A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan (1557-2000)
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ent aspects. Thus, táant in mač[i]keʔ (90b) represents a more recent past than ȼ’óʔok in mačik (90a), which
in turn represents a more recent past than hóʔop’ in mačik (90c). Similarly, sáam in mačeh (90f) refers to a
more recent past than ʔúuč in mačeh (90g). These relationships are illustrated on the left-hand side of the
timeline in Figure 5-3.
On the other hand, although most of the remaining aspects are, in one sense or another, concerned
with the future, they cannot be so neatly arranged in a temporal sequence. This is undoubtedly because
the future is less well known than the past. Instead, they express notions of obligation or relative definite-
ness about future events, as illustrated on the right-hand side of the timeline in Figure 5-3 and in the
ex amples below (elicitation notes 1979):
(94a) heʔel in šokikeʔ
‘I will certainly read it’
(94b) yàan in šokik
‘I must read it’
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TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD
(94c) k’ab’éet in šokik
‘I need to read it’
(94d) tèen kin h šokik ~ tèen kin in šokeh
‘it is I who is going to read it’
(94e) b’íin in šokeh
‘I will read it sometime’
The examples in (94d–e) contrast the definite future with the indefinite or remote future. In a reversal of
basic word order in Yucatec Maya, the agent (tèen) in (94d) has been moved to the front of the sentence,
which is a morphosyntactic process that will be explained at length in 2.1. in Chapter 16.
The remaining aspects mentioned in Figure 5-3 lack the temporal implications of the other aspects. The
events they refer to are either habitual (the incompletive) or in progress (the durative) and, as such, can be
placed anywhere along the timeline.
4. THE “PRESENT TENSE”
What then of the so-called present tense ( presente de indicativo) of the Colonial grammarians. If it was not a
tense, what was it? Hanks (2010:210) describes it as a “progressive,” but it must have been more than that.
Examples from both Colonial and Modern Yucatec indicate that it had a purposive function and actually
served as an intentional or immediate future in a number of contexts.
4.1. CORONEL’S PARADIGM OF THE “PRESENT TENSE.” The paradigm for the “present tense” shown in
Coronel’s grammar (1620a:6) and repeated in the later grammars of San Buenaventura (1684: fol. 3r) and
Beltrán de Santa Rosa María (1746:41) employs a periphrastic construction composed of the imperfective
stem of a root intransitive followed by cah, which is inflected with an ergative pronoun:
(95)
Maya
Spanish
Gloss
nacal in cah
yo subo
I ascend
nacal a cah
tu subes
you ascend
nacal v cah
aquel sube
that one ascends
nacal ca cah
nosotros subimos
we ascend
nacal a cahex
vosotros subis
you-all ascend
nacal v cahob
aquellos suben
they ascend
The root of the intransitive verb is nac ‘to ascend’; nacal is its imperfective stem, accounting for the possible
gerundial (or “progressive”) meaning in this context. However, the initial position in such constructions can
also be occupied by nouns and adjectives, as in the following examples:
(96a) ich v cah che lo
‘that tree bears fruit’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 223r)
(96b) ikal v cah kaknab
‘the sea is turbulent’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 225r)
TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD 105
(96c) kazil v cah
‘he is behaving foolishly’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 233r)
(96d) ya v cah in tanamel
‘my liver is sore’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 411r)
On the other hand, the verbal stems that occupy this position cannot take direct objects: Transitive verbs
must be intransitivized before they can appear in such constructions, and their direct objects must be
demoted to indirect objects after the preposition ti (reduced to t before a possessive pronoun in the fol-
lowing examples):
(97a) ichintah v cah ti cħuplalob
‘he is eyeing the women’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 224r)
(97b) paycun v cah ti cħuplal
‘he is bewitching a woman [to sin with her]’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 361v)
(97c) halmah in cah t u xicin
‘I am advising him’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 204v)
(97d) kaayah v cah Juan t u baal v ba cimen
‘John is selling the belongings of the dead person’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 234v)
This limitation calls into question the claim that such constructions represent a tense, because tenses nor-
mally apply to both transitive and intransitive verbs.
The Calepino de Motul contains numerous examples of such constructions, whereas their frequency
in the many documents from the Colonial period is very low. In Colonial testaments, the testator intro-
duces his or her enumeration of the items he will bequeath to heirs with patcan in cah ‘I declare,’ using a
participle in the initial position, as in the following example:
(98)
patcan yn cah lae
‘I declare this:
hun ac yn man solal y ynv icham Phelipe Hau lae
this one house plot that I purchased with my husband Felipe Hau,
c in ɔaic ti ynv al Lucia Hau y etel yn han Pedro Yx
I give to my daughter Lucia Hau and my son-in-law Pedro Ix’ (TK757L)
The emphasis on such constructions in the Calepino de Motul, compared with their low frequency
in Colonial documents produced by the Maya themselves, is probably an artifact of their classification
as a “present tense” by the Spanish priests who produced the Colonial grammars. As Hanks (2010:154–
155) points out, the grammars and Spanish-Maya and Maya-Spanish dictionaries like the Calepino were
intended as aids in the conversion of the Maya people to Catholicism. They were used for translating
their catechisms, sermons, and Biblical texts into Maya, and for that purpose they elicited many sentences
exemplifying the use of the “present tense” in this language that they incorporated in their dictionaries.
