(29b) héʔe laʔ
‘here it is!’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:102)
(29c) héʔe loʔ letiʔ b’inen in manaʔ
‘There it is! That’s what I want to buy.’ (BB.4.31; Hanks 1990:277)
(29d) héʔ yàan sáabukàanoʔ
‘There it is in the bag.’ (BB.1.94; Hanks 1990:275)
The /l/ in laʔ and loʔ surfaces only when aʔ and oʔ immediately follow héʔe.
láayliʔ ‘still, even, now, yet’ is composed of the third person singular independent pronoun lay ‘he, she,
it’ in Colonial Yucatec and the enclitic ili (phonetic [iliʔ]) ‘still, yet’ (cf. 2.1. above and 2.1. in Chapter 4). léeyliʔ
is based on the more recent forms of this pronoun (le and ley). Some examples of the use of láayliʔ ... eʔ
and léeyliʔ ... eʔ appear below:
(30a) láiliʔ mináʔan tóʔon tàak’ineʔ
‘we don’t have money yet’ (Blair and Vermont-Salas 1965:139, 158)
(30b) walkil sáamaleʔ léeyliʔ wayanečeʔ
‘at this time tomorrow, you will still be here’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:299).
(30c) léeyliʔ t u wèenleʔ
‘he’s still sleeping’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:165)
In le ... (l)aʔ and le ... (l)oʔ, /l/ surfaces in the demonstrative pronouns, le laʔ ‘this one’ and le loʔ ‘that
one,’1 but not when the frames serve as demonstrative adjectives:
(31a) le laʔ in ȼéen=palil
‘this one is the child I raised’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:43)
(31b) u b’aatab’il le kàahaʔ
‘the ruler of this town’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:28)
(31c) le b’aʔaš k aw áʔalikoʔ le loʔ hač ʔúučih
‘that which you say, that one was long ago’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:20).
DEICTIC PARTICLES
401
As in Coloniall Yucatec (cf. 2.1. above), máʔ can appear with or without the partitive enclitic iʔ:
(32a) máʔ in k’áatiʔ
‘I don’t want it’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:176)
(32b) máʔ t u b’in
‘he’s not going’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:176)
Other examples of máʔ ... iʔ ‘not’ are given below:
(32c) máʔ máʔa=lob’čahakiʔ
‘he has not recovered’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:176)
(32d) máʔa t uy áʔalah ʔuȼ t uy ičiʔ
‘he didn’t say that he liked it’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:176)
Here, too, the example without the partitive enclitic (32b) seems to be more general in scope than the ones
that have it (32a, 32c-32d) (cf. Durbin and Ojeda 1978b).
The initial deictic in táant ... eʔ ‘just’ is composed of the durative aspect particle plus t:
(33)
táant in hàanleʔ
‘I just ate’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:270)
Like héʔe ... (l)aʔ, héʔe ... (l)oʔ, le ... (l)aʔ, and le ... (l)oʔ, the /l/ in téʔe ... (l)aʔ ‘right here, here’ and téʔe
... (l)oʔ ‘there’ surfaces only when the terminal deictic immediately follows the initial deictic:
(34a) t u láakal b’áʔaš t a mèentah ten téʔe k u kùupankil t in puksíʔik’alaʔ
‘everything you did to me, it is bottled up here in my heart’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:138)
(34b) máʔa to t a k’àanoʔ, téʔe k’àan téʔe laʔ
‘Not over there in your hammock, right here in the hammock here.’ (BB.4.60; Hanks 1990:481)
(34c) b’is téʔe kàabaloʔ
‘take it down there!’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:118)
(34d) ȼ’áah ten in toʔ yàan téʔe loʔ
‘give me my bundle that is over there!’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:277)
The next deictic frame is tíʔ ... iʔ ‘there’:
(35)
tíʔiʔ tíʔ t kanahiʔ
‘there, we learned it there’ (Blair and Vermont-Salas 1965:52)
to ... (l)oʔ ‘[out] there’ behaves like héʔe ... (l)aʔ, héʔe ... (l)oʔ, le ... (l)aʔ, le ... (l)oʔ, téʔe ... (l)aʔ, and téʔe
... (l)oʔ:
402
DEICTIC PARTICLES
(36a) šéen to ʔič nahoʔ
‘go over there in the house!’ (BB.4.129; Hanks 1990:419)
(36b) tiʔan to loʔ
‘They’re over there.’ (BB.4.75; Hanks 1990:419)
wal ... eʔ ‘perhaps, probably, or else’ has become a deictic frame in Modern Yucatec:
(37a) b’e=ʔòorá(h)a(ʔ) tíʔ čilikb’al wal t u k’àaneʔ
‘right now, he’s probably lying down there in his hammock’ (Blair and Vermont-Salas 1993:1057)
(37b) káʔah a hop wal a šikineʔ h pèedroh
‘you’d better listen carefully, Peter!’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:299)
(37c) tak lás d’òose(h) ʔáak’ab’ waleʔ
‘until twelve o’clock at night probably’ (Blair and Vermont-Salas 1993:1057)
The initial deictic phrase in wal(a)kil ... aʔ ‘at this time [of day]’ contains the subjunctive suffix -ak, fol-
lowed by the nominal suffix -il. The root in this phrase (wal) does not seem to have any semantic relation-
ship to the dubitative particle wal. An example of the use of this deictic phrase appears below:
(38)
walkil sáamaleʔ tíʔ yanen kankùumeʔ
‘at this time tomorrow, I will be in Cancun’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:299)
Last, but not least, is way ... eʔ ‘[in] here,’ which contrasts in meaning with to ... (l)oʔ ‘[out] there’:
(39a) way t uy ilaheʔ
‘he saw it here’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:301)
(39b) ká sùunahen tàal wayeʔ
‘then I turned around to come back here.’ (BB.4.78; Hanks 1990:412)
The initial deictic way has an alternate form (wey) in the dialects of Yucatecan Maya spoken in Hocaba (V.
Bricker et al. 1998:301, 304), Sotuta, and Chancah (in Quintana Roo) today :
(39c) tak káʔah k’učuk wey tak k’íiwik
‘until he came here to the plaza’ (V. Bricker 1981a:235, line 473)
(39d) káʔah ʔòok túun takčib’ič’éʔenóʔob’ wey kàaheʔ
‘and then those from Tacchibichen entered this town here’ (SOT971A:6)
2.3. EMBEDDED TERMINAL DEICTICS. In discussing the relative ranking of terminal deictics (TDS) in Mod-
ern Yucatec, Hanks (1990:491) mentions that “there are two major constraints on the normal syntactic
distribution of TDS: (i) they occur only at the final boundaries of a topic phrase or sentence, and (ii) only
one TD occurs at any boundary.” The first constraint also applied to Colonial Yucatec; the second did not.
The following example from a text dating to 1567 illustrates the embedding of one deictic frame in another,
with multiple terminal deictics at the end of the phrase:
DEICTIC PARTICLES
403
(40)
he tun a halach vinic yan vai la e
‘then, as for this ruler of yours, who is here’ (MID567:fol. 367, line 78)
The two frames in this example are he ... la ‘this’ and vai ... e ‘[in] here.’ The terminal deictic of the first frame
(la) is embedded in the second frame (vai ... e).
Much more common are phrases and sentences ending with terminal deictics preceded by a single
initial deictic:
(41a) bay bin a nuppicex au ox=kaz olal lo e
‘thus you will resist those carnal desires of yours’ (Ciudad Real 1600?:fol. 339r)
(41b) lay u beel Juan tzucachil lo e
‘this is John’s condition: lust’ (Ciudad Real 1600?:fol. 50r)
(41c) y etel ca nucteylob yan vay ti provinçia yucatan la e
‘and our elders who are here in this province of Yucatan’ (MID567:fol. 365, line 4)
(41d) he ix
kax lo e
‘and as for that forest there’ (OX772-007)
(41e) he t u tħan lic c alic tech la e
‘as for in the language in which we say this to you’ (MID567:fol. 367, line 93)
(41f) ma v tialob i e
‘it is not theirs’ (DZ651E-616B)
The above examples suggest that e always occupies the final position in a phrase or sentence after lo, la,
and i.2
As such, e was easily lost in the transition to Modern Yucatec, when la and lae became aʔ, lo and loe
became oʔ, and ie became iʔ. Because terminal deictics have become mutually exclusive (Blair and Ver-
mont-Salas 1965:253–256, 1967:845; Hanks 1990:491), it is now necessary to rank them as follows: aʔ > oʔ
> b’eʔ > iʔ > eʔ. As a result of the reduction of the number of possible terminal deictics in phrases and sen-
tences from two to one, eʔ has became an “empty placeholder” (Hanks 1990:567), invoked when no other
terminal deictics are relevant.
However, there is still one reflex of Colonial Yucatec lae in the modern language, in b’ehláʔeʔ or
b’eheláʔeʔ ‘now, today, these days, actually, nowadays’ (V. Bricker et al. 1998:29; Hanks 1990:18–19). The
sixteenth-century forms of this expression were hele la (Ciudad Real 1600?:fol. 206v) and hele lae:
(42a) u kinil ocçah ba hele lae
‘now is the time for converting oneself’ (Ciudad Real 1600?:fol. 341r)
(42b) tan=çuuanen hele lae
‘I am very busy now’ (Ciudad Real 1600?:fol. 412r)
(42c) bal v nen v ɔij au ol hele lae
‘what are you imagining now?’ (Ciudad Real 1600?:fol. 326v)
404
DEICTIC PARTICLES
(42d) vay ix yan v mandamientoil t in pach hele lae
‘and here there is his writ against me now!’ (DZ587A-079-080)
A seventeenth-century example of hele lae appears below:
(42e) ca ti nuppi v ɔabal v multunil hele lae
‘then he ran across the placement of his mound today’ (DZ651C-452A-B)
The first modification of hele lae appeared in the second half of the 1840s, when it was combined with
ba or bay ‘thus’ in letters originating from Tihosuco in the east and Tekax in the Puuc region:
(43a) ba=hele lae ɔooc u kuchul ora
‘now the hour has come’ (HTZ847A)
(43b) c inu alic tech bay=hele lae
‘I say it to you now’ (TKX848A)
By 1850, bay had changed to bei in Chan Santa Cruz in Quintana Roo:
(44)
bei u oraila bei=hele laa
‘thus the hour is now’ (V. Bricker 1981a:203, lines 575–576)
The shift from bay to bei or bey echoed the shift of lay to ley or lei in the third person independent pro-
nouns, which had begun much earlier during the seventeenth century (cf. 2.3. in Chapter 4 and 2.4.1.
below). With that modification, all the elements in b’ehláʔeʔ or b’e=heláʔeʔ were in place.
Thus, the root of b’ehláʔeʔ is not b’eh ‘road,’ as I originally thought (V. Bricker et al. 1998:29; see also
Hanks 1990:312). The word is, rather, composed of two roots — b’èey ‘thus’ and hele(l) ‘today’ — and the
terminal deictics laʔ and eʔ.
Hanks (1990:501–504) mentions one other, rare (and highly specialized) context in which more than
one terminal deictic may be associated with a single sentence or phrase, namely when a citation form is
embedded within a le ... (l)oʔ frame during an elicitation session:
(45a) le héʔelečeʔ oʔ —> miš b’áʔah kiyáaik—>
‘That héʔelečeʔ (that you’ve said), it means nothing.’ (F.1.B.168; Hanks 1990:502)
(45b) pwes u k’áat iy áʔal le tíʔili aʔ oʔ —>
‘Well, this tíʔili (that you’ve said), it means
ʔóli ká k ʔáʔal um p’eé b’áʔa sùuk—>
it’s sort of like if we were to say a customary thing.’ (F.1.A.685; Hanks 1990:503)
Below are comparable examples from Hocaba and Ebtun:
(45c) k(uy) iláʔaleʔ káʔah luk’ le šáʔak’ iʔ oʔ
‘it was seen that that anatto paste left there’ (Poʔot Yah n.d.b)
DEICTIC PARTICLES
405
(45d) máʔ t inw áʔal iʔ oʔ tíiyoh
‘isn’t that what I said, Uncle?’ (EBT979C)
Such examples would not have been regarded as problematical in Colonial times, when there was no
restriction on the number of deictics that could occur at the end of a phrase, and, in fact, there were
already examples of the embedding of one deictic frame in another then, albeit in a different context (e.g.,
[40] above). For this reason, I regard the examples in (45a–d) as vestiges of an earlier more general toler-
ance for the presence of multiple terminal deictics at the boundary of clauses and phrases.
