A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan (1557-2000)
Page 41
‘one house lot here belongs to my son, Juan Ek’ (TK661-048-049)
(19c) bay xan hun ppel solar y u cħenil yn matan t in yum lae
‘thus also, one house lot with its well is my gift from my father’ (IXL766Z)
2.2. NUMERAL CLASSIFIERS AS SURROGATE ADVERBS IN COLONIAL YUCATEC. An unusual characteristic of
a number of numeral classifiers is that they can only co-occur with the number, hun ‘one.’ This is the reason
why so many numeral classifiers are listed only as part of compound expressions with hun ‘one’ on the
thirteen pages running from folio 196r through 202r in the Calepino de Motul. And the reason why their
use with numbers is limited to hun ‘one’ is that they have a special idiomatic function as temporal adverbs
that other numeral classifiers lack. Some examples of these special-purpose numeral classifier expressions
are listed in (20) below:
(20)
hun=bak ‘jointly, together’
hun=bel ‘increasing day by day; while’
hun=bul ‘continuously’
hun=cet ‘equal, jointly, together, equally’
hun=çut ‘at one point, in one moment or instant, immediately’
hun=tzol ‘in order, in a row’
hun=tzac ‘apart, aside’
hun=hol ‘straight, directly, without deviating to one side or the other’
hun=hom ‘on the dot, very promptly’
hun=yalili ‘superficial, skin deep’
hun=yuk ‘general, universal; generally, universally’
hun=kalab ‘all, entire’
hun=kub ‘alone [without companions]; fitting exactly [without room for anything else]’
hun=kul ‘perpetual, eternal, everlasting, forever’
hun=mac ‘full’
hun=moçonili ‘rapidly [like a whirlwind passes]’
hun=mol ‘together, joined, accumulated, near’
hun=tacil ‘apart, aside, alone’
hun=taɔ ‘straight, direct, directly without stopping’
hun=tach ‘exactly, promptly, at once’
hun=tanil ‘carefully, diligently’
hun=tħul ‘direct, straight, directly’
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hun=xicnal ‘exactly, promptly, at once’
ti hun=lukul ‘forever’
Some examples of their use as temporal adverbs appear below:
(21a) hun=bak v tħanob
‘they speak with one voice’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 196r)
(21b) hun=cet v benelob
‘they go together’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 197r)
(21c) hun=çut a talel vaye
‘in one moment you will arrive here’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 197v)
(21d) hun=hol a benel t u beel a col
‘directly you go on the road to your field’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 197v)
(21e) hun=kul puɔi
‘he fled forever’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 199r)
(21f) hun=mol v benelob
‘they go together’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 199v)
(21g) hun=tħul v benel ti y otoch
‘he goes straight home’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 201v)
(21h) ti
hun=lukul v ppatah
‘he left it forever’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 422r)
An interesting characteristic of the numeral classifier phrases in (21a–h) is that, in every case, they
occupy the initial position in the clause. As such, they function as focused adverbials, and, according to
Yasugi (2005:65–66), the verbs that follow them should be marked accordingly. That is indeed the case with
hun=taɔ ‘straight, direct, directly without stopping’ and binel (imperfective), binic (perfective), and binebal
in the following sentences drawn from the Chronicle of Cħac Xulub Cħen and the Documentos de Tabi:
(22a) ti sutpahaan ti likin
‘it turned to the east;
hun=taɔ v binel ti noh be
it goes straight to the highway’ (OX697-015-016)
(22b) hun=taɔ binicon ti kax
‘we went directly to the forest’ (CHX-587)
(22c) hun=taɔ binebal latulah t u hol noh laam ti chikin lae
‘it will go straight until the end of the big depression in the west’ (OX683-043A-044B)
NUMBERS AND NUMERAL CLASSIFIERS
243
As further evidence of their adverbial status, the numeral classifiers in (21a–h) and (22a–c) are not
immediately followed by nouns. This is also true of numeral classifiers with temporal and spatial mean-
ings, such as ten ‘time(s)’ and lub ‘league.’ ca=ten ‘twice’ also means ‘again,’ a common adverb in Yucatecan
Maya, as in:
(23a) ma bay=kin in beeltic t u ca=ten
‘I will never do it again’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 279r)
(23b) babahel in mal vay t u ca=ten
‘a little while from now I will pass by again’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 38v)
Units of time like kin ‘day’ and haab ‘year’ could also serve as numeral classifiers without a following noun:
(24a) hun=kin ca sihi
‘on one day he was born’ (Bacabs 1779?:83)
(24b) hun=kin c u chibal u uich u
‘for one day the face of the moon is bitten’ (Bacabs 1779?:87)
(24c) hun=hab kalan ti mascab t u menob
‘for one year he was locked up in jail by them’ (CHX-295A-B)
(24d) ox=haab in culic y icnal
I lived with him for three years’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 202v)
So also could numeral classifiers that referred to distance:
(25a) vai ti kuchion t u chun v mulil Tabi
‘here we arrived at the base of the wall of Tabi,
ca=lub y okol ca cahal loe
two leagues above our town’ (YT718B-104A-C)
(25b) hun=auat hun=lub u talel
‘for one shout, one league he comes’ (Gordon 1913:87)
In other words, although many numeral classifiers directly preceded nouns, those that functioned as tem-
poral or spatial adverbs did not.