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TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD
4.2. THE USE OF THE “PRESENT TENSE” TO EXPRESS INTENTION. The intentional function of Coronel’s
“present tense” is most evident in examples from the Calepino when the initial position of that construc-
tion is occupied by benel, the root of which is ben ‘to go’:
(99a) benel in cah in cħab in toh cumkal
‘I am going to collect my debts in Conkal’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 153v)
(99b) benel in cah in hau in col t in han
‘I am going to divide my field with my son-in-law’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 178r)
(99c) benel in cah in ma-mac-kabte y okol Juan
‘I am going to intercede on behalf of John’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 292r)
(99d) benel in cah ti con=muk
‘I am going to hire myself out for work [literally, I am going to sell strength]’ (Ciudad Real 1600?:
fol. 311r)
(99e) benel in cah in chaante missa
‘I am going to attend Mass’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 137r)
(99f) benel in cah in nacte okot
‘I am going to watch th
e dance’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 315v)
They, as well as patcan in cah ‘I declare’ in testaments (e.g., [98] above), are also semantically transparent
examples of Smailus’ (1989:20–21) “declarative mode” (see also 7. in Chapter 16).
ben ‘to go’ had an alternative form, bin, during the sixteenth century. Eventually, binel replaced benel
in the benel A-cah expressions, as in the following example from Homun, near Hocaba:
(100) binel u cah u con lay u lumob
‘he is going to sell these lands of his’ (HOM804B)
By the middle of the eighteenth century, binel in cah and bin in cah had become equivalent expressions for
‘I am going,’ according to Beltrán de Santa Rosa María (1746:66), and a century later, bin A-cah had become
the standard form of this expression:
(101a) bin u cah bisbil Santa Rosa hun pulili
‘Saint Rose is going to be taken for once and for all’ (COP850A)
(101b) entonces bin u cah tun likil tropae
‘then, troops are going to rise up then’ (HAS850A)
(101c) bin u cah u ximbat a tzicbenilex
‘he is going to visit Your Excellency’ (CHA851A)
In the 1930s, Andrade (1940:4.56) documented the persistence of the bin A-cah construction in Modern
Yucatec. However, by the 1970s, several alternative forms of this construction had appeared in the penin-
TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD 107
sula. The alternative that was most similar to the one that was established during the eighteenth century
was in use in the eastern part of the peninsula, notably in Ebtun and the surrounding region, for which I
elicited the following paradigm during the months I lived in Ebtun in 1979 (V. Bricker 1979a:82):
(102)
Singular
Plural
1st
b’in u káʔah-en ‘I am going’
b’in u káʔah-óʔon ‘we are going’
2nd
b’in u káʔah-eč ‘you are going’
b’in u káʔah-éʔeš ‘you-all are going’
3rd
b’in u káʔah-Ø ‘he/she is going’
b’in u káʔah-óoʔ ‘they are going’
The major change between this paradigm and the one used by Coronel for nac ‘to ascend’ is that the erga-
tive pronoun associated with káʔah remains u irrespective of the person of the subject, and the inflection
for subject is now marked by the suffixed absolutive pronouns. An example of this construction that was
mentioned to me in Ebtun is:
(103) b’in u káʔahen č’ùuy
‘I am going to sew’ (V. Bricker 1979a:41)5
At the same time in the west, only the final nasal in b’in was retained in this construction, and it was
merged with the subject pronoun:
(104)
Singular
Plural
1st
mi káʔah ~ niŋ káʔah ‘I am going’
mah káʔah ‘we are going’
2nd
ma káʔah ~ na káʔah ‘you are going’
ma káʔahéʔeš ‘you-all are going’
3rd
mu káʔah ~ nu káʔah ‘he/she is going’
mu káʔahóʔob’ ‘they are going’
In Hocaba, I was told that if someone said mi káʔah hoʔ ‘I am going to Merida,’ he or she would immediately
get up and set out for Merida. From this, I inferred that such constructions functioned as an immediate
future, neither a present tense nor a progressive aspect, and I have so labelled it in Figure 5-3.
5. ASPECTUAL STEM SUFFIXES IN ADVERBIAL FOCUS CONTEXTS
The basic word order for transitive clauses in both Colonial and Modern Yucatec is Verb-Object-Subject-
Adverb (VOSA), and it is Verb-Subject-Adverb (VSA) for intransitive clauses, both of whose verbs take the
stem suffixes described in 2. above. When the adverb is moved to the front of the clause, before the verb,
in adverbial focus constructions (AVOS and AVS), a different set of suffixes marks the perfective and sub-
junctive stems (see also 2. In Chapter 16).
The first formal treatment of adverbial focus constructions in Modern Yucatec was carried out by Rob-
ert Blair (1964:99–102, 114–116), and it was followed eight years later by Marlys Stefflre’s (1972:119, 168,
170–172) analysis of such constructions involving the manner interrogative particle (b’iš ‘how’) and manner
adverbial particles like b’ey ‘thus’ and máʔalob’ ‘well.’ Ortwin Smailus included such constructions in his
research on Colonial Yucatec during the 1970s, which was published in 1989. At about the same time, I
dealt comparatively with such constructions in both Colonial and Modern Yucatec, focusing on the front-
ing of temporal adverbial particles and dates (V. Bricker 1981b). More recently, Yoshiho Yasugi (2005) has
analyzed such constructions in terms of head-marking theory, using examples drawn from the Colonial
grammars of Coronel (1620a) and San Buenaventura (1684).
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TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD
5.1. INTRANSITIVE STEM SUFFIXES THAT CO-OCCUR WITH FOCUSED ADVERBIAL PARTICLES. The move-
ment of an adverbial particle such as bay ‘thus, like’ to a position in front of an imperfective intransitive
verb in Colonial Yucatec did not result in a change in the stem suffix:
(105a) lic v çebech malelob bay u malel booye
‘they pass quickly like the shadow passes’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 101r)
(105b) bay v binel ti chikine
‘thus it goes to the west’ (SB596B-070)
(105c) bai bic v talel lae
‘thus how it comes’ (TK661-008C)
However, whenever the intransitive verb in question referred to an event that took place in the past, then
the -el or -Vl suffix was replaced by one of two suffixes, -ic or -(i)ci, depending on whether the emphasis
was on completion or sequencing:
(106a) lay u chun binic padre
‘por esso se fue el padre’
‘for that reason the priest left’ (Coronel 1620a:41)
(106b) lay u chun binci padre
‘por esta causa se fue el padre’
‘for this reason the priest left’ (Coronel 1620a:41)
(106a) has been qualified by Coronel (1620a:41) as follows: “if the preterite is of today, that is, the present
day, the c occurs at the end ( si el preterito es de hoy, digo, del dia presente, se pospone la c),” implying that
(106b) represents an action that has been completed, without specifying when. This distinction parallels
the one that the Colonial grammarians claimed was signalled by the use of Ø- and ti- with the normal
intransitive perfective stem suffix, -ih. And the Spanish glosses provided by Coronel invoke the third-person
preterite of irse ‘to depart’ in both (106a) and (106b), demonstrating, once again, the difficulty experienced
by the Colonial grammarians in distinguishing semantically between the two ways of referring to the past.
As in the case of intransitive stems marked by -ih for the perfective, those marked by -ic and -(i)ci
involved an ergative split, but the split was in terms of a person hierarchy, contrasting the first and second
persons with the third, not in terms of a contrast between the imperfective and perfective aspects:
(107)
Singular
Plural
1st
in tal-ic
ca tal-ic
2nd
a tal-ic
*a tal-ic-ex
3rd tal-ic-Ø
tal-ic-ob
These forms are illustrated below in context:
(108
a) hanil be in talic
‘limpio esta el camino por donde oy he venido’
‘the road on which I have come is clear’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 197r)
TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD
109
(108b) tabx au ocil a talic
‘de donde has oy venido’
‘from where have you come?’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 342r)
(108c) kax=cab talic_ Juan
‘a des[h]ora vino oy Juan’
‘John came suddenly’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 241v)
(108d) hal tan pay ca talic
‘a rraiz de la playa hemos venido’
‘next to the beach we have come’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 360r)
(108e) lah=cet talicob t u lacal
‘todos han venido oy juntos, o juntamente’
‘everyone has come together’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 259v)
Note that the first- and second-person singular and plural forms of talic took the clitic set of subject pro-
nouns (in, a, ca), but the third-person singular and plural forms of talic were marked by the suffixed set of
pronouns (-Ø and -ob). The same was true of bin(i)ci:
(109)
Singular
Plural
1st
in bin-ci
*ca bin-ci
2nd *a bin-ci
a bin-ci-ex
3rd bin-ci- Ø bin-ci-ob
Some examples of the use of these forms in context appear below:
(110a) ciac-ciac in binci
‘fuyme aca y aculla como quiera’
‘I went here and there aimlessly’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 70v)
(110b) ix ma y oc be binci_ Juan
‘John lost his way’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 229r)
(110c) bay binici_ ti lakin ...
‘thus it went to the east ...’ (DZ569-038)
(110d) ma tuz a binciexe
‘lexos de aqui os fuistes’
‘you-all went far from here’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 301r)
(110e) layli u katunil binciob ah ytzaob
‘it was still the katun when the Itzas went
yalan che yalan haban yalan ak ti num=yaob lae
beneath trees, beneath bushes, beneath vines in misery’ (Gordon 1913:75)
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TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD
Yasugi (2005:59, n1) has interpreted the first “i” in the -ici suffix of bin-ici in (110c) as “an echo of the root
vowel -i-” that was inserted to break up the consonant cluster resulting from suffixing -ci to bin. However,