houston 1997, Wald 1998), but there is accumulating data to show 338 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 the descent of Ch’orti’ from Classic Ch’olti’an (Robertson 1998). An urgent subject for future study is the relationship between Ch’orti’-speakers and the bearers of Classic Maya civilization: Are the Ch’orti’ the inheritors of Classic practices in ways that have yet to be detected? Did their ancestors hold a privileged place in Classic society? Did these languages survive because they existed in zones where all speakers, high- and low-status, used the same language? Finally, how was relative uniformity achieved in the texts, and by what means of recension? What, in short, were the mechanisms and scribal communications that assisted broad comprehension of this language? At the least, Ch’orti’-speakers now deserve closer ethnographic and archaeological attention. In the future Mayanists will need to pay greater attention to the comparative study of prestige languages allied with script. Sumerian, although extinct by ca. 2000 b.c., was studied and written until the beginning of the Common Era. Middle Egyptian served as the principal means of communicating literary and religious information until the Greco-Roman period, some 2,000 years after its use as a living language. But why the special quality and prestigious persistence of an ancestral form of Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’? Why was Classic Ch’olti’an prestigious? To speculate from poor data, it may have been the language of Preclassic Tikal or Calakmul, cities of abiding stature (Martin and Grube 1995), or, on yet weaker evidence, of the Mirador Basin at an earlier time, when it hosted the first regionally integrated, monumental florescence of lowland Maya civilization (in the absence of credible decipherments it is unclear whether the few texts at Kaminaljuyu in highland Guatemala were at all involved in these textual and linguistic developments). It is also possible that, much like Nahuatl, Classic Ch’olti’an served as a multifunctional lingua franca that performed an important role in diplomacy and trade. Whatever its origin, Classic Ch’olti’an may have established transpolity linkages between the elites of the Classic period, serving a linguistic community of greater lateral than vertical solidarity. Comments j i l l b ro d y Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, La. 708034105, U.S.A. 15 xi 99 Consideration of the social role of Mayan writing is appropriate as knowledge from glyph translation increases. From what we know about the ancient Maya archaeologically and about the role of writing in states at such a technological level, it is clear that most Mayan writing would have been uninterpretable by commoners, although publicly placed stelae depicting scenes along with largely calendric writing were more accessible (C. Brown 1991, Durbin 1980). With their “geographic argument,” Houston et al. attempt to have it both ways: they recognize the importance of geographical contiguity in arguments that they themselves use and mention the considerable borrowings of glyphic lexicon between neighboring languages but go on to state that the geography of colonial languages is “hardly very direct evidence” for language affiliation. While linguistic evidence must be given priority, geographic evidence is also relevant, given trade, intermarriage, and the consequent multilingualism among speakers of various Mayan languages prior to contact. Houston et al. overemphasize the “Yukatek ‘bias.’ ” They claim that prior to 1930 there was “wide availability of Yukatek dictionaries and grammars” but offer no citations to them. One assumes that they refer to documents such as Pacheco Cruz (1938), which provides lexicon and short phrases but little morphology. Similarly, their depiction of “Northern Yucatan [as] the major regional focus of Maya field archaeology” implies that the findings of that field research were available at that time, which was not the case. They repeat the petty complaint requisite among those who do archaeological or historical analysis but never interact with living speakers of the languages about the supposed confusion caused by using the spellings of Mayan language names that are advocated by institutions led by speakers of Mayan languages (n. 2). However, it is actually much more challenging to follow the imprecision about which level of reconstruction the authors are referring to at any given point, whether an individual language, a grouping, a branch, and at what point in time—for example, (1) discussion of “Chol-Chorti-Mopan” and “Choloid” without reference to what level of generalization either represents in relation to the taxonomy in figure 1 and (2) the reference to the “ubiquitous suffix-i:y” without identifying the extent of its ubiquity. Logically, Classic Mayan must occupy an intermediate position between traditional family groupings of languages and the modern spoken (or recently dead or dying) languages. However, Houston et al. may be a few steps ahead of themselves. The translation of glyphs has recently relied more on morphology than other historical studies of Mayan languages, but reliance on the phonological similarities and differences between lexical cognates across languages has actually been the “common convention[s]” of Mayan historical linguistics, resulting in models like figure 1. Arguments about the morphology of intransitive verbs in Classic Ch’olti’an are not furthered when claims are based on unglossed examples. Glyph reading has only recently arrived at the point where morphemes can be read with confidence, and modern languages have not all been analyzed morphologically to universal satisfaction. Therefore, basing a reconstruction nearly exclusively on morphology is an adventurous undertaking. The absence of citations for most of the linguistic data used renders the invitation to “test this assertion against the many hundreds, if not h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 339 thousands, of texts that form our corpus of evidence” falsely generous. I am not the reviewer whom the authors cite in n. 9 as suggesting that “the assumptions underlying comparative linguistics are potentially as weak as those used in glottochronology.” Glottochronology cannot apply to Mayan language prehistory because its dates were based on situations involving different social factors in change. Indigenous dating, where available, is the most useful, provided that we can be assured that the inscriptions of dates were not manipulated (as they sometimes were) for any pressing social reasons of the time. However, it is easy for nonspecialists to forget that all reconstructions are hypotheses, a fact that is obscured by the authors’ authoritative proclamations. As for the claim that the language of the glyphs represents an elite language, a number of factors are given too little attention. Elite or high written languages usually do not represent any native language but are taught and learned in special institutions by noble categories of individuals only. Mayan script probably represented the high language in a diglossic situation. It is, however, always for social reasons that languages change and that writing exists, and the social aspects of language are usually unavailable when dealing with ancient scripts. This is doubtless because of the impossibility of reconstructing the precise social situations of ancient times. Explanatory power can be found only in an argument linking language ideology with the power that writing represents (Freire 1994). Writing is a phenomenon of states, and it is used for social control. john g. fought 604 Looking Glass Dr., Diamond Bar, Calif. 91765, U.S.A. 11 xii 99 So much is wrong in this article that in this comment I must ignore not only the epigraphic issues but also some serious linguistic questions. Until I can prepare a longer paper for publication elsewhere, I note that my publications on Chorti and Cholti address some relevant points (Fought 1973[1969], 1984). Robertson kindly sent me his 1999 paper, not yet easily accessible, which gives a fuller statement of his view of the relationship between Cholti and Chorti; I thank him for it. However, I am regretfully convinced that his treatment of the historical development of the Mayan language family falls below internationally accepted standards of method, argument, and evidence in historical and comparative linguistics. He relies on an idiosyncratic conception of morphological change (Robertson 1992), based in turn on a misunderstanding of Kuryłowicz (1947). Evidently he is not familiar with the devastating critique of that paper by Mańczak (1957–58), who gathered many counterexamples and noted that even his own much broader approach accounted for fewer than half of the analogic changes he examined. Mańczak concluded that most such changes are simply accidents of linguistic history. But Robertson seeks far- reaching explanations and postulates deductive laws of language change. He uses them within an unchanging grid of inflectional and derivational categories whose origins and relevance to the Mayan languages he never explains and through which the actual forms of the language move from cell to cell, driven (or sucked) onward as if by the power of markedness itself. Analogic change doesn’t work that way: it extends the scope of some patterned relationships among forms at the expense of others. As a consequence of such changes in the distribution of forms, the structure of grammatical categories may also change in various ways. The body of detailed, interconnected findings built up in more than a century of comparative linguistic study grows largely from the interactions of regular phonological change and irregular morphological change. Robertson’s pretended deductive principles of language change are related to this classic comparative method of historical reconstruction as cold fusion is to physics. More unfortunately still, Robertson seems not to understand the ergative-absolutive predication system of the Mayan languages, as found in especially clear form in Cholti and Chorti. The categories of transitive and intransitive, fundamental to such systems, are not found in Robertson’s grid of tense, aspect, mood, and voice features. He mislabels the imperfective absolutive prefix in Chorti a-way-an ‘he/she sleeps’ as an ergative (1998:6). He creates nonsensical labels for other forms, such as transitive-intransitive for the always intransitive “potential” infixed -h- formation of Chorti. He fails to recognize exact counterparts of Chorti imperfective absolutive forms (a-t’ox-pa) when used in the doctrinal texts of the Colonial Cholti manuscript Arte of ca. 1695 (atoxpa). His interpretation of the Cholti imperfective absolutive prefixes leans on the analysis by its anonymous Benedictine author. Neither he nor Robertson was able to accept the a- prefix for what it obviously is, a third-person (imperfective absolutive) marker. He labels the two sets of personal prefixes, one ergative and one absolutive, just as they are now used in Chorti, as embodying “an unacceptable homonymy” that must lead to change. In fact, the transitive (ergative) stems and the intransitive (absolutive) stems are easily distinguishable by their combinations of affixes. Unfortunately, it must be said that Robertson’s work does not provide a trustworthy foundation for Mayan linguistics or epigraphy. c h a r l e s a n d r e w h o fl i n g Department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale, Ill. 62901, U.S.A. 10 xi 99 As the authors intended, this provocative paper raises a number of interesting issues regarding the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphic writing and the relationship of written Mayan texts to spoken languages. They cover so much ground in so little space that they are unable to do justice to many of the issues raised, but they do succeed in making their own positions clearer than before. 