A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan (1557-2000)
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(130a) hach tibil ix v tzecticonob cuchi
‘and it was very good for them to preach to us then’ (MID567:fol. 365, lines 18–19)
TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD 117
(130b) y oklal hach tibil u beelticob
‘because they behave with great virtue’ (MID567:fol. 367, line 81)
(130c) bay licil av ubic v canile
‘thus while you hear his story’ (TXM578)
(130d) lay natah oklal licil c oktic ca ba tech
‘it was he who understood why we supplicate you’ (TXM578)
(130e) hi bicil c in conic hun ac in kax ti in yum ti señor cappn Julia Baeza
‘how I sold one lot of my forest to my lord, who is Mr. Captain Julia Baeza’ (OX595-004A-C)
(130f) bay licil yn tzolic yn testamento yn takyah tħan
‘thus, while I place my last will and testament in order’ (MA629-019A-C)
Another characteristic that adverbially focused transitives shared with their intransitive counterparts in
Colonial Yucatec was the contrast between the immediate past and the historical past. The immediate past
employed the same stem suffix (-ah) and aspectual clitic particle (t[i]) as the ones used for the unmarked
word order:
(131a) helel en 20 de Agosto ti y aabil de mil quinientos quarenta y uno
‘today on the 20th of August in the year of 1541,
t in chicbesah v kaba haboob hoppic christianoil lae
I pointed out the names of the years when Christianity began’ (Gordon 1913:17)
(131b) 15 años hele t in ɔibtah uchci y utzcinnabal nucuch mullob t u men cħiballob
‘15 years today I wrote about how it happened that the big wall was restored by the lineages’
( Gordon 1913:15–16)
(131c) helel en 20 de abril manic pasgua resuresion
`today on the 20th of April when Easter Sunday passed,
t in hoksah ho ppel libra sac cib hoolhun pis tumin
I withdrew five pounds of white wax for 15 coins’ (HB783B-220A-221B)
On the other hand, the suffix(es) used for marking the historical past of transitive stems in adverbial
focus constructions were the same as the ones used for marking intransitive stems under the same con-
ditions ([i]ci):
(132a) ocolbil v cimçici v lak
‘a traycion mato a su compañero’
‘treacherously, he killed his companion’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 343r)
(132b) on-teel haab in tzentici in yum
‘muchos años sustente a mi padre’
‘for many years, I supported my father’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 351r)
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TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD
(132c) 1542 años oxlahun kan t u hun te pop
‘1542 years, 13 Kan was on the first of Pop,
u heɔci cah espanoresob
when the Spaniards established a town’ (XIU685-025A-C)
(132d) hi bicil t u canticiob
‘however they related it’ (TK590A-007A)
However, one of the texts in the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel has some striking exceptions to
this pattern (Gordon 1913:60–62). My title for this text is “The Creation of the Maya Week” because it con-
tains clear evidence that the person who composed it was interpreting the Biblical creation of the world in
seven days in terms of one of their own time periods, namely the uinal of twenty days (V. Bricker 2002). The
examples in (133a) and (133b) begin the count of the seven days in Genesis in terms of what happened on
the days 1 Chuen and 2 Eb in the Maya calendar:
(133a) hun chuen v hokçici v ba t u kuil
‘on 1 Chuen, he revealed himself in his divinity,
v mentci caan y luum
and he created the heaven and the earth’ (Gordon 1913:60)
(133b) ca eb v mentci yax eb
‘on 2 Eb, he created the first ladder’ (Gordon 1913:60)
The -(i)ci suffix that appears in these examples is appropriate for a text that chronicles events in deep time,
when the world began, but it is not the suffix that Spanish grammarians regarded as appropriate for an
event that occurred on a single day (1 Chuen and 2 Eb). What is at issue here is the symbolic relationship
between the days of the Maya uinal and the seven days of the European week, not that the events in
question were limited to a 24-hour period of time. This may be the reason why the verbs in this text were
marked by -(i)ci.
The apparent -ici suffix on the transitive verbs in (132a–b), (132d), and (133a) resembles the suffix on
the intransitive verbs in (111a–b), and the -ci suffix on the transitive verbs in (132c–d) resembles the suffix
on the intransitive verbs in (106b), (109), (110a–e), (115a–b), (116a–f), and (117). But -ic was (and still is) the
imperfective stem suffix for transitive verbs in both word orders. Was it the source of the first part of the
-ic-i suffix used for marking the historical past with transitive stems in Colonial Yucatec? Or was the use
of -ic-i for the historical past with both transitive and intransitive stems the result of analogical levelling?
In either case, -i could have served as a deictic enclitic, marking the historical past for both transitive and
intransitive verbs in adverbially focused constructions.
Although not mentioned by the Colonial grammarians, there was another suffix that co-occurred with
transitive stems in adverbially focused constructions. That suffix was -il, and the earliest evidence of its use
comes from a document originating in Dzan in 1587:
(134a) lay v chun v nupilen loe
‘this is the reason why he resisted me’ (DZ587A-071)
TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD
119
Other examples of its use in later centuries include:
(134b) va ix bicil v nucul y ohelil v kaxob ah couohob
‘as the reason why the Couoh people knew their forest’ (DZ651B-107A-B)
(134c) la ix bin v chun y ohelil v chi lay kax t u lacal
‘and they say that this is the reason why everyone knew of the entrance to this forest’
(DZ651B-111A-B)
(134d) bay y ohelil t u lacal u nucil uinicob
‘thus, all the senior men knew it’ (KNX784A)
-il did not completely replace -ah with transitive stems in adverbially focused constructions until recent
times. The following examples of the use of this suffix today come from the Hocaba dialect of Modern
Yucatec:
(135a) b’ey t in haȼ’ilečoʔ
‘thus I saw you’ (elicitation notes 1979)
(135b) b’iš t a haȼ’ilen
‘how did you hit me?’ (V. Bricker 1981b:118)
(135c) máʔalob’ t aw il(ah)il
‘you saw him well’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:332)
(135d) nàapul t uy ilil káʔah p’éel hóʔol yàan téʔeloʔ
‘he looked directly at two heads that were there’ (Poʔot Yah n.d.b)
(135c) suggests that -il was originally suffixed to the t(i) ... -ah transitive stem that was used with both nor-
mal and adverbially focused words orders, distinguishing the latter from the former. Eventually, -ah-il was
reduced to -il, but t(i) remained as the marker of the immediate past.
-il also occurred in transitive stems inflected for the present perfect in adverbially focused construc-
tions in Colonial Yucatec:
(136a) t uy alah v tħan t u pormayl derechos
‘he mentioned the words in the tax forms,
he bicil y ohelmail v kaxob ah couoh yan ti kan=che lae
how the Couoh people have known their forest that exists at Kanche’ (DZ651A-012A-013C)
(136b) he v nucul y ohelmail v chi kax t u lacal
u tial ah couohob yan ti kan=che lae
belonging to the Couoh people that exists at Kanche’ (DZ651B-113A-D)
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TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD
And the same is true of the Hocaba dialect of Modern Yucatec:
(137a) b’iš a haȼ’mahilen
‘how have you hit me?’ (V. Bricker 1981b:118)
(137b) b’ey a haȼ’mahilenoʔ
‘thus you hit me’ (V. Bricker 1981b:119)
The subjunctive stem of transitive verbs in adverbially focused contexts was marked by -ic in Colonial
Yucatec, the same suffix used for the unmarked transitive imperfective stem. bin was the aspectual particle
that preceded it in remote future expressions, permitting it to be distinguished from the imperfective tran-
sitive stem, which co-occurred with different aspectual head words and clitic particles (see 2.2. above). The
Calepino de Motul contains a few examples of the use of -ic in this context:
(138a) bay bin a nuppicex au ox=kaz olal loe
‘thus you will resist those carnal desires of yours!’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 339r)
(138b) vtzcin bay bin au alice
‘do as you say!’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 41v)
(138c) ppococh bin a chooic a pixan
‘you will cleanse your soul completely’ (Ciudad Real?: fol. 391v)
(138d) bicx bin av utzcinic lo
‘how will you improve that?’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 437r)
(138e) hun chi ca chi bin in mol=cabtic v tħan padre
‘in one or two words I will summarize the priest’s words’ (Ciudad Real?: fol. 307v)
Such constructions do not appear in any Colonial documents in my database, and I have only one
example of b’íin governing -ik in an adverbially focused context in Modern Yucatec:
(139) es yás keh t u láak uy áʔalikoʔ b’íin y oheltikoʔ
‘so it was that everything that they said, they would inform them of’ (V. Bricker 1981a:239, lines
639–640)
6. THE VANISHING HISTORICAL PAST
The heyday of the distinction between the immediate past and the historical past must have predated the
arrival of the Spaniards in the Yucatan peninsula during the first half of the sixteenth century. The surviv-
ing chronicles of events preceding and during the Conquest and continuing for several decades afterward
imply a strong tradition of oral and written history that was not encouraged by the new masters. The use
of the historical past in focused adverbial constructions was common in sixteenth-century documents, but
tapered off during the seventeenth century and was gone before 1700. In constructions with the normal
word order, the distinction lasted into the 1770s and disappeared after that.
TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD 121
What survived into Modern Yucatec are remnants of what was once the immediate past for both nor-
mal and focused word orders, namely the clitic particle t- and the -ah suffix with transitive stems and the
occasional use of the -ih suffix with intransitive stems in the normal word order, as well as the -il suffix with
transitive stems and the -ik suffix with intransitive stems in the focused word order. But these construc-
tions no longer refer to the immediate past. They simply indicate that the events denoted by the verbs in
such constructions have been completed, without specifying how recently they took place. In other words,
the historical past is not what it used to be.
Both the historical past and the immediate past referred to completed actions, without any consider-
ation of their internal characteristics. This was appropriate for a chronicle or an account book, in which
the events in question were simply mentioned after their dates. Incidentally, this was the kind of informa-
tion that was inscribed on historical monuments in hieroglyphs during the centuries before the Spaniards
arrived.
But this is not the kind of history that speakers of Modern Yucatec recount today, which is delivered as
narrative, not chronicle. And for that purpose, the completive aspect is often used for situating events in
the past, but texture is provided by aspects based on the imperfective stem (the habitual, inceptive, dura-
tive, terminative, and proximate perfective) and/or, where relevant, aspects based on the subjunctive stem
(the anterior or remote past). They make it possible to include details that were lacking in the chronicles
and hieroglyphic texts.9
7. SUMMARY OF CHANGES IN ASPECTUAL HEAD WORDS
AND SUFFIXES THROUGH TIME
Several aspectual particles and suffixes were gradually whittled away in the transition from Colonial to
Modern Yucatec, reducing them to a single consonant (or even nothing), or, in the case of suffixes, were
permitted to remain only at the end of phrases. The subjunctive suffix that was limited to root transitives in
Colonial Yucatec was eventually replaced by the subjunctive suffix that had originally co-occurred only with
derived transitive stems. Other losses include the suffix for the prophetic future, the distinction between
the immediate and the historical past, and the almost complete disappearance of the periphrastic inflec-
tion of verbs that the Colonial grammarians had favored as “tenses.”
Another kind of change involved the eventual grammaticalization of two intransitive verbs that had
served as aspectual head words in complement constructions in Colonial Yucatec. One of them also under-
went the reduction to a single consonant of aspectual head words of non-verbal origin.
NOTES
1. Folio 164r of the Calepino de Motul (Ciudad Real 1600?) glosses elom as ‘that which will surely burn’ ( lo
que se ha de quemar o arder sin falta).
2. Itsaj and Mopan have retained a reduced form of the -Vb subjunctive suffix of Colonial Yucatec (pho-
netic [-Vb’]) with root transitives: -Vʔ (Hofling 2000:50, 2011:13).
3. According to Andrade (1940:3.2.1. and 4.66. ), ʔil-ah-ma(h) is a variant of ʔil-ma(h): inw il-ah-ma ‘I have seen it.’
4. k’ab’éet is the Modern cognate of the noun, kabet, in Colonial Yucatec (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 232r),
which did not serve as a head word during the first part of the Colonial period. However, an example
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TENSE/ASPECT AND MOOD
of kabet in the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel suggests that it may have acquired that function
before the end of the Colonial period:
ti hach kabet v bel y ocsabal ti ol
‘that it is very necessary that it be believed’ (Gordon 1913:42)
5. b’in was not the only intransitive verb used in such constructions in Ebtun. The intransitive verb, máan
‘to pass by, move,’ was mentioned in the following sentence: máan a káʔahéʔeš ‘you-all intend to wan-
der from place to place’ (V. Bricker 1979a:128).
6. ocic t u jolob [literally, ‘water entered their heads’] was the standard expression for “baptism” chosen
by Spanish priests, “which describes the manner of executing the sacrament” (Hanks 2010:130).
7. According to the Chronicle of Oxkutzcab, that year had begun in 1542 (H. Bricker and V. Bricker 2011:
Table 4-1).
8. Of course, it is possible that u likbal is functioning as a possessed noun in this context: ‘the uprising.’
However, the structural parallels between (129) and (126c) and the thematic parallels between (129)
and both (126a) and (126c) make it possible to interpret the presence of both u likbal and likbal-
Ø in this
document as evidence that the subjunctive stem of lik and other root intransitives was in the process of
shifting to a completely nominative-accusative pattern of pronominal inflection in adverbially focused
constructions.
In addition, there is some inconsistency in the use of the first-person singular pronoun with -bal
intransitives in other documents attributed to the Talking Cross of Chan Santa Cruz, which use the suf-
fixed pronoun (-en), instead of the clitic pronoun (in), of which the following are examples:
t u men tene mah membileni
‘because, as for me, I was not created;
lukbalen t u noh u kab in yum tac t uy ahaulil caan
I left the right hand of my father in the kingdom of heaven
cat emen vay y okol cabe
when I descended here in the world;
ti hocbalen t u cahil chicħene
I came out from the village of Chichen [Itza]’ (V. Bricker 1981a:214–215, lines 231–238)
lukbalen and hocbalen contrast with the use of in talbal in (127).
9. Additional details were provided pictorially in the scenes that often accompanied the hieroglyphic
texts.
CHAPTER 6
INTRANSITIVE VERBS
There are two kinds of intransitive verbs in Colonial and Modern Yucatec: root and derived. Root intransi-
tives can form causative stems by suffixing -s or -es to the root, a characteristic that derived intransitives
do not share.
1. ROOT INTRANSITIVES
1.1. VERBS OF MOTION. In considering what constitutes a root intransitive, it is instructive to begin with
verbs of motion. The following examples of such verbs occur in both Colonial and Modern Yucatec:
(1)
Colonial
Modern
Gloss
benel ~ binel
b’in
go
emel
ʔéemel
go down, descend
hokol
hóok’ol
come out, emerge
hulel
ʔúʔul
come, arrive here
kuchul
k’(ù)učul
come, arrive
likil
líik’il
arise, ascend
lubul