On the other hand, when kin ‘day’ appeared in a numeral classifier phrase before a noun, it had an
adjectival function, as in:
(26)
lay u chun ca kin xec ca kin ahaulil
‘this is the reason for the two-day seat, the two-day reign’ (Gordon 1913:20)
And, of course, kin ‘day’ was also a noun that could itself be quantified with the numeral classifiers, piz and
ppel, in dates, as in (6a–d).
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2.3. HISTORICAL CHANGE IN NUMERAL CLASSIFIERS. A comparison of the number of numeral classifiers
that are mentioned in the Calepino de Motul (166) with the number of numeral classifiers that were still in
use during the 1970s and 1980s in Hocaba (230) and Pixoy (225) gives the false impression that they have
actually increased in number over time. That is because, unlike modern lexicographers, the compilers of
the Calepino made no effort to elicit all the numeral classifiers in the Maya lexicon of the late sixteenth
century. Most of those that were mentioned do not appear as head words, but show up accidentally in
example sentences under other head words.
Many of the numeral classifiers for which evidence is lacking in the Calepino de Motul show up in
notarial documents and the Books of Chilam Balam of Chumayel and Tizimin, as well as the manuscript
known as “The Ritual of the Bacabs.” The Chumayel mentions 88 numeral classifiers, of which 41 are not
shared with the Calepino de Motul. The Tizimin mentions 62 numeral classifiers, of which 18 are not shared
with either the Calepino or the Chumaye
l. And “The Ritual of the Bacabs” refers to 99 numeral classifiers,
of which 52 are not shared with the Calepino or the two Books of Chilam Balam. There are also 12 numeral
classifiers in notarial documents that do not appear in the other Colonial sources. Therefore, to the 166
numeral classifiers that are documented in the Calepino de Motul may be added 123 numeral classifiers
from these other sources (41 + 18 + 52 +12), for a grand total of 289 numeral classifiers in Colonial sources.
But these numbers do not tell the whole story of what happened to numeral classifiers in Yucatecan
Maya over time. Only 103 of the 289 classifiers in the Colonial sources, or ca 36 percent, have been docu-
mented in the Modern dialects of Hocaba and Pixoy. This means that 186 numeral classifiers in the Colonial
sources, or ca. 64 percent, were lost over time. Furthermore, 233 numeral classifiers in Hocaba and Pixoy
are not shared with each other, nor with Colonial sources. Assuming that the numeral classifiers in Modern
Yucatec that are not also attested in Colonial sources were originally present at the beginning of the Colo-
nial period, Colonial Yucatec must have had at least 233 more numeral classifiers than the 289 numeral
classifiers that are actually documented in Colonial sources, for a total of 522 numeral classifiers:
(27)
166 in Calepino de Motul
123 in other Colonial sources
233 only in Modern Yucatec5
522 in Colonial Yucatec (hypothetical)
It should be noted that this figure — 522 numeral classifiers — is similar to the 528 numeral classifiers
elicited by Brent Berlin (1968) for the dialect of Tzeltal spoken in Tenejapa in highland Chiapas, Mexico,
during the 1960s. What is different is the number of numeral classifiers in the two regions that have sur-
vived into recent times: 230 in Hocaba and 225 in Pixoy versus 528 in Tenejapa. Clearly, the rate of loss of
numeral classifiers in Yucatecan Maya has been much greater than in Tzeltal.
This discrepancy can be traced to the differential exposure of the two languages to Spanish loan vocab-
ulary. In the 1960s, most of the population of Tenejapa spoke no Spanish (Berlin 1968:19), whereas by
1970, Yucatecan Maya had been heavily influenced by Spanish. In the Tzeltal region, the number system
was robust, and it was still possible to count up to 800 in Tzeltal (Kaufman 1971:91–96), whereas in the
Yucatan peninsula, only the numbers from one to three or, at most four, or five were still in use (Romero
Castillo 1961:658).
Speakers of Yucatecan Maya normally do not use numeral classifiers with Spanish numbers (Blair and
Vermont-Salas 1965:61; but see Lucy 1992:51). Therefore, as Spanish loans replaced the Maya terms for
numbers, the number of opportunities for using numeral classifiers in the language must have declined.
And because numeral classifiers were used less often than in the past, many of them were gradually for-
gotten and therefore not passed on to the next generation.
NUMBERS AND NUMERAL CLASSIFIERS
245
In my experience, speakers of Yucatecan Maya who were born during the 1930s used numeral classi-
fiers with great precision, but those born a generation or two later are not able to distinguish šéet’ ‘piece’
from šóot’ ‘chunk’ and b’áab’ ‘stalk, stem’ from múuč’ ‘group.’ Their Maya vocabulary is less varied than the
vocabulary of earlier generations, and it lacks some of the nuances of earlier varieties of the language.