There is one other specialized context in the dialect of Modern Yucatec spoken in Oxkutzcab where
more than one terminal deictic can appear at the end of a sentence or phrase, namely when a terminal
deictic is reduplicated in a process that Hanks (1990:498–501) calls “expressive stretching”:
(46a) héʔ yáalkaʔ le haʔ b’ey aʔaʔ
‘The water will surely run (off) this way.” (BB.5.60; Hanks 1990:498)
(46b) máʔ klàaro ʔíʔistak oʔoʔ
‘Of course, it’s not clear.’ (F.1.A.895; Hanks 1990:499)
(46c) pwes u k’áat y áʔal tíʔ a tàal eʔeʔ
‘Well, “There is where you come from,” it means’ (F.1.A.774; Hanks 1990:500)
In examples like these, aʔaʔ, oʔoʔ, iʔiʔ, and eʔeʔ are used for emphasis (see also Ojeda and Durbin 1978b:55–
60). Their counterparts in the Colonial orthography (if there had been any) would have been: lala, lolo, ij,
and ee. There are no examples of lala or lolo in my documentary database, and ij and ee would have been
ambiguous because they could have represented phonetic [iʔ] and [eʔ], respectively. On the other hand,
it is possible that the reduplicated vowel in bei=hele laa in (44) was intended to indicate emphasis, rather
than aʔ. b’ehláʔaʔ with a more general meaning also occurs in Modern Yucatec (V. Bricker et al. 1998:29),
conforming more closely to bei=hele laa in (44).
There are also a few examples of the reduplication of initial deictics in Modern Yucatec:
(47a) héʔ yàan héʔelaʔ
‘Here it is here (take it!).’ (Hanks 1990:471)
(47b) héʔ k u b’in letiʔ héʔeloʔ
‘There goes the one there (look!).’ (Hanks 1990:471)
Sometimes the deictic frame, consisting of both initial and terminal deictics, can be reduplicated:
(47c) tíʔiʔ tíʔ t kanahiʔ
‘there, we learned it there’ (Blair and Vermont-Salas 1965:52)
The first instance of the frame in this example consists only of the initial and the terminal deictics, whereas
the second frames a lexical verb inflected for completive aspect (t kanah).
2.4. HISTORICAL CHANGE IN INITIAL DEICTICS AND DEICTIC FRAMES. The principal changes that took place
in deictic particles over time involved the raising of medial /a/ to /e/ before final /y/ in initial deictics, the
406
DEICTIC PARTICLES
loss of /l/ in la, lo, lae, and loe after words ending in non-laryngeal consonants, and the limitation of the
number of terminal deictics that could occur at the end of a phrase or sentence to one.
2.4.1. VOWEL FUSION IN [Y]-FINAL INITIAL DEICTICS. /a/ served as the medial vowel before /y/ in three of
the initial deictics in Colonial Yucatec: bay, lay, and uay. During the Colonial p
eriod and after, lay gradually
became ley or le, bay became bey, and uey became a variant of uay.
The first evidence of lay being replaced by ley in my database comes from a document in the Titles of
Ebtun dated to 1675:
(48)
bay xan ley in matan ti in yume
‘thus also this alms of mine to my father’ (EBT675A)
However, this phrase is only one of seven references to the demonstrative pronoun in the document. The
other six were written as lay.
The next references to ley (or lei) instead of lay in an Ebtun document were written more than a century
later in 1784:
(49a) ley u tial ah camalob
‘this is for the Camal men’ (EBT784A)
(49b) ley u tial Dn Matheo Camal
‘this is for Don Mateo Camal’ (EBT784A)
(49c) lei t betah t u can titzil lae
‘this we did in the four corners’ (EBT784A)
Now there were three instances of ley in a single document, but there were also six references to lay.
Another reference to ley showed up four years later in 1788:
(50)
hele en 26 de enero de 1788 as ley lae
‘today on the 26th of January of 1788 years, this’ (EBT788A)
This time there were only two instances of lay in the document.
A document dated to 1791 contained one instance of le and one of lay:
(51)
va t u mentab le hal tħana
‘or he made this true word’ (EBT791C)
Another document dated to the same year contained one instance of le, but three instances of lay:
(52)
le ix c in kubic y u huunil lae
‘and this is what I delivered with the letter’ (EBT791F)
There is only one document with ley, lei, or le from the first decade of the nineteenth century in Ebtun,
which contains four instances of le and none of lay:
DEICTIC PARTICLES
407
(53a) le lob t u metaho
‘that harm that he did’ (EBT809B)
(53b) ma t ɔocbes...bi le despacho
‘we did not finish this dispatch’ (EBT809B)
(53c) yan ychil le despacho
‘it exists in this dispatch’ (EBT809B)
(53d) le lob t u betaho ten
‘that harm that he did to me’ (EBT809B)
Table 15-1 shows that there continued to be roughly equal numbers of ley and lay during the second
A Historical Grammar of the Maya Language of Yucatan (1557-2000) Page 65