340 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 The very brief review of previous research on the relationship of the script to spoken language is oversimplified to the point that it is misleading. Many of the authors cited in table 1 as favoring one linguistic affiliation or another in fact hold more complex views, generally involving components of both Ch’olan and Yukatekan languages. For example, I am cited as saying that the glyphs reflect a Yukatekan language, while the paper referred to was restricted to testing Yukatekan versus Ch’olan readings of inscriptions in one area, the central Petén. I explicitly stated that I was making no claims for other areas and that the results were not clear in the Petén. To cite Lounsbury as a proponent of highland connections is similarly misleading, as he was an early and strong proponent of linking the inscriptions to Ch’olan and Yukatekan languages. In any case, the question of linguistic affiliation is not settled by a sampling of changing fashions among epigraphers but requires evidence, and it seems to me premature to dismiss the possibility of a Yukatekan system. Moreover, having argued for an exclusively Ch’olan system, the subsequent excursus into the history of highland Mayan languages seems unnecessary. It is clear that Yukatekan and Ch’olan languages have been in long-term contact, as evidenced by lexical and morphological borrowings (Justeson et al. 1985). In such a situation, the authors are quite correct in cautioning against making inferences about linguistic affiliation on the basis of isolated words. The priority given to morphology, however, is overstated. Both phonology and syntax are also quite relevant and are routinely considered in historical linguistic research. They argue persuasively for the importance of increased collaboration among linguists and epigraphers. The authors make strong claims that the language of the writing system throughout the Maya lowlands was an Eastern Ch’olan language and that it was relatively unchanged throughout the approximately 600-year-long Classic period. This would be a rather extreme case of diglossia and would require a significant revision in the language history of the region. Most researchers have accepted Kaufman’s (1976, 1990; Kaufman and Norman 1984) proposal whereby the diversification of Ch’olan occurred during the Classic period, not before it. The authors suggest that glottochronological dating is unreliable and that “datable inscriptions will provide far better, direct information on the timing of language change during this period.” This is true only insofar as they are incorrect about a static ritual language. They generally argue against spatial and temporal variation in the script. This position runs counter to widely recognized patterns of regional variation in writing, iconography, and architecture. They suggest that variation may come from “individual scribal or rhetorical preference,” but regional patterning is much more easily related to language or dialect variation. The evidence provided in support of an Eastern Ch’olan affiliation for the entire script is incomplete in a number of respects. Virtually no evidence is presented to demonstrate that there is no variation over space and time. An exception (and counterexample) that the authors accept is that a Western Ch’olan pattern for positionals marked by -wan originated in the northwest and spread from there during the Late Classic. We need many more such studies of the distributions of signs over time and space. The part of the paper that I find most interesting and useful, because it is testable, is the system of verb morphology that they propose for “Classic Ch’olti’an.” Curiously, and disturbingly, it is significantly different from systems previously described by these authors. They propose here that active transitive verbs took a vowel-harmonic ∗-V1w suffix in the declarative mood, which, following Wald (1994), they believe was recorded in the script by a -wa suffix. Such a reconstruction differs from that of Robertson (1992:179–81), which mentions no such suffix for Eastern Ch’olan. Declarative intransitives, it is claimed, generally take an -i suffix (! ∗ik), a significant departure from Houston’s (1997:293–94) claim that -i was a completive aspect marker. Whether the verbal system was split-ergative is not mentioned, but I take the statement that “in Mayan languages, verbs that have a single argument take the absolutive pronoun” to imply that they consider the system to be completely ergative (as claimed in Houston 1997). In all extant Ch’olan and Yukatekan languages, incompletive intransitive verbs take Set A (ergative) pronouns and are thus split-ergative (cf. Quizar and Knowles-Berry 1988), and many researchers believe that the Mayan script was similarly split-ergative. Ideally, when one is comparing evidence garnered from historical linguistics with that gleaned from the hieroglyphic record, the analyses should be developed independently. It is disturbing to me that the hypothesized system continues to change but the insistence that it is Eastern Ch’olan remains. The paper’s claim that “an urgent subject for future study is the relationship between Ch’orti-speakers and the bearers of Classic Maya civilization” is an essentialist and ahistorical argument that runs contrary to recent scholarship among Mayans, linguists, and cultural anthropologists (cf. Fischer and Brown 1996, Warren 1998). Given their conviction that the language is Eastern Ch’olan, the absence of references to modern linguistic work on Ch’orti (e.g., Fought 1967, 1972; Pérez Martı́nez 1994; Quizar 1994a, b) is odd. A serious difficulty with an exclusive focus on morphology at the expense of syntax is that the reconstructed system is largely untestable unless one looks beyond verb paradigms. Mayan languages are well known for their elaborate voice systems, including the antipassive in addition to the passive. Most current debates about verb morphology hinge on whether a verb form is active transitive, passive, or antipassive and on whether the system was completely ergative or split-ergative. In order to determine the voice system, one must look beyond the verb to larger clausal and discourse levels. For example, antipassives generally allow indefinite or generic patient arguments (incorporated objects) but not definite objects, while passives favor definite patient arguments (as their subjects). To be more specific, the -aw verbal h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 341 suffix that Houston et al. interpret as a transitive suffix has also been interpreted as an antipassive suffix (Lacadena 2000), Mora Marin 1999), which would result in a very different understanding of verbal morphology. What they interpret as transitive clauses might in fact be incompletive antipassives in a split-ergative system (Mora Marin 1999). This is another area that needs more research on sign-distributional patterns of grammatical systems. Diglossia refers to a situation in which markedly different language varieties are used in different contexts and thus involves differences of register and genre. Mayan writing is associated with formal, ritual and political contexts, which differ from less formal contexts such as ordinary conversation. I think almost everyone agrees that Mayan hieroglyphic writing reflects a formal register and welcomes a reevaluation of Classic Maya linguistic practices from a sociolinguistic perspective. The assertion that it is unchanging and Eastern Ch’olan requires demonstration that can only come from further research on temporal and spatial variation. patricia a. mc anany Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 34 Concord Ave., Cambridge, Mass. 02138, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 29 xi 99 Over the past century, pursuit of the language in which Classic Maya inscriptions were composed has followed a path similar to navigation through the streets of Boston. Progress has been impeded by roadblocks, one-way streets, unmarked avenues, and unexpected cul-de-sacs. During the first half of this century, some influential scholars espoused the position that Maya hieroglyphs were a largely uninterpretable form of rebus writing that contained little in the way of grammatical or phonetic structure. As Houston, Robertson, and Stuart chronicle, subsequent approaches to Maya hieroglyphic texts tended to focus on modern Yucatek or, more recently, Ch’ol as the descendant “tongue” of the Classic Mayan spoken and written language. Now, analyzing the morphology of verb phrases and employing principles of historical linguistics, Houston et al. suggest that the inscriptions were written in an ancestral form of Ch’orti’, one of the least-studied Mayan languages. The parsimony of this proposal is appealing. Historically, the multilingual character of the Maya region has posed a conundrum for epigraphers who noted lexical similarities between the inscriptions and several modern languages, giving rise to the notion that Classic-period literacy was interlingual—a rare if not singular form of literacy. The “new” language—Classic Ch’olti’an, ironically dead already—proposed by Houston et al. is a logical consequence of their argument and appears to be supported with epigraphic data. If it did indeed exist as a written language, then who spoke it? The authors propose that it was a prestige language, spoken primarily by elites eager to distinguish themselves from the rest of the population. Such diglossia probably existed on the fringes of the Classic Maya world, in northern Yucatán, to the west in the Grijalva Basin, to the southeast at Copan, but what of the southern Maya lowlands? What evidence exists to demonstrate that farming families of the Péten and Belize did not speak Classic Ch’olti’an even if they could not write it? In fairness to the authors, they do intimate that Classic Ch’olti’an was clinally distributed, with southern lowland commoners speaking a vernacular not too distant from that employed by elites and scribes. But if the difference was comparable to that separating spoken U.S. English from that published in academic journals, then was Classic Ch’olti’an really a prestige language? Here, the arguments presented by Houston, Robertson, and Stuart become more tenuous, as they are predicated upon the expectation of diglossia rather than the demonstration of it. Most of the prestige languages cited as examples were profoundly distanced linguistically and temporally from the language spoken by society as a whole. Following this line of thought, the authors suggest that Classic Ch’olti’an actually may have been the language of Preclassic lowland Maya society, enduring into the Classic period only among elites and in written texts. This intriguing idea is certainly worthy of additional scrutiny. Such follow-up, however, is frustrated by a dearth of material referable to the hypothesized vernacular “low-Mayan” employed by commoners during the Classic period. There is one class of information—“pseudo-glyphs”—that has received no scholarly attention but appears commonly on polychrome pottery produced by artisans not of the palace tradition. If subjected to rigorous comparative study, such glyphs might provide a base for evaluation of the diglossia hypothesis. Based as it is on comparative examples of class-based linguistic diversity, the diglossia argument is a welcome antidote to the fetishization of Classic Maya civilization, emphasizing as it does the commonalities in strategies of elite demarcation rather than the singular mystery of Classic Maya society. But despite this effort at situating Classic Maya script within an established tradition of prestige languages, the plain fact remains that the abundance, complexity, and logo-syllabic structure of the hieroglyphic texts produced by Classic Maya scribes have no rival in the Americas. As is clear from this article, continued success in gaining and understanding of these texts is dependent upon the application, with increasing rigor, of linguistic methods. While Classical archaeologists studying “Old World” civilizations have long included philology as an essential element of their tool kit, those working in the Americas have not considered linguistics (or even native Mesoamerican languages) to be part of a core of knowledge essential to interpreting the past. In the grand scheme of things, Maya inscriptions pose the ultimate challenge to Americanist archaeology, long predicated upon the study of developmental sequences based on sherds, lithics, bone, and architecture. Snugly fitting into a scientific paradigm, Americanists were free to narrate the deep history of the Americas without having to deal with the complexities of indigenous texts. In the Maya region, where archaeological 342 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 research has taken an increasingly historical bent, this position is no longer tenable. Despite this “writing on the wall,” much epigraphic research has been marginalized from mainstream anthropological archaeology, accused of being too technical and too esoteric—a strange turn of events indeed, since translation of ancient Maya script gives voice to those long silent, a purported goal of anthropology. The research presented here shows quite clearly that continued antilinguistic bias will adversely impact our ability to understand not only Maya written script but also the role of that script within a class-divided society. It’s time to remove the roadblock. john m. d. pohl Department of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles, Calif. 90024, U.S.A. 22 xi 99 Houston, Robertson, and Stuart make a persuasive argument for Ch’olti’ as the source of a prestige language employed by the Classic Maya elite in the formulation of their hieroglyphic inscriptions. In the debate on the subject that I have witnessed since I attended my first Palenque Roundtable nearly 25 years ago, pro and con arguments rarely superseded the polemics of differing factions of linguists and epigraphers. This made sense at the time, for truth is ultimately found in compromise through such debates. However, in broadening the comparative universe to include a consideration of the social motivations for the development of synthetic languages and writing systems in other civilizations, Houston et al. introduce much-needed perspective to the problem. What I find intriguing is that while it appears that the Classic Maya inscriptions were indeed based on a specific dialect, this would not necessarily prevent peoples from formulating words in their own dialects or even introducing foreign terms if they so desired. The evidence points to the continued usage of Ch’olt’i by venerable tradition, therefore, rather than by the invocation of strict linguistic rules for their own sake. I was especially interested in the discussion section of this paper, for it centers on issues that are of concern to those working on not only hieroglyphic but also pictographic writing systems. The authors propose that lateral linguistic closeness or solidarity among Classic Maya elites formed along networks facilitated by scribal ties and family alliances crossing political boundaries, but they emphasize that there is often little evidence to suggest what relationship elite discourse might have had with the vernaculars still in use today. Some comparative insight might come from consideration of the Postclassic Mixtec. By a.d. 1250, Oaxaca was divided among scores of dispersed great houses and city-states ruled by petty kings and queens. Like those of the Classic Maya, royal houses employed intermarriage to create webs of reciprocal relationships that consolidated elite control over much of the Mixteca Alta, the Mixteca Baja, and parts of the Valley of Oaxaca. The linguistic situation was complex. There were ten different languages spoken in and around this region and numerous dialects of each. Nahua may have been used as an elite lingua franca in some cases, but “solidarity” was primarily fostered by the use of a pictographic system executed in the MixtecaPuebla horizon style. Following the work of Jiménez Moreno, among others, Kathryn Josserand divided the Mixteca Alta into three separate dialectical areas that she termed Western Alta, Eastern Alta, and Northeastern Alta (Josserand 1983). Finding little to suggest that these divisions were necessarily the product of topographical barriers, she thought that they might be the result of some form of differentiated social behavior. My own examination of primary genealogical stems portrayed in the codices indicates that Mixtec kings and queens did in fact maintain three preferred alliance corridors that ran directly through each of the three dialectical areas (Pohl 1995, 1997). This suggests that systems of royal marriage intended to bind families into competitive monopolies probably regulated social interaction among their constituent populations as well. We do not know if the Mixtec elite spoke a special dialect as a class of people, but they certainly shared a special vocabulary rooted in homonyms and poetic metaphors. Tone puns may have been intended to bridge dialects, while poetic metaphors were rooted in the arcane symbolism of religious stories that unified the elite as a class but also differentiated their descent groups. Examples of both homonyms and metaphors are evident in the rebus signs that are so prolific throughout the Mixtec codices. Remembering that Classic Maya texts were frequently associated with an equally rich body of pictographic and figurative imagery, I think that we need to consider more of the effect of poetic and iconic symbolism on the synthesis of preColumbian court languages as well. andrea stone Department of Art History, University of WisconsinMilwaukee, Milwaukee, Wis. 53201, U.S.A. 1 xi 99 The proposal that Classic Maya texts were written in a prestige language ancestral to Eastern Ch’olan and often not the language of the scribes who wrote them is a fascinating idea that will reshape our thinking about the social context of this remarkable writing system. This notion raises further questions about who could comprehend such texts or whether they were for rote recitation or primarily for visual impact. We must now face the likelihood that scribes were trained to write not in their own languages but rather in a semifossilized language that also incorporated archaisms from centuries earlier. Thus, while it may be true, as Coe and Kerr (1998: 36) argue, that Maya writing should not be construed as difficult to master simply because it is logo-syllabic, this paper suggests that literacy was highly restricted. As Houston et al. aver, Classic Maya writing forged ties horizontally among elites who shared the specialized knowledge of the prestige language and left the masses to admire from a distance. At the same time, what the writing recorded was not a strictly dead language but one that h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 343 responded to the contemporary linguistic situation, for instance, showing influences from Western Ch’olan and Yukatekan, dialectical idiosyncrasies, and innovations in spoken Eastern Ch’olan. This combination of conservatism and flexibility in the formation of “Classic Ch’olti’an” paints a complex picture that will be the subject of much discussion in the future. The critical idea put forth is linking the prestige language with ancestral Eastern Ch’olan. Given the often conflicting or ambiguous picture presented by many texts, proving this point beyond doubt will be slow going. One of the inscriptions from Naj Tunich, Drawing 65 (Stone 1995:figs. 7–9), uses Ch’olan verbal suffixing but also includes a Yukatek phonetic spelling of the month Pax, deciphered by David Stuart (1987:fig. 39a). Another apparent Yukatek lexeme is the glyph for “cloud” (Houston and Stuart 1994:44; Stone 1996). Phonetic clues unequivocally point to a reading of muyal, a specifically Yukatekan term. Interestingly, muyal is also recorded for Ch’olti’ (Morán 1935:47), but other Ch’olan languages use some form of the Proto-Ch’olan tokal, “cloud” (Kaufman and Norman 1984:132), indicating that it was a late borrowing into Ch’olt’i. Such mixed evidence for linguistic domination defies easy resolution of the problem tackled by the authors, but it is to their immense credit that they have staked out a position. The crux of their argument for ancestral Eastern Ch’olan as the language of the glyphs rests on historical changes in verb morphology specific to that language but reflected widely in the writing system. This assertion needs to be scrutinized carefully by specialists in comparative Mayan linguistics. As an art historian, I see insights stemming from this model of a prestige language that can be applied to imagery. For instance, one figure in the Santa Rita murals, who may represent God H, has a glyphic collocation on his shoulder (Gann 1900:pl. 39). The central glyph is a logograph for “flower” framed by a phonetic spelling of the word “flower” as nich. This is a Ch’olan spelling (the Yukatek spelling is nik), and yet the Santa Rita murals are located in a region of northern Belize that in Late Postclassic times was almost surely Yukatek-speaking. Here we have a deliberate Ch’olanization of the word “flower” for prestige reasons. Such an idea accords perfectly with the dramatic Mixteca-Puebla style of the Santa Rita murals, surely invoked for its foreign prestige value. Let us hope that these three authors will continue to refine their ideas about Classic Ch’olti’an as a prestige language, as they will provide much grist for many Mayanists’ mills. This hypothesis has far-reaching implications. judith storniolo Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104-6398, U.S.A. 15 xi 99 With so many advances in decipherment and epigraphy in the past ten years, some of them the work of the authors of this article, the time may very well be ripe for systematically analyzing the phonological and morphological components of the Classic-period script to determine its structure and grammar. Although their article is only a sketch of part of the grammatical system, it is the beginning of this process. Their well-described and documented assertion that the Classic-period scribes wrote in a prestige language explains the homogeneous nature of the script over time and space. Testing their Eastern Ch’olan hypothesis on the Classic script will most likely set the tone and trajectory for Mayan epigraphic and historical linguistic research for the next decade. The most puzzling assertion in the article is Houston et al.’s cladistic representation of Eastern Ch’olan, showing Ch’olti as the direct ancestor of Ch’orti. The shared innovations that set Ch’olti and Ch’orti apart from Western Ch’olan make these two languages candidates for subgrouping, therefore making them sister languages descendant from a common ancestor rather than mother and daughter respectively (see Kaufman and Norman 1984). Genetic relationships among languages rest firmly on a social base. The implications of the relationship between these two languages will determine the subsequent claims and proposals concerning the history of the speakers in real time. The primary verbal categories in the article are confusing and their explanations sketchy, perhaps because of space constraints. The authors ignore the narrative syntax of the inscriptions and the evidence from modern sources in formulating their verbal hypothesis. Their claim that positionals “tend not to take aspect markers” may not apply to Ch’orti. In modern Ch’orti roots are inherently transitive or intransitive, both bound forms, and stative in the case of free forms such as nouns and attributives. Verbal positionals are a subset of a larger group that includes free forms that are adjectival in nature. In Ch’orti verbal positionals are formed by adding -Vn/-Vm to the root. They are completive in aspect (unmarked in Ch’orti in the intransitive completive). Free forms can also be incompletive in aspect when marked by the /in/ prefix. Both bound and free forms can be reduplicated (e.g., pak’em, “planted”; p’ahxan, “first”; in k’iti, “squeezed”; in kit’kit’, “very cramped, narrow”). The historical status of this aspectual marking needs to be explored further. Speakers of split-ergative languages must be cognizant of two primary distinctions concerning predication—whether the utterance is transitive or intransitive and whether the action is completive or incompletive. In Ch’orti, as previously mentioned, verbal roots are bound forms. When no other inflectional or derivational affixation is present, the root takes a thematic suffix. The suffix -V1y and -i mentioned by Houston et al. match the thematic suffixes for the verbal roots discussed. Thematic suffixes seem to occur systematically only in Eastern Ch’olan, and they occur next to the verbal root but not with most derived forms. This could account for the nonoccurrence of -i after -laj/-aj and argue the likelihood 344 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 that the “i” in the syllable -ni is mute in the antipassive positional form CHUM- [mu]-wa-n(i). The secondary verbs described and analyzed by the authors as ∗-V1y medio-passives are better read as transitives when they are placed contextually within the narrative syntax of the inscriptions (Barbara MacLeod, personal communication). In modern narratives in Ch’orti, deictics are numerous and are an integral part of the narrative text (see Fought 1972). Using an alternative interpretation that follows narrative syntax, the -V1 would be the thematic suffix and the glyphic suffix y(a) read as a deictic. This alternative interpretation would also work with occurrences of y(a) with -i (see Wald 2000). The arguments and assertions that Houston, Robertson, and Stuart present regarding the structure of the verbal system of what they call “Classic Ch’olti’an” continue to be actively debated (Lacadena 2000). A complete monograph including documentation from their distributional studies of the inscriptions and presenting their thoroughly worked-out historical and comparative assertions would be welcome. In spite of the brevity with which they have presented their conclusions, their groundbreaking work will lead to real progress in answering a plethora of questions concerning cultural, linguistic, and historical issues. Admittedly, the study of inscriptional verb morphology is in its adolescence, if not its childhood. Alternative interpretations must be sorted out and placed within a historical and comparative framework. The trajectory, however, is set, and many of the questions concerning the social framework of the Classic Maya are sure to be answered. eric taladoire 18 rue de Fosées St. Jacques, 75005 Paris, France ([email protected]). 24 x 99 While the understanding of glyphic inscriptions has always been a crucial issue for Maya archaeology, their decipherment belongs rather to the linguists and epigraphers, and it is somewhat difficult for an archaeologist to comment on such technical aspects. I therefore do not feel able to discuss the intrinsic value of this article, and although most of the arguments seem pertinent and even convincing, it would require a specialist to criticize its basic proposals. Some weak and strong points need to be mentioned at the outset, as they bear on the archaeological interpretations. Among the weak points, for instance, a simple, even strong, rejection cannot be accepted as a valid argument in this kind of discussion (e.g., “they cannot be taken as evidence”); another, more important case, as the authors themselves point out, stems from the fact that we cannot forget that “the forms reconstructed from historical linguistics probably reflect vernaculars rather than the high forms expressed in script.” But the methodology employed largely compensates for these difficulties: through their grammatical and, more specifically, morphological approach (“internal evidence is key”), a rigorous and scientifically valid analysis helps them to solve this problem. The proposed linguistic basis for decipherment is largely convincing. In any case, the model and the rejection of insufficient geographical and lexical evidence would not prevent some counterchecking of, for instance, the validity of the geographical context. If we accept their demonstration of the existence of a prestige, written language, it seems at first glance coherent with what we currently know about Maya sociopolitical structure, and, generally speaking, it does indeed show strong similarities with other prestige languages. But it needs to be stressed that they themselves changed over space and time. Therefore, a call for prudence is necessary, and it is fair to recognize that the authors themselves make such a call by pointing out that counterexamples can be observed; in Yula or Xcalumkin, for instance, they record Yukatekan words that they interpret more as archaic terms. One can also criticize the pertinence of some chosen texts: Oxkintok in Yucatán is probably more Petén-related than other sites: it is not surprising to find Classic-type inscriptions there. Would purely Yucatec sites present the same kind of written language? It is not really convincing to state that “not even Chichén Itzá displays much evidence of Yukatekan.” As for the chronological dimension, the proposed model could fit Classic Maya inscriptions, but change over time has to be taken into account: Does the model apply to the early Postclassic inscriptions from Yucatán, after the collapse and the arrival of new external influences? A collateral issue would be the validity of the model if applied to the Maya codices or to ceramics. In this last respect, would inscriptions on vases pertain to the same tradition or to a more profane, as opposed to prestige, language? This last question brings us to the ultimate comment: Is it really acceptable to grant their hypothesis general acceptance? In their conclusions the authors suggest that subscribing to their proposal might lead to a lateral, as opposed to vertical, interpretation of Maya social structure. Granting them this probability, it must be counterchecked against the archaeological record. Whereas Maya sociopolitical stratification seems generally to support this view, one can always point to contrary evidence, such as the Petexbatun realm history, where at least vertical cohesion seem to counterbalance the common lateral interpretations. As they suggest as the end, it is time to “undertake a site-by-site statistical analysis.” david webster Department of Anthropology, Penn State University, University Park, Pa. 16802-3804, U.S.A. (dXW16@ psu.edu). 12 xi 99 Many years ago it was commonplace to talk about a Classic Maya “period of uniformity” in the central and southern Lowlands. While architectural and sculptural styles, painted ceramics, and other markers of the elite h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 345 Maya Great Tradition obviously varied somewhat from one site or region to another, archaeologists preferred to emphasize similarities rather than differences. Inscriptions figured heavily in this perception of sameness. Sylvanus Morley (1977:149), summarizing the epigraphic situation in 1940, concluded that even though the noncalendrical content of the glyphs could not be read, inscriptions from anywhere in the Maya lowlands tell the same story. . . . Whatever their significance may be, it is the same everywhere, that is to say, they must treat of matters common to all, such as a generally accepted astronomy and the common religious philosophy arising therefrom, and not of purely local matters. Throughout the Maya area, the undeciphered glyphs deal with an extremely limited subject matter and are essentially homogeneous. Since Morley’s time Mayanists have become inured to endless assaults on this conception of uniformity. Many have come from dirt archaeology. Excavation, settlement research, and more sophisticated forms of dating have revealed very different scales and occupational histories for major and minor centers. Polities such as Copan have ceramic sequences that do not at all resemble those of Tikal or Uaxactun, and even the preserved material culture of commoner Maya households shows unexpected variation. More to the point, since about 1980 our much more sophisticated understanding of the content of noncalendrical glyphs has also reinforced this impression of variety. Behind the formal similarities in the Classic hieroglyphic medium itself, on which Morley’s opinion was based, lurks a host of detail that would have astounded him, partly because the subject matter is so much wider than he imagined and partly because so much of it is concerned precisely with local matters. Emblem glyphs and the increasingly recognizable toponyms are by definition local. The inscriptions of Yaxchilan are replete with references to warfare, while those of Copan are more heavily religious and ritual in content. The scribes of Palenque recorded genealogical information in unusual detail and emphasized a triad of patron gods different from those of the centers. Titles such as sajal occur much more frequently on the western margins of the lowlands than anywhere else. Nonregnal elites at some centers seem to have had much more ability to possess or use inscribed monuments and the associated elaborate iconography than those at others. Just when one was beginning to despair of ever again being able to point to any common essence of “Mayaness,” Houston, Robertson, and Stuart reassure us that there is something uniform after all, a common ancient prestige language—Classic Ch’olti’an—that is ancestral to more recent Ch’olti and Ch’orti. Morley, no doubt, would be gratified. Not being a linguist or an epigrapher, I have no opinions about the arguments that lead them to this conclusion; as always I am utterly amazed at the cleverness and detail of such deductions, and I am convinced by them, especially because I heard a lengthy ear- lier presentation and discussion of this reconstruction two years ago. The widespread use of Classic Ch’olti’an, however, does raise for me some interesting speculations and questions. First, I have to admit publicly to an unseemly suspicion that I try to hide when in the company of Mayanist colleagues. Despite the ostensibly close relationship between writing and the political forms of the state, I have long entertained the idea that Classic Maya polities (with some exceptions such as Tikal, and probably Calakmul and Caracol by the 8th century) were essentially literate chiefdoms without much well-developed stratification. This is not such a renegade idea as it might first appear, because we know that some societies entirely lacking in complex integrative political institutions maintained impressive traditions of literacy for centuries (the origins of their writing systems are another matter). Medieval Iceland is perhaps the best case in point (e.g., see Miller 1990). As Houston, Robertson, and Stuart point out, however, prestige languages are powerful instruments for social differentiation (among other things), and all the examples they give involve societies with one or another form of class structure. Does anyone know of such a prestige language operating for centuries on a political landscape dominated by multiple rank societies? Apparently Classic Ch’olti’an was used without much change (content apart) for about 650 years or more. Granted that prestige languages are valued and used partly because of their conservatism, do we know anything from comparative linguistics about how (or if) they themselves change through time? Is it sensible to think that some form of Common Mayan was spoken as a vernacular language as recently as the Late Preclassic? Finally, given the increasing emphasis on Classic Maya central places as royal courts, how does the idea of a prestige language and its dissemination fit into our conceptions of courtly etiquette and deportment? Is there any way to find out if kings and associated elites used Common Mayan in verbal discourse by the 8th century or whether by that time it was a vehicle for inscriptions known mainly by scribes? marc zender Department of Archaeology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4. 12 xi 99 I strongly concur with Houston, Robertson, and Stuart’s conclusions, both in general terms and with regard to specific observations concerning the linguistic affiliation and history of the Maya script. The documentation of a prestige language predicated upon Ch’olti’an and written throughout the Yucatán peninsula is one of the most important epigraphic breakthroughs of the last few decades. Houston et al. have demonstrated beyond reasonable equivocation that morphological features diagnostic of Ch’olti’an are attested throughout the script, regardless of region or period. They also offer an important corrective for epigraphers’ all too frequent uncritical use 346 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 of linguistic sources and a priori assumptions regarding the linguistic affiliation of texts based solely on arguments of geographical distribution. Their exemplary arguments can be extended, however, with evidence from the intransitive predicates. While the most common spelling of the intransitive is CV-Ci, indicating ROOT-i (e.g., hul-i, “arrived”), numerous CVCi-ja and CV-Ci-ya-ja spellings, presumably indicating ROOT-i-j and ROOT-iiy-j (e.g., hul-i-j and hul-iiy-j), occur in texts throughout the lowlands. In addition, the identical -j also appears in detransitivized constructions such as CVC-root transitives in passive derivation (e.g., mahk-j-iiy-j, “it had been closed” [PN St. 8]), antipassive derivation (e.g., u-ts’ak-ah-j, “it counts” [YAX H.S.3, Step 1]), and medio-passive derivation (e.g., haab’-ay-j?, “it got set up”? [PN Throne 1]), though never on positional roots, intransitive or other. Of all the Ch’olan languages, only Ch’olti’an ever had such a suffix. While evidence from Ch’olti’ itself is wanting, the -j appears throughout Ch’orti’ on all intransitive and intransitivized verbs, including -V1y and -i intransitives and -u and -o antipassives (Wichmann 1999:11–13; Wisdom 1950), and likewise avoids positional intransitives. The widespread presence in the script of this diagnostic suffix further highlights the importance of Eastern Ch’olan. Strengthening such considerations is the script’s plethora of -V1y suffixes marking both medio-passives (e.g., pul-uy-i, “it got burned”) and intransitives (e.g., lok’-oyi, “he/she/it emerged”). Such a pattern, as Houston et al. have recognized, “is unique to the Ch’olti’an subgroup.” Indeed, the medio-passive function of one of the script’s -V1y verbs, puluy, may actually have survived into Ch’olti’ as Morán’s (1935:18) pului, a so-called passive-completive form. Frozen, fossilized remnants of this function may also survive in such abstruse Ch’orti’ terms as bahkoih, “be jointed” ( ! bak “joint, bone”), and pukruih, “stir of itself” ( ! puk “to stir”) (Wisdom 1950:576–77).1 Especially important is the ample testimony that -V1y also functions throughout Ch’olti’an to mark completive intransitives involving motion and change of state (Morán 1935; Fought 1984:49, 53; Wisdom 1940, 1950). The presence in the script of both the intransitivizing -j and the -V1y of intransitives, then, clearly implicates Ch’olti’an, and their widespread appearance—both geographically and diachronically—provides further support for the prestige-language hypothesis. While Houston et al. base their study on Classic texts, the codices may provide—given their Late Postclassic manufacture and general association with Yukatekan languages—the most convincing evidence for a prestige language in the script. While Ch’olan morphology has long been identified in the codices (Lacadena 1997, Wald n.d.), the detailed outline of the history of Classic Ch’olti’an now permits closer analysis and identification of unequivocally Ch’olti’an morphology. Specifically, the 1. Such considerations underscore the historical importance of Ch’orti’, and I echo here, as I have elsewhere (Zender 1999:14, 25), the authors’ call for more detailed study of this language. Dresden Codex preserves the entire four-voice system, including active transitives in -V1w (pp. 65a, 67a), passive derivation in -h-. . .-aj (pp. 3a, 26c, 44b), medio-passives in -V1y (p. 60), antipassives in -V1w (pp. 10c: A1, 15c: A1), and -V1y intransitives signalling “motion” (pp. 61a, 70c) all alongside equally clear examples of Yukatekan morphology (such as ERG-CVC-aj transitives and CVC-i passives) in a pattern most suggestive of the tail-end of a long evolutionary sequence descending from the authors’ proposed period of diglossia. Considered concomitantly with the general absence of written Yukatekan in the Classic period, the presence of such diagnostic Ch’olti’an elements alongside late written Yukatekan suggests that the prestige language and its strong connection to the written word persisted into Postclassic times. In sum, morphological evidence for Houston et al.’s hypothesis spans two of the three major predicational classes of Mayan languages; distributional evidence includes written texts from throughout the Maya lowlands, diachronically spanning more than a millennium. In this regard, it is perhaps relevant that Ch’olti’-speakers enjoyed the largest documented geographical distribution of any Ch’olan language: from the Selva Lacandona (deVos 1988:159–64) to the river valleys of the Manché Ch’ol (Scholes and Adams 1960) to the Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’ of the departments of Chiquimula and Zacapa, Guatemala (Morán 1935; Oakley 1966; Wisdom 1940, 1950). Could this be a reflection, complementary to the authors’ own suggestions, of the social prominence and widespread vernacular of the Classic Ch’olti’? Reply s t e p h e n h o u s t o n , j o h n ro b e r t s o n , a n d david stuart Provo, Utah, U.S.A. 8 i 00 We thank the commentators for their remarks and John Clark, Tricia McAnany, and Søren Wichmann for suggested improvements to this response. The comments fall into two general categories, those from linguists or linguistically minded epigraphers and those from archaeologists. Some of the linguistic comments are surprising in their asperity and general disinclination to deal directly with the substantive arguments in the paper. Not one addresses our core proposal: that the Classic Maya inscriptions record a Ch’olti’an language. In part, such remarks reflect genuine differences of opinion, yet they also reflect a pervasive anxiety about historical reconstruction. In training and outlook, Americanist linguists tend to be synchronic and noncomparative, devoting their creative lives, laudably enough, to a certain language or set of languages (Fought to Ch’orti’, Hofling to Itzaj); in many cases they are suspicious of historical or colonial sources and of any treatment of morphological shifts. We are delighted that this paper has flushed h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 347 out such attitudes, enabling us to address them openly in the future.1 Brody seems not to understand our point about “geographic arguments,” namely, that it is imprudent in the presence of glyphic data to claim correlations between the location of glyphs at archaeological sites and the languages spoken nearby during colonial or modern periods. Her assertion that we overemphasize the Yukatek bias is baffling in view of the immense concentration of linguistic and archaeological investigation on that language and area during the first century of Maya studies. We would invite her to consult Brasseur de Bourbourg’s publication of Diego de Landa’s Relación (1864; also Tozzer 1941), Edward Thompson’s pioneering work in the 1890s (1897), the Martı́nez Hernández (1930) edition of the great Motul dictionary, Ralph Roys’s researches (1931, 1933, 1943; see also Morley 1911), Tozzer’s ethnography of the Lacandon Maya—supposedly the last “pagan” Maya and thus purported exemplars of past lifeways (1907)—and his seminal grammars of Yukatek (1921; see also Beltrán de Santa Rosa 1859; Gates 1940), J. Eric S. Thompson’s close association with the Yukatekan village of Socotz, which strongly influenced his interpretations of ancient Maya (1930; as did his collegial association with Roys [see Ventur 1978:74]), and the Carnegie projects in Yucatán (e.g., Lothrop 1924, Morris, Charlot, and Morris 1931). It is curious that she should accuse Robertson of being one of those who “never interact with living speakers of the languages,” as he has undertaken research with most Mayan languages through an active program of fieldwork over a span of some 33 years. And what does our comment pertaining to modern orthographies (which we follow) have to do with arguments about language groupings? The modern spellings appear to have become a litmus test for political correctness, and any position out of step with such social agendas is likely to be castigated as illiberal and reactionary (e.g., Brown 1996:166, 174). Contrary to Brody’s claims, we did not use terms such as “Chol-Chorti-Mopan” and “Choloid”; rather, these occur in quotations from Thompson’s work, and therefore there is no reason at all for us to justify “what level of generalization either represents in relation to the taxonomy.” And are we to understand that, because Mayan historical linguistics has typically not taken account of morphology, that should remain our collective practice? (Fought, too, remains stuck in this retardataire position.) If anything, this has been one of the problems with Mayan historical reconstructions. The complaint, made also by Hofling and Storniolo, that the paper is not a monograph is unrealistic given the page limitations in this journal. Since these commentators do not precisely dispute the substance of our historical arguments, it is hard to see how yet more data would change their responses. Moreover, if Brody has difficulty with such “authoritative proclamations,” then it would have been helpful if 1. Some of the transcriptions in the paper now require updating, particularly with respect to morphosyllables, a new category of glyph. she had spelled out her differences of opinion. The notion that writing is only a “phenomenon of states” and topdown politics ignores the multifarious uses of script in ancient societies; it cannot be reduced to an “ideology” of “power.” Hofling, too, seems vexed by our “misleading” and “oversimplified” citation of sources. We make the same point about Thompson, whose work shows a long evolution that is often not easy to tease out of the published record (n. 4). Yet, it strikes us as fair to hold authors to their declarations, as Hofling later does for Houston. Hofling, for example, has made a case for Yukatekan in the Petén during Classic times, but his claims are epigraphically invalid: they rest heavily on the theory that similar glyphic forms record entirely different values depending on the language being recorded. Focusing on a particle that designates active transitives (see below), he suggests an alternative reading, of dubious validity, that implicates a language group that has formed his professional focus, the Yukatekan Itzaj language now spoken (barely) in the central Petén. We discern a covert “geographic argument” here. Hofling misconstrues Houston’s work on completives by confusing an -i (a modern marker) with Classic Ch’olti’an -i:y (Houston 1997:293–94). He also seems confused about the problem of homophony—that similar suffixes may be spelled with the same glyphs but have entirely different functions—and therefore misinterprets Lacadena’s (2000) work on the subject. Like Brody, he seems averse to our emphasis on morphology. A good part of the paper does in fact deal with phonology, but we take care to explain why it ultimately is limited in relation to determining precise language affiliation. His belief that we see a “static ritual language” is a distortion of our viewpoint (see, e.g., Stuart, Robertson, and Houston 1998, Houston, Robertson, and Stuart 1999, Stuart, Houston, and Robertson 1999). Variation must be an important theme in epigraphic research, but it is important to explore the linguistic commonalities first. The hierarchy of investigation compels our full attention first to broad patterns so that departures from them can be seen in context. Hofling’s criticism that our views have changed would seem to be less a weakness than a necessary receptivity to new data. As an example he cites Robertson (1992: 179–81), where the marker for transitive verbs was reconstructed as ∗-V1 rather than the reconstruction in this article, ∗-V1w. We draw his attention to Watkins’s (1973: 100) reminder that a given reconstruction is an artifact reflecting the contemporary state of intellectual development. As such, it is subject to change, just as all intellectual artifacts or scientific propositions are. Linguists are for some reason continually surprised, indeed shocked, by this. The great Irish philologist Osborn Bergin once remarked wryly that no language had changed so much in the last fifty years as Indo-European. 348 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 Surely Mayan comparatists should have some room to reevaluate hypotheses based on new understanding. On grounds totally independent of the script, the amended reconstruction ∗-V1w more generally accounts for all Mayan subgroups—not only Ch’olti’an, Q’anjob’alan, and Mamean-K’iche’an but also the Tojolab’al transitive marker -aw, which apparently lost vowel harmony but retained the w.2 It is therefore hardly self-serving (or circular) to observe that ∗-V1w additionally accounts for the script’s morphosyllable -V1w, rendered in the glyphs by a sign that also functions syllabically as wa (Houston, Robertson, and Stuart 1999). Hofling goes on to scold us for not changing our view that the script cannot have split-ergativity. For him ERGverbtrans. -wa (e.g., as at Palenque, Temple of the Inscriptions, East Tablet, K7–L7, P11–O12, ya-k’a-wa/u-PIK , yak’-aw u pik, “he gives its skirt,” or ma-ya-k’a-wa/ U-tu-ta-IL, y-ak’-aw u tu:til, “he does not give his?”) is apparently antipassive, split-ergative, and incompletive. By contrast, we have always held that this particular construction is active, ergative, and neutral with regard to tense-aspect. There are many reasons to reject the idea of split-ergativity in general and the u-verbintrans.-wa as a split-ergative, antipassive marker in particular. The most compelling one is that the data do not permit it. No Mayan language can have an antipassive and at the same time have a direct object that is possessed. By definition, the antipassive can have only a single argument—the agent but not the patient—associated with the transitive verb. Of the three main types of antipassives, (see Robertson 1992, Mithun 1984), the rarest—the one relevant to Hofling’s proposal—is found, as far as we know, only in Ch’orti’, Mam, Q’anjob’alan, Q’eqchi’, and Yukatekan. The object here is generic and is therefore incorporated into the verb, thus leaving only a single argument—the agent. It is roughly equivalent to English “I deer-hunt” or “I water-ski.” If possessed, however, the object is unincorporable, leaving the transitive verb with agent and patient and thus retaining its normal status of active voice. It would be impossible in these languages to say “he its-skirt-gives,” with a modified patient/object. While most patients in the script are generic, there are enough examples of patients that are possessed or in other ways modified that we must conclude that the morphosyllable -V1w cannot be an antipassive marker. Two further reasons for rejecting the antipassive, splitergative -wa are etymological. Robertson (1992:214; 1993) has shown in abundant detail that split-ergativity is an innovation and not a part of Common Mayan. For split-ergativity we point to languages like Acalán Chontal, which at a minimum use the ergative and an -el nominalizer to mark the incompletive. We propose that Classic Ch’olti’an simply preserved Common Mayan’s 2. It is not wild speculation to propose the loss of vowel harmony, since Ch’orti’ has a severely restricted vowel-harmonic system, where -e appears after the stem vowel e and -i appears after all other stem vowels. Interestingly, the earlier, full vowel harmonic system is still retained in Ch’orti’ in the imperative mood. straight ergativity and that all Mayan split-ergativity is innovative. That Ch’olti’an remained conservative is indicated by its pronominal system, which essentially preserves the Common Mayan system except for the ergative third-person plural, which changed ∗ki- to u-. . .-ob’ (Robertson 1979); all the other languages developed more complex pronominal systems (Robertson 1983, 1984). Classic Ch’olti’an also preserved the Common Mayan ∗ -aj of the absolutive noun, while the extant Tzeltalan and Ch’olan innovated by displacing ∗-aj with -V1 (Houston, Robertson, and Stuart 1999; Stuart, Houston, and Robertson 1999:13).3 The evidence presented above also suggests a preservation of the Common Mayan transitive marker -V1w. These examples of universal lowland innovations that are absent from the script seem to negate Hofling’s assumption that because split-ergativity is found in other extant languages it was part of Classic Ch’olti’an as well. The second etymological argument is deductive, asking what form the split-ergative would have taken if it had occurred in the script. The only etymology we have ever seen which adequately accounts for the split-ergative is the so-called progressive, which takes the following shape: pre-Ch’olti’ ∗iyuwal(u-tal-elX), lit. “ongoing (his-coming X),” “X is coming.” This form moved from the progressive, which is a syntactic construction, to the morphological incompletive in Ch’olti’: yual in-caxi-el, “me caigo [I fall].” In Acalán Chontal the process is further developed. The verb iuual is now detached from the construction and has become an adverb, so that the original syntactic construction is reduced to morphological affixation: ERG-verbintrans .-el, u-tal-el, “he comes.” In Ch’ol, the marker is mi-ERG-verbintrans.-el, mi-k-majl-el, “I go” (Warkentin and Scott 1980:73). Here, the mi- prefix was historically a predicating verb, equivalent to ∗iyuwal, but today it is a morpheme prefixed to the verb. The same structure occurs in Yukatek tá:n u t’ú:b-ul k’i:n, “the sun is coming up,” where tá:n is equivalent to ∗iyuwal. Finally, Wastek, which we propose is closely related to Tzeltalan and Ch’olan, has apparently lost the initial verb but still has a -Vl to mark the incompletive.4 In every case, the marker for the split-ergative is the nominalizing suffix -el (or -Vl.) It would be very difficult to imagine a split-ergative in the script that did not have an -el (or at least a -Vl). In this regard, Hofling’s putative u-verbintrans.wa does not have a nominalizing suffix. But even if for some reason wa exceptionally did not take a nominalizer, there are still no instances of any other nonderived intransitive verbs with an -el. Hofling’s rebukes are not only linguistic. His charge 3. Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’ use -b’il and -b’ir as markers for kinship, but apparently they innovated by losing markers for body parts or intimate apparel. 4. Wastek lost the possessive ergative for intransitives because of a massive reformation of the pronominals (Robertson 1993). It is also true that Tzeltalan and Wastek included the original nominalizing -el, which could be used only with intransitives (including passives and antipassives) came to mark transitives as well. We take this to be another common innovation and further evidence that these two languages share a close ancestral origin. h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 349 of “essentialism” reflects a shibboleth of fashionable discourse in anthropology (cf. Fischer 1999). Our point was simply that the Ch’orti’ and their Ch’olti’ ancestors deserve far more attention than they have thus far received other than through the published researches of Wisdom (1940) and Fought (1967, 1972, 1984; see also Lubeck and Cowie 1989; Pérez Martı́nez 1994, Pérez Martı́nez et al. 1996). Hofling’s vehement division of past from present is, as he says, modish among some (but not all) “Mayans, linguists, and cultural anthropologists,” but surely the best way of understanding ancient Mayan peoples is through modern homologies. Cultures are historical entities and structures of meaning entwined with precursors, not de novo creations of each generation. An austere “discontinuism” in Mesoamerican research goes back to the days of George Kubler (1961, 1985) and beyond. There will always be counterclaims to its a priori dogmas, as good an example as any of methods that predetermine interpretation. Nonetheless, we freely admit that criticism of research that assumes “fossilized” or “ahistorical” non-Westerners is appropriate (Price 1989). Given our model, a more reasonable approach is to see the modern Ch’orti’ as plausible homologies for the Classic Maya, as the source of crucial linguistic insights yet ungleaned, and as people deserving far more attention from ethnohistorians. Storniolo appears more receptive to the general arguments in the paper. Nonetheless, she is puzzled by our revision of the Mayan family tree. In this regard, we again quote Watkins (1973:100): “mutability applies also to the model of the kinship relations obtaining among a set of languages, the configuration of the family tree, which may also be modified—like any scientific proposition—by new data.” Such revisions in family trees are not only normal in comparative research but to be expected where new data warrant them. The unique aspectual pronouns found in Ch’orti’ can be explained only in terms of the singular aspectual system found in the apparent ancestor of Ch’orti’, which we claim is Ch’olti’ (Robertson 1998). We are not certain what Storniolo means when she says that the ∗-V1y medio-passives are transitive verbs. It is logically impossible to read medio-passives or, for that matter, genuine passives as transitives. We suspect that she has misunderstood MacLeod’s personal communication, which we imagine was that certain secondary expressions in Maya sentence strings are better read as transitives. We believe that the secondary expressions are nominalized antipassives, while MacLeod sees them as verbs, particularly as derived transitives, but this is not the place to resolve the question. Again, while indirectly pertinent to the arguments of this paper, Storniolo’s citation of Wald’s (2000) as-yet-unpublished study opens an interesting and controversial question relating to the issue of split-ergativity. We now believe that Common Mayan had aspectual morphemes (∗k[V]-incompletive and Ø-completive) that were prefixed to the verb and tense morphemes (-Ø present and ∗-i:y past) that were suffixed to adverbs of time. We further believe that the morphology of tense displaced the morphemes of aspect. Therefore, Classic Ch’olti’an verbs were inflected for tense and not aspect, indicating that, in the script, the present was unmarked and the deictic past marked. From Fought we receive perhaps the most sweeping of dismissals, although nothing by way of concrete refutation. His rejection of Robertson’s analogical approach to grammatical change rests on a simple metaphysical assumption, unfortunately central to the American structuralist tradition throughout the latter two-thirds of the 20th century. He asserts that language must be approached on formal grounds alone, without regard to meaning. Anyone who seriously holds this metaphysic must reject structured, grammatical paradigms because such structures are necessarily the products of both form and function—they are by definition analogical systems. The only kind of analogy that such a metaphysic can permit is the amorphous, disjointed kind Fought propounds: Analogic change “extends the scope of some patterned relationships among forms,” resulting in the possibility that “grammatical categories may also change in various ways.” We assume that the “various ways” often are “simply accidents of linguistic history.” Here, there is no possible way of saying why the forms in question have a patterned relationship (in reality the patterns are given by the interrelationship of the related functions of the grammatical categories), any more than there can be even an attempt to identify the relational patterns of grammatical systems. Those who are strictly formalistic in their approach to language might allow for analogy of the type brick : bricks :: blick : blicks to account for a new plural, but in principle they must reject analogy because for them there are no constraints on analogies of the type John is easy to please : John is eager to please :: It is easy to please John : ∗It is eager to please John. Since meaningless metaphysics can work only on formal grounds, practitioners must reduce analogy to some senseless, hollow formalism. But if one takes into account the meaning of eager and easy, as all English-speakers must, then it is easy to go beyond the prestidigitation of an ad hoc marking of eager in the lexicon to an explanation of why it is “ungrammatical.”5 Meaning constrains analogy. The question of analogy in language change—even Fought’s strictly formal variety—has been of theoretical concern and practical use in explaining language change for over a century. Every standard textbook on language diachrony treats analogy; it is part and parcel of grammatical change. Furthermore, despite Fought’s statement to the contrary, Kuryłowicz was hardly crushed by Mańczak. Hock (1986:234) observes that Kuryłowicz’s fourth law “provides a very reliable guide to historical linguistic research” and that “counterexamples are hard to find.” He suggests that the second law appears to be a general tendency and that “most of Mańczak’s hypotheses are in essential agreement with Kuryłowicz’s second ‘law’ and therefore add little to our understanding of analogical change.” Watkins’s (1970) reexamination of 5. See Robertson (1991) for an extensive discussion of the history and consequences of strictly formal linguistics. 350 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 Lachmann’s Law appeals to Kuryłowicz’s second law of analogy, based on a grammatical system of form and meaning, in accounting for vowel lengthening that can neither be construed as phonological nor restricted to forms without consideration of the grammatical categories in which they reside. Analogy in structured grammatical categories has not gone away and never will if one is intent on explaining grammatical change, because grammatical categories are by their very nature analogically structured. The task of the comparatist, according to Watkins (1973:101), is “to construct hypotheses, and to demonstrate precisely how it is possible, within a linguistic tradition or traditions, for language to pass from one system at one point in time to another system at a later point.” Although Fought claims profound insight into the theory that underlies the comparative historical method, he has not taken up this task: to explain how, given their ancestral origin, the several Mayan languages came to be the way they are. Some of Fought’s criticisms of Robertson’s work call for further comment. His assertion that transitive and intransitive are not found in “Robertson’s grid” apparently refers to Robertson (1992), but here the so-called grid in every category includes the morphological reconstructions for both the intransitive and transitive verbs (p. 217). His statement that Robertson does not understand the ergative-absolutive predication system of the Mayan languages seems to overlook Robertson’s dissertation, one of the earlier and most extensive works on this subject. Robertson apologizes for having labeled the a of a-wayan as second singular instead of third singular, although he did get the translation right (“he sleeps”). His article did not include the observation that Ch’orti’ a-t’ox-pa and Ch’olti’ atoxpa are exact counterparts because, according to his analysis, they are not homologues. With regard to the a-, once again Fought rejects the data in favor of a pet theory, one that we consider methodologically unacceptable. It is a mistake to disregard a historical text unless there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Ch’olti’ is, after all, extinct, and the only speaker of that language that we have access to is the man who wrote the grammar and liturgy. (Incidentally, the cleric was not a cloistered “Benedictine”; the Ch’olti’ mission was under the control of Dominicans, with some Franciscan participation [Sapper 1985:20–23].) Colonial sources are at once linguistic and historical documents and should be taken seriously as such. The data given in the grammar and liturgy contradict Fought’s theory of the a- prefix on all three counts: It is not third-person, it is not imperfect, and it is not absolutive because it is not a pronoun. According to the Spanish cleric, if a- attaches to the preterite (completive), the semantic result is a second present (incompletive): vixi en, “I went”; a-vixi en, “I go.” If, in contrast, the aattaches to the split-ergative incompletive, the semantic function switches from the here and now to a second future (future of necessity): yual in-vixn-el, “I go (now)”; a-vixn-el on, “we have to go.” The data direct us to con- clude that a- is a temporal deictic, which has the effect of moving the action described by the verb forward in time. It is also a deictic in Acalán Chontal and in Poqomam, which, being the only K’iche’an language that possesses this element, likely borrowed it from Ch’olan. Significantly, there are many examples of both uses of a- in the liturgy. Fought’s reading of the a- is precisely what prompted the Ch’orti’ reanalysis, resulting in the pronominal series that is unique to Ch’orti’. Zender’s comments are warmly supportive, and we thank him for them. Some of the examples he cites require further discussion, however, for the supposed ja on the intransitive hul, “arrive,” has nothing to do with verbal affixation but rather is integral to the HUL logograph. Our suspicion is that the sign originated as a depiction of a hand together with a moon element that was visually similar to the independent -ja suffix used on passive spellings. The “arrive” verb is therefore not an example of -ja on an intransitive, and we do not know of any other verbs that could be interpreted as such. We also suspect, contrary to Zender, that the j does indeed appear on positional roots, as part of the -l-aj suffix, since the l must function as the suffix that usually attaches to positionals, which are fundamentally adjectival-like. At the close of his comments Zender makes a profitable geographical argument–that the broad distribution of Ch’olti’an in the southern portion of the southern lowlands is, despite our cautionary statements, relevant to the homeland of this language. The archaeologists (McAnany, Pohl, Webster) clearly find much merit in the model of a “prestige language.” McAnany asks where we might find the “homeland” of Classic Ch’olti’an. She is undoubtedly correct that there was an area where Ch’olti’an was also used by peasants, although it is unlikely that the same phrasings or tropes would occur in everyday speech. The best model here is probably the elastic and variable relationship between speech in Egypt and the priestly and elite languages recorded in script (Parkinson 1999:fig. 18, 48–49)—although, to be sure, the analogies are loose, since various forms of Egyptian interacted with script for over 4,500 years (Ray 1994:51), whereas Maya glyphs were used for a third of that period and only a few centuries of their development are well documented (Grube 1990). It is clear that “diglossia” (Ferguson 1959) is a highly complex phenomenon. Ferguson saw it as involving versions of the same language, often in relationships that were surprisingly unyielding to change (Ferguson 1959:327; MacMullen 1966:5). This was later extended by Fishman (1976:290) to cover different languages as well. The “high language” was regarded as superior and was usually connected with writing and, paradoxically, limited literacy. In extreme cases, such as Sinhalese, high varieties cannot be used in speech (De Silva 1976:38–39). High languages embodied divine revelation or moral values and were closely associated with formal speech, literature, or proverbial wisdom, formal education, and strong traditions of grammatical study (Maya glyphic spellings seem to show a morphemic understanding that takes account of underlying structure). An almost artificial standardiza- h o u s t o n , ro b e r t s o n , a n d s t u a r t Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions F 351 tion was the norm, as in Greek Katharevousa or the Sa’idic Egyptian that came to dominate later, official forms of the language (Satzinger 1985:307–12; Ray 1994: 53–54). High languages could be, as in Egypt, acutely conservative, even “self-consciously archaizing” (Parkinson 1999:49), with negative consequences for “social cohesion” (Loprieno 1996:516). Mixings with “low language” or penetrations from spoken language helped resolve “communicative tensions” with intermediate varieties of the language (as in Greek mikti or Arabic al-luah al wus [Ferguson 1959:331–32; see also Parkinson 1999:49]) The Ch’olti’an case probably had much of this complexity. Any written form of a language will depart in some measure from everyday speech (Chafe and Tannen 1987:387; Ray 1994:60–62), but in the places where the script was first recorded it is likely to have been a matter not of radically different languages but of distinct codes and registers that branded particular sociolinguistic “domains“ or “spheres of activity“ with courtly or ritual language (Grillo 1989:4). Such registers occur today in Mayan languages such as Tzotzil (Laughlin 1975:28) and so are not necessarily limited to literate expression. Inevitably, the hierachical nature of such language use would have become more severe as speech diverged from script both inside and outside the area where Ch’olti’an was spoken. In regions where Ch’olti’an was widespread we would expect to see changes in script that reflect changes in language, patterns of the sort that can be observed in the eastern and southeastern reaches of the Classic Maya area (Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998:284–85; Wichmann and Lacadena 1999). In contrast, areas with Ch’olti’an texts but distinct vernaculars may have been diglossic less in Ferguson’s sense than in Fishman’s. Presumably, language ideology and authoritative discourse in such communities would have been sharply defined; elite/nonelite relations may have been expressed linguistically in ways quite distinct from those in the Ch’olti’an homeland, which appears to have lacked the complex ethnicities of Yucatán (Lincoln 1990). Texts would have required translation and interpretation (Loprieno 1996:524). With small numbers of speakers, the prestige language would have died out or creolized; with large numbers the substrate languages would have been strongly influenced or extinguished (Thomason and Kaufman 1988; Zvelebil 1995:45). The convulsions of the Maya collapse led to what we see in the Maya codices: frozen, archaic forms that could not have reflected living Ch’olti’an but instead consisted of the peculiar, mixed (creolized?) shapes discussed by Lacadena (e.g., 1997) and Wald. In much of the central Petén Ch’olti’an may have been replaced by Yukatekan languages and restricted to more exalted ritual contexts, finally to disappear altogether by early colonial times (Campbell and Muntzel 1989:185–86). An enduring question is how it was able to achieve standardization: Was this a result of the Maya educational system, or did it arise from an aesthetic and conceptual need for a “purified, canonical idiom” (Ray 1994:63)? We are unsure whether “pseudo-glyphs” can be used to resolve these issues as McAnany helpfully suggests. These marks capture the idea of writing by emphasizing repeated glyphs, rounded or elliptical cartouches, and clusters of large and smaller glyphs, but they are unreadable because they conform to no detectable system. The only meaning being directly communicated may be the sheer richness of hieroglyphs as social markers. In this, pseudo-glyphs, like the labor-intensive textiles and spotted feline hides reproduced on the surfaces of Late Classic ceramics, are low-cost simulations of wealth. Pseudo-glyphs require a calligraphic hand but no knowledge. Nonetheless, we cannot assume that two different sets of painters produced glyphs and their unintelligible imitations. There is some evidence that scribes responsible for fully literate texts could also produce, on the same pot, rapid “design” bands of pseudo-glyphs (e.g., Culbert 1993:fig. 69). McAnany is quite correct that epigraphers tend to ignore pseudo-glyphs and that these marks are intriguing cultural productions worthy of scholarly study. The relative proportion and quantity of pseudo-glyphs at a given site may indicate general misunderstandings of script and thus signal the presence of vernaculars distinct from the prestige language. Interestingly, pseudo-glyphs become common only in the Late Classic period, often in particular varieties of ceramic vessel (e.g., Adams 1971: fig. 48a). We presume that as the number of legible texts increased so did illegible ones, and this would suggest a heightened visibility for script in Late Classic times. Pseudo-glyphs are relatively uncommon on pottery from Campeche and Yucatán (Nelson 1973:figs. 81, 82; Forsyth 1983:fig. 22), where legible characters are also rare (Smith 1971:fig. 40a) and, when they do occur, often appear on stuccoed ceramics (Ball and Ladd 1992:fig. 7.22). Northern Yucatán is also one of the few places in the Maya region where one can make a near-case for the coexistence of two distinct writing systems. Sites such as Sayil, Tabi, and others (e.g., Pollock 1980:fig. 236, 385) are notorious for their sprinkling of aberrant inscriptions, and these texts may be graphic expressions of YukatekCh’olan bilingualism (Wichmann and Lacadena 1999). A similar situation is found at the site of López Mateos, in the extreme west of the Maya region (Weber 1972:fig. 2; Navarrete, Lee, and Silva Rhoads 1993:fig. 30). Pohl’s comparative examples from the Mixtec region dwell on a central problem that we have been unable to settle. Horizontal bonds between elites usefully distinguish such groups from their subjects and clients, but what was the nature of vertical bonds within the Classic Maya kingdoms? A partial answer to this may be found in the alternative solidarity forged by the “mono-ethnic” Maya polities as they joined together in the cult of local deities (Houston and Stuart 1996). Rulers possessed sacred or liturgical language to mediate between people and patron gods and to define themselves as models of comportment within courtly settings that compressed and exemplified social relations (Inomata and Houston n.d.), but their governance was based less on oppression and cynical manipulation than on a “covenantial” pol- 352 F c u r r e n t a n t h ro p o l o g y Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000 itics of reciprocal duties and moral obligations (Monaghan 1995, n.d.; Houston 1999). We have a strong suspicion, too, that Classic society was organized into distinct “houses” rather like the Aztec calpōlli, involving fictive kinship and groups that embraced different levels of wealth and social prestige (Houston 1998:521); Webster steers toward this interpretation as well. To the overall question of how uniformity can coexist with variability (see also Webster), this is probably the nature of the civilization as a nesting of peer polities, occasionally organized into large-scale hegemonic structures (Martin and Grube 1995) but fundamentally antagonistic to the suppression of covenantial polities. Stone raises an intriguing question about the degree of archaism in the script. By Postclassic times (post-900 a.d.) Classic Ch’olti’an, or at least their version of it, must have sounded strange to contemporary ears; very likely its social functions changed considerably through time. In Classic inscriptions there can be little doubt that vernaculars interceded in the script, leading to changes that can only be understood as representing coeval changes in language, including the reduction of vowels from complex to simple forms and perhaps the introduction of split-ergativity. Stone correctly emphasizes the importance of looking carefully at lexical items in understanding such percolations from vernaculars, although, as we explain in the paper, such items deserve the greatest interpretive caution because they can diffuse widely. Incidentally, it is doubtful that she is correct about a spelling of nich in the Postclassic Santa Rita murals: the reading is surely K’IN-chi, or k’inich. Conversely, Taladoire suggests that Yukatekan must be found at Chichén Itzá, but epigraphically the connections are not strong, although Wichmann and Lacadena (1999) have made a compelling case for Yukatek forms from inscriptions in the northwestern reaches of the Yucatán peninsula. We do not pretend to have the final word on this difficult subject. We take pleasure in the sophistication of current debate and the level of detail present in this truly remarkable writing system. Future work on an international scale will lead to consensus about Classic-period aspect, more precise orthographies, comprehensive genealogies of particular morphological patterns, and a more detailed understanding of the deviations from these patterns and the local explanations for them. Pessimists will insist that progress has not really taken place, that we are merely complacent participants in mutual yeasaying (Baudez 1999:948). Yet our colleagues will prove them wrong, and we will again hear, and be moved by, the language of Classic Maya inscriptions. References Cited a d a m s , r . e . w. 1971. The ceramics of Altar de Sacrificios. 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