The impact of this change is most noticeable in the way that p’éel has become the dominant numeral
classifier in the language. At the beginning of the Colonial period, the generic numeral classifiers were tul
(phonetic [túul]) ‘animate,’ cul (phonetic [kúul]) ‘plant,’ and ppel (phonetic [p’éel]) ‘thing.’ Later in the Colo-
nial period, ppel became the numeral classifier of choice for quantifying nouns of Spanish origin, including
those referring to people (see 2.1. above). By the end of the twentieth century, p’éel was competing with
túul as the animate classifier for people and animals referred to by Maya nouns, and I have also heard it
used for quantifying plants. It seems that, as the traditional numeral classifiers fall by the wayside, p’éel is
gradually assuming the role as the all-purpose numeral classifier with the few Maya numbers that are left
in the language.
There is one group of numeral classifiers that should have been relatively immune from the losses
resulting from the replacement of Maya number words by their Spanish equivalents, namely those that
served as surrogate temporal adverbs after the numbers, hun ‘one’ and ca ‘two.’ But this is not the case.
The possible examples of such constructions that appear in the Hocaba dictionary (V. Bricker et al. 1998)
are too few and too heterogeneous in meaning and structure to constitute a coherent semantic class:
(27) hun=hùul ‘identical’
hum=pakiliʔ ‘completely’
hum=pùul ‘all at once, in one motion’
hum=puliʔ ‘never, ever, forever; at once’
hum=pùuliliʔ ‘completely’
hum=p’íit ‘ a little’
káʔah=téen ‘again’
They should be compared with the examples in (20), which, because they are far more numerous and
were grouped together under hun ‘one’ in the Calepino de Motul, were more easily recognized as having
something in common. The ones in (27) are all that remains of what was once a robust category of numeral
classifiers that served as temporal adverbs in Colonial Yucatec.
NOTES
1. This is similar to the way that speakers of German refer to the half-hour when telling time:
um halb elf Uhr
‘at half-past ten’ [literally, at half eleven hour]’ (Baumann and Klatt 1910:477)
2. The examples in (6a–e) and (8a–e) are consistent with the Maya numbers from one to forty on pages
152–153 of Beltrán de Santa Rosa María’s Arte de la lengua maya . . (1746). Therefore, the insertion of
“ca” before “kal” between angle brackets in the numbers from twenty one through thirty nine on page
263 of René Acuña’s edition of Beltrán’s grammar (2002) is unlikely to be correct.
3. An earlier treatment of this topic by Moisés Romero Castillo (1961) is based on only 33 numeral
classifiers.
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NUMBERS AND NUMERAL CLASSIFIERS
4. The interrogative particle, hay ‘how many?’, is also a bound morpheme, replacing the number in
numeral classifier phrases, such as:
hay tul a mehenob
‘how many sons do you have?’ (Ciudad Real 1600?: fol. 173r)
5. But assumed to have been present in Colonial Yucatec.
CHAPTER 10
ADJECTIVES
Robert Blair (1965:45–46) called adjectives “attributives” and treated them as a subclass of nouns in his
grammar of Modern Yucatec. So also did Norman McQuown (1967:242) in his sketch grammar of Colonial
Yucatec. Adjectives, like nouns, can serve as stative verbs in equational sentences when they co-occur
with pronominal suffixes (as in [9a–b] in 1.2. in Chapter 4). However, unlike nouns, adjectives cannot be
inflected for possession with clitic pronouns, and for this reason they are not treated as a subclass of nouns
in this grammar.
Adjectives are more difficult to distinguish from adverbial particles in Colonial and Modern Yucatec,
which can also function as st
ative verbs when followed by pronominal suffixes. The most useful criterion
for differentiating them is syntactic, not morphological: only adjectives can modify nouns, whereas parti-
cles can modify adjectives and verbs, but not nouns.
1. ADJECTIVAL ROOTS
Colonial and Modern Yucatec have both monosyllabic and disyllabic adjectival roots. Many of the mono-
syllabic roots in Colonial Yucatec have cognates in Modern Yucatec. Among them are seven color terms:
(1) Colonial
Modern
Adjective
Gloss
Adjective
Gloss
box
black
b’òoš
black, dirty
çak
white, false
sak
white, false
ek
black
ʔéek’
black
chac
red
čak
red, pink, orange, rust-colored
kan
ripe, yellow
k’an
ripe
poz
pale, discolored
pos
pale
yax
green
yáʔaš
green
Taste is another semantic category represented by Colonial monosyllabic adjectives and their Modern
cognates:
(2) Colonial
Modern
Adjective
Gloss
Adjective
Gloss
cii
sweet, tasty, delicious,
kiʔ
delicious
pleasant
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248 ADJECTIVES
çuuɔ
sour, acrid, acidic,
súʔuȼ’
sour, acrid
astringent
cħaah
sour
č’áʔah
alkaline (taste in rainwater)
cħocħ
salty, brackish, briny
č’óoč’
salty
pah sour
pah
sour
pap
spicy, smarting, burning
páap
spicy
yac
strong like tobacco
yak
smelly
and chili
A number of monosyllabic adjectives in Colonial and Modern Yucatec are concerned with personal char-
acteristics, both good and bad: