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 Maya writing is the best understood of the pre-Colum-
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, co-
herent 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 ances-
tral 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, Gua-
temala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) and a coeditor
(with Oswaldo Chinchilla and David Stuart) of The Decipher-
ment 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 in-
clude The Structure of Pronoun Incorporation in the Mayan Ver-
bal Complex (New York: Garland Press, 1980), The History of
Tense/Aspect/Mood/Voice in the Mayan Verbal Complex (Aus-
tin: University of Texas Press, 1992), and “The Origins and De-
velopment 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 Lec-
turer, 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 Re-
search, 1987), (with Stephen Houston) Classic Maya Place-
Names (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1994), and “A New
Decipherment of the ’Directional Count’ Glyphs” (Ancient Me-
soamerica 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 Me-
soamerica, 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,
bian 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 fea-
tures 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 inscrip-
tions? More pointedly, how can the linguistic evidence
encoded in the ancient script be used to situate the writ-
ten 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 lan-
guage of the ancient inscriptions within a broader con-
text 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 sub-
families 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” ap-
proach, recognizing a general presence of Ch’olan or Yu-
katekan languages in the glyphs without offering a more
specific identification. But which of the languages within
these families most closely approximates the specific lin-
1. 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 re-
sponding to the arguments herein. Søren Wichmann and David Kil-
lick helped with criticism and sources. Other helpful comments
came from anonymous reviewers. The usual disclaimers apply. Un-
less 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 Ga-
brielle 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 Sci-
ences, 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 an-
cestral to the so-called Eastern Ch’olan languages—the
historically attested Ch’olti’ language and its descen-
dant, modern Ch’orti’ (fig.1).2 Furthermore, we agree
with Alfonso Lacadena (1998b) that Yukatekan lan-
2. Robertson doubts that “Eastern Ch’olan” and “Western Ch’olan”
are useful labels. In some respects, Acalán Chontal (the colonial-
era 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 hiero-
glyphic 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 docu-
mented in Maya script and situated within historical
developments, has obvious implications for hieroglyph-
ics decipherment and, more broadly, for interpretations
of elite culture and society during the Classic period. By
providing early, written attestations that can be com-
pared with reconstructions from historical linguistics, its
identification should offer Maya archaeology a firmer lin-
guistic 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 mod-
ified, but we hope that they will prove useful and inter-
esting 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 gener-
ally 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 mid-
16th 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 gradu-
ally 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. Thomp-
son 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 them-
selves. Following well-established practice, words taken from lex-
ical sources preserve their original spellings. Glyphic transcriptions
(in boldface) accord with a useful system developed by George Stu-
art (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 sixteenth-
century 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 de-
cipherment continued to demonstrate an almost exclu-
sive 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 lan-
guages was also advanced by Kelley (1976:13) and, as we
shall see, was soon widely acknowledged in the epi-
graphic 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 archaeologi-
cal features or distinctive dates in texts signaled language
boundaries between the Petén and central Yucatán
(Thompson 1978:7–10). Few people agreed about the na-
ture 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 recogniz-
ing 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 hi-
eroglyphs. 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, how-
ever, 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 Type of Argumenta Proposed Affiliation

1828 C. Rafinesque G “Tzendal”

1876 L. de Rosny G Yukatek
1950 J. E. S. Thompson G/L Modern Yukatek and Ch’ol-Ch’orti’, Mopán;
later Tzeltal,Tzotzil, and Q’anjob’al
1955 Y. Knorosov M Yukatek
1976 D. Kelley G Yukatek and Ch’olan
1982 L. Schele M Ch’olan
1984 B. MacLeod M Ch’olan
1986 V. Bricker M Yukatekan and Ch’olan
1987 M. Closs L Yukatekan
1988 J. Justeson, W. M. Norman, M Yukatekan in Early Classic Belize
and N. Hammond
1991 A. F. Chase, N. Grube, L Yukatekan at Caracol, Belize
and D. Z. Chase
1991 M. Macri M Ch’olan
1994 R. Wald M Eastern Ch’olan
1996 A. Lacadena M Eastern Ch’olan
1997 M. Ayala L Tzeltal at Toniná, Chiapas
1997 F. Lounsbury L Possible Kaqchikel or K’iche’an input
1998 C. Hofling M 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 (Thomp-
son 1972:55).
By the late 1970s, then, most specialists had accepted
geographical arguments that limited the language affil-
iation 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 evi-
dence incorporated glyphic readings that have not with-
stood review (Justeson and Campbell 1997:65). Increas-
ingly, 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 interpreta-
tions, 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 suf-
fixes in the script. Building in part on MacLeod’s work,
Schele (1982) forcefully and eloquently asserted the ge-
ographical 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 ele-
ments, 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 in-
complete 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 re-
sulted from the errors of scribes speaking different languages, the
signs being recorded without any real understanding of their lin-
guistic underpinnings. Nonetheless, they probably overvalue lexi-
cal 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 incom-
plete spellings have other motivations, including aesthetic manip-
ulation and the transformation of syllabic groupings into near-logo-
graphs, 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 pat-
terns in phonology (or at least their representation in glyphs) di-
agnose 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 spe-
cialists 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 dis-
tinctive 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 in-
triguing 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, de-
tected 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 end-
ing, 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-speak-
ers (MacLeod 1987:72). More confusing still, both the
“Yukatekan” -lah and the Ch’olan -wan sometimes ap-
peared 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” char-
acter 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 lan-
guages. 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 dec-
ade 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 con-
sider 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, usu-
ally of isolated words, or (3) grammatical or morpholog-
ical 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 cele-
brated decipherment of Linear B writing as representing
an early form of Greek involved the discovery of struc-
tural 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 gram-
matical 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 be-
cause 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 re-
gard 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 im-
portant for some discussions to come but is generally too ambig-
uous 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, trawling for possible fits between script and language.
61–62; cf. Campbell 1984:4), but this approach is fraught Although necessary, at least at an initial stage of re-
with difficulties. Glottochronology offers at best impre- search, this exploration runs the risk of becoming ad hoc,
cise results and at worst spurious certainty of chronol- as though the language or languages of the script rep-
ogy. As decipherment advances, epigraphic reliance on resented a devised system of communication drawn from
glottochronology in studies of linguistic history during several linguistic sources—a Yukatekan verb appearing
the Classic period should diminish. Datable inscriptions alongside a Ch’olan for reasons of scribal caprice. It is
will provide far better information on the timing of lan- more judicious to assume that a glyphic text records a
guage 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 in-
terconnected than geographical and lexical lines of evi-
dence 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 lan-
guages or branches need to be evaluated against the
glyphic evidence. If such patterns occur systematically
from site to site, then those languages are plausibly re-
corded in script; if not, then glyphs may record dialect
or language differences (Macri 1988:35–37). Methodolog-
ically, such comparisons raise the practical point that
such studies must increasingly rely on collaboration be-
tween linguists and glyph specialists. The data are too
voluminous and complex to be mastered comprehen-
sively 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 writ-
ten 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 discus-
sion of language affiliation. As we have noted, Maya epig-
raphers in the past have cast wide linguistic nets while

8. Macri (1988:33) advocates equal attention to syntax and dis-

course, but these features tend to be more general than the partic-
ulars 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 com-
parative linguistics are potentially as weak as those used in glot-
tochronology. The fact that comparative linguistics has flourished
and produced solid results for over a century and a half of schol-
arship 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, Bruxel-
les, F4); c, yi-cha-ni, y-icha:n, “maternal uncle” (Yax-
chilan Lintel 58, C1); d, o-chi, och-i, “enter” (Palenque
Palace Tablet, R13); e, pa-ti, pa:t, “back, behind” (Col-
lections, Emiliano Zapata); f, UH-ti-ya, uht-i:y, “it fin-
ished, happened” (Tortuguero Monument 6, E2); g, ni-
chi, 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 cul-
de-sac, that language will lead to later forms and will
possess historical idiosyncrasies not present in other Ma-
yan languages. On occasion, a study disciplined by com-
parative linguistics may suggest that the language of Ma-
yan glyphs preserves archaic forms lost in daughter
languages (e.g., Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998).
Regional differences in phrasing may or may not reg-
ister 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 pub-
lic 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 “Clas-
sic Ch’olti’an,” employs distinctive morphological ele-
ments 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.
Fig. 3. Primary and secondary categories of Mayan verbs in Common Mayan.
Phonology, Lexemes, Morphology, and Classic
Ch’olti’an
A tenet of historical linguistics is that any language de-
scended from another language will exhibit certain sys-
tematic, paradigmatic relationships to its ancestor. In
terms of phonology, for example, the descent of the Com-
mon 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 Com-
mon Wasteko-Ch’olan and specifically Ch’olan connec-
tion 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 pho-
nology 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])
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 Com-
mon Mayan ∗k(’) to Common Wasteko-Ch’olan ch(’)
(seen in chih, chij, ch’am, ’ichan), glyphic spellings dis-
play certain vowels characteristic only of Ch’olan lan-
guages. 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 Wasteko-
Ch’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 (Hous-
ton, 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(’). Exam-
ples 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 geograph-
ically restricted to the extreme western lowlands. All
four lexemes would fit comfortably within Yukatekan,
but they cannot be taken as evidence of an ancient Yu-
katekan affiliation for Palenque. We find kab’, for ex-
ample, attested in modern Ch’ol for “earth,” where the
expected form, in fact reconstructable for Common Was-
teko-Ch’olan, would be chab’ (Kaufman and Norman
1984:89). Ch’olan kab’ is, as Kaufman and Norman sur-
mise, certainly a later borrowing from Yukatekan. The
restricted distribution of these words may indicate a re-
gion 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 Wasteko-
Ch’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 ju-
lu, 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 connec-
tion considerably.
The lexical origins of certain CV syllables in the writ-
ing 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, oth-
ers 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 in-
novation 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 histor-
ical 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 tive (declarative) mood and ∗-oq in the optative (sub-

Positionals in Mayan Languages junctive) mood (compare K’iche’ declarative ka-war-ik,
“he sleeps,” with the optative ka-war-oq, “would that
Language Positional Stem Translation 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. Further-
∗ ∗
Common Mayan CV1C- V1l Gloss more, the optative ∗-oq changed to ∗-ok and then to -ik
Classic Ch’olti’an chum-ul-i:y (CHUM- “sitting”
[mu]-li-ya)
by analogy with the declarative -i; for example, in
Ch’olti’ tzuc-ul “sitting” Ch’olti’ x-pacx-ic, “I will return,” the optative -ic has
Ch’orti’ jaw-ar “lying face up” become a future marker.
Tzendal nac-al “sitting” Classic Ch’olti’an probably preserved the declarative
Tzeltal hutz-ul “sitting” ∗
-ik as -i. Intransitive verbs and other single-argument
Kaqchikel (Sololá) k’aw-äl “lying face up”
K’iche’ pak’-al-ek “lying face up” predicates (excluding CV[h]Caj passives and -laj posi-
Poqomchi’ chun-l-ek “sitting” tionals) display glyphic spellings with root 1 i (ta-li 1
Mam pak’-l “lying face up” tal- i; UH-ti 1 uht-i) or root 1 yi (PUL-yi 1 pul-uy-i; tsu2-
yi 1 tsuts-uy-i). A similar pattern occurs with positionals
using -wan (CHUM-[mu]- wa-ni 1 chum- wan-i), an an-
possible to make similar observations with respect to tipassive10 form detected by Lacadena (1988a; CH’AM-
morphology. These diagnostic features involve, in our wi 1 ch’am- w-i), and a distinctively Ch’olti’ verb de-
view, three major predicational types that are universally tected at Naj Tunich by Barbara MacLeod (pa-ka-xi 1
present in all Mayan languages: the positional, the in- pak-x-i; MacLeod and Stone 1994:178; Morán 1935:21).
transitive, and the transitive. The morphology that char- The final -i registers a particle that descends from the
acterizes these three classes constitutes a well-defined Common Mayan ∗-ik, a marker of single-argument pred-
grammatical system whose pattern is readily recon- icates. By the time Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’ were in use, the
structable back to Common Mayan (fig. 3), a historical particle had disappeared altogether. That it does not oc-
trajectory that has not hitherto been charted. cur after velar -aj or -laj, also marking intransitive pred-
The positional predicates are “statives”—that is, ad- icates, may reflect a poorly understood phonological pro-
jective-like—and regularly do what their name implies: cess. Interestingly, when marked aspectually or
signal positions such as sitting, standing, crouching, and deictically these suffixes take an unequivocal glottal h,
so on. The reconstructed canonical form for this class is as in -laj 1 -lah-i:y.
∗
CV1C root, with a suffix ∗-V1l, where the root and suffix Transitive verbs, in contrast to intransitives, have a
vowel are identical. In effect, the root vowel determines direct object (e.g., “I set it down, I found the paper,” and
the vowel of the suffix, a process known as vowel har- so on). The primary division in Mayan transitive verbs
mony (table 2). The translation would roughly be, for is between root transitives (verbs with a single, short
example, “I am [in a] sitting [position].” The canonical vowel, CVC, e.g., ∗-muq-, “to bury”) and derived tran-
∗
CV1C-V1l form is preserved in all the Common Wasteko- sitives (verbs that are otherwise more complex, either by
Ch’olan languages. vowel length or additional consonants or by derivational
It is also necessary to reconstruct in Common Mayan morphemes, e.g., ∗-ts’ihb’-, “to write” [table 4]). We pro-
a non-vowel-harmonic suffix, -an, which probably oc- pose that the root transitives in Common Mayan took
curred when the root vowel of the positional contained
an -l, as preserved in Kaqchikel k’ul-an, “married.” In 10. An antipassive is a form that signals the absence of a direct
other words, if the positional root vowel contains an l, object, for example, “The lion kills for sport.”
the regular suffix -V1l cannot occur; -an then takes its
place. This is technically known as dissimilation, since table 3
unattested ∗k’ul-ul would otherwise result in two l’s in Intransitives in Mayan Languages
the same word, one in the root and one in the suffix.
The Q’anjob’alan subgroup has generalized ∗-an (displac-
ing -V1l) as the only positional marker. Finally, the ad- Language Intransitive Translation
jectival positional is like all noun and adjective predi-
cates in the Mayan languages; it tends not to take aspect ∗
Common Mayan ∗
k-in-war-ik “I sleep”
markers. Transitives and intransitives typically are Classic Ch’olti’an tal-i (ta-li) “he comes”
marked for aspect. Ch’olti’ vixi en “I went”
Intransitive verbs have no direct object (e.g., “I sit Ch’orti’ in-wayan “I sleep”
Tzendal u-tal on “I came”
down,” “I lie down,” and so forth). They have only one Tzeltal b’aht “he went”
associated argument (I in the two sentences above), in Akatek chin-wey an “I sleep”
contrast to transitives, which have two, as in “I set it Kaqchikel (Sololá) nk-i-wär “I sleep”
down” or “I lay it down.” In Mayan languages, verbs Cunén K’iche’ k-in-wor-ek “I sleep”
K’iche’ ka-war-ik “he sleeps”
that have a single argument take the absolutive pronoun Poqomchi’ wir-ik “he slept”
and are inflected for aspect (table 3). They also take the Mam n-ch-in-ta:n-e “I sleep”
suffix derived from Common Mayan ∗-ik in the indica-
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 ∗
CV-h-C migrated to the function “passive” in Common
Transitives in Mayan Languages Wasteko-Ch’olan.12
The transitive positional describes not a position a
Language Transitive Translation 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 posi-
∗ ∗
Common Mayan ka-ru-muq-u “he buried it” tional. Tzendal illustrates the three kinds of positions:
Classic Ch’olti’an ’u-chok-ow (‘U-cho- “he scatters it”
ko-wa)
the “stative” positional nac-al (sit-posit.), “sitting,” the
Ch’olti’ in-kux-u “I ate it (meat)” transitive positional nac-ay-on (sit-intrans.posit.-I), “I sat
Ch’orti’ in-mak-i “I covered it” down,” and the transitive positional q-na-[h]-c-an (I-set-
Tzendal q-magh-at “I beat you” [trans.posit.]-sit-trans.posit.), “I set.”
Tzeltal la-h-mil “I killed him” The “intransitive transitive” category is determined
Akatek xx-in-ma’ naja “I hit him”
Kaqchikel (Sololá) x-in-tz’et “I saw him” by voice, which includes passives and antipassives—the
Cunén K’iche’ x-in-ch’y-o “I hit him” former being a crucial focus for our discussion. For root
K’iche’ x-at-in-ch’ey-o “I hit you” transitives we reconstruct ∗CV-h-C for the passive in
Poqomchi’ x-at-ni-k’oj “I hit you” Common Wasteko-Ch’olan. The passive in Ch’olti’an
Mam n-w-il-e “I see it”
(Ch’olti and Ch’orti’ [Lacadena 1998a]) is an innovation,
-h-. . .-a(j), firmly linking the Ch’olti-an subgroup with
a
The xx signals an alveolopalatal retroflex. 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 vowel-harmonic ending ∗-V1w in the declarative The script also registers a second kind of passive, -V1y,
mood and ∗-V1’ in the optative mood. Vowel-harmonic a so-called medio-passive. The medio-passive typically
∗
-V1w in active transitives from Classic Ch’olti’an (ren- signals intransitive actions that are wholly self-con-
dered ERG-ROOT-wa) support this reconstruction (Wald tained and strongly signal a change of state, as with the
1994). The derived transitive class is so diverse that mor- transitive verb burn, “the house burned,” or close, “the
phological reconstruction is less secure than for the root door closed.” With medio-passives, the agent is typically
transitives. unknown. The English word get is quite effective in
The reflexes (descendants) of the ∗-V1w suffix are found translating medio-passives: “It got cut,” “it got full,” and
throughout all the Mayan subgroups. Classic Ch’olti’an so on.
is a precise preservation of Common Mayan. It is also The etymology of both the Classic Ch’olti’an passive
found in a reduced form in Ch’olti’ and, as -V1, in Ch’ol. -h-. . .-aj and the medio-passive -V1y is the intransitive
It has been further reduced to -e (after a root with e) and positional. The original function of these two passive
morphemes is readily found in Tzendal (Colonial Tzeltal)
-i (elsewhere) in declarative sentences (but stays as -V1
and Tzeltal; nac-ayc-otan (calm.down-intrans.posit.my-
in the subjunctive). It has been further reduced simply
heart), “my heart calmed down” (Tzendal), and hu-h-tz-
to -i in Ch’olan. But the point is that the Ch’olti’ and
ah (sit.down-intrans.posit.-sit.down-intrans.posit.), “he
Ch’ol similarity here is due to a preservation and there-
sat down” (Tzeltal). What is unique to Classic Ch’olti’an,
fore does not place them in the same lineage any more
Ch’olti’, and Ch’orti’ is the following facts of diachronic
than i-muk-u (he-bury-transitive), “he buried it,” and x-
change: the migration of the intransitive positional suf-
u-muq- u (completive-he-bury-transitive) place Ch’ol
fixes ∗V1y (earlier) and -h-. . .-aj (later) to become passive
and Kaqchikel in the same lineage. forms in pre-Classic Ch’olti’an and the displacement of
These primary categories—positional, intransitive, the earlier passive ∗V1y to the status of medio-passive.
transitive—intersect, creating three secondary verbal
categories: intransitive positionals, transitive position-
als, and “intransitive transitives” (fig. 3).
The intransitive positional describes not a stative po-
The History of Classic Ch’olti’an
sition but a position a being takes. Such intransitive
verbs might translate, for example, “I sat down,” “I stood Table 5 provides evidence for the direction of change
hinted at above. It contains the data underlying our re-
up,” and so on. We assume that the intransitive posi-
constructions. The positionals, intransitives, transitives,
tionals had these forms in Common Mayan: ∗CVC-er and
∗ and passives figure most prominently here. Mere in-
CV-h-C. By Common Wasteko-Ch’olan times, -aj was
spection reveals the probable accuracy of these recon-
added to ∗CV-h-C, yielding ∗CV-h-C-aj, a form that ap-
structions, although the table goes beyond the scope of
pears in Classic Ch’olti’an as a passive (Lacadena
this paper by giving detailed data implicating historical
1998a).11 With the innovation of ∗CV-h-C-aj, the original
developments in language families other than Ch’olan.
The most complete demonstration of several changes
11. Kaufman and Norman (1984:109) propose that an -aj intransi-
tivizer was suffixed to the root transitive passive CV-h-C to form readily found in Mayan languages is the comparison of
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 po- 12. See below for a further discussion of the movement of intran-
sitional that we reconstruct from Common Wasteko-Ch’olan. sitive 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

Intransitive Transitive
Language Positional Positional Positional Passive

∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Common Mayan -V1l/-an -er/-h- -b’a: -ax-
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Common Wasteko-Ch’olan -V1l/-an -V1y/-h-. . .-aj -b’a: -h-
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Common Ch’olan -V1l -V1y/-h-. . .-aj -b’a: -h-
Classic Ch’olti’an -V1l -wan [late]/-laj -b’u/-b’a?a/-chokon -h-?. . .aj
Ch’olti’ -V1l -uan -b’u/-chokon -h-. . .-aj
Ch’orti’ -V1r -wan -b’u/-b’a -h-. . .-aj
Acalán (Classical Chontal) -V1l -van ? ?
Ch’ol -V1l -täl -chokon -h-. . .el
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Common Tzeltal-Tzotzil -V1l -V1y/-h-. . .-aj -an -ot
∗
Tzendal -V1l -V1y -an -ot
Tzeltal -V1l -h-. . .-ah -h-. . .-an -ot
Tzotzil -V1l -ı́ -an -at
Tojolab’al -an -an -a’CVC-an -(a)h
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Common Q’anjob’alan -an -Vy -ba’ -l
Q’anjob’al -an -a’ -b’a’ -le
Akatek -an -na(dv) -b’a’ -l-
∗ ∗ ∗ ∗ ∗
Common Mamean-K’iche’an -V1l/-an -e:’ -b’a’ -h-
∗
Kaqchikel -V1l/-an -e’ -b’a’ -Vh- 1 -V:
Poqomchi’ -l CV-h-C -a:’ Vr/-j/-h-
Sakapultek -V1l -V1b’ -V1b’a’ -l/-b’
Mam -l/č -e:’/CV:C-et -b’a’ -et
Tektitek -l/č -l-et -b’a’ -et
Awakatek -l -e:’ -b’a:’ -l
Ixil -l-éle -[a,e]b’ -b’a’ -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 tran-
sitive 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 adjec-
tival 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 re-
garding the Q’eqchi’ innovations is that certain intran-
sitive verbs of motion take the same -e’ marker: -num-
e’, “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 in-
fluencing the marker of the intransitive positional, and
the passive marker attaching to certain intransitive verbs
of motion—occur in other Mayan languages. The im-
portant 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 im-
plication, 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 dis-
cussed in this paper: Common Mayan, Common Was-
teko-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 Wasteko-
Ch’olan ∗-h-. . .-aj from the intransitive positional func-
tion 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 po-
sitional ∗-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 Was-
teko-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 po-
sitional ∗-V1l (compare Mam -k’ul-b’a, “to meet some-
one,” 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 Kaqchi-
kel: t-in-chap (incompletive-I-take), “I take it,” k-i-chap-
er (incompletive-I-take-passive), “I was taken.” Further-
more, 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 sec-
ondary (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 in-
novated 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 ad-
jectival positional ch’ub’-l, “pursed lips,” has an intran-
sitive positional form n-ch’u-:- b’-et.
The new, innovative Tzeltalan form ∗-V1y ! ∗-er is ex-
tensively attested in Tzendal: adjectival positional chub-
ul, “sitting,” intransitive positional chub-uy, “to sit
down,” adjectival positional chot-ol, “squatting,” in-
transitive positional chot-oy, “to squat.” Tzendal also
had a secondary marker for the intransitive positional,
[-h-]. . .-agh (gh being a velar fricative), which undoubt-
edly corresponds to modern Tzeltal -h-. . .-aj; in Tzendal
VhC was written simply VC by the colonial scribes. Ob-
serve the following in Tzendal: adjectival positional ton-
ol, “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 po-
sitional te-h-k’-ah, “to stand up.”
It is not uncommon in languages of the world for mark-
ers 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 medio-
passive (e.g., pas, “to do,” pa-h-s, “to get done,” but’, “to
fill,” bu-h-t’, “to fill up” [Kaufman 1968:87]). For intran-
sitive 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 pre-
Classic Ch’olti’an. There is a series of intransitive verbs
of motion, which take ∗-V1y: lok’-oy, “to come out,” t’ab-
ay, “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 intransi-
tives 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 num-
uy, “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 medio-
passive. 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 ear-
lier passive to a medio-passive function—is readily found
in other Mayan languages. In Yukatek Maya, for exam-
ple, 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 vow-
els with rising tone (Hironymous 1982). Thus, a similar
process occurred in the development of Classic
Ch’olti’an, where an original passive (∗-V1y) was dis-
placed by a new passive (-h-. . .-aj), restricting the func-
tion of the original to a medio-passive. Similarly, in Tzel-
tal 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), pas-
ot, “to be done.”
The medio-passive -V1y form is ubiquitous in Classic
Maya inscriptions, occurring throughout the Yucatán
Peninsula, heedless of distributional arguments for Yu-
katekan 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 lo-
coi, “leave”; pul-uy-i (pu-lu-yi) 1 pului, “burn”; t’ab’-ay-
i (T’AB’-yi) 1 tabai, “ascend, begin.” Classic Ch’olti’an
had other examples of this verb class: hom-oy-i (ho-mo-
yi), “?”; 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’A-
a-yi), “finish” (a euphemism for “death”); naj-ay-i (na-
ja-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, analogi-
cally derived, that probably came into existence when
the form ∗-V1y moved to become a passive marker in pre-
Classic Ch’olti’an times. We propose that it developed
from the l of the positional ∗-V1l and the -aj of the bi-
partite morpheme -h-. . .-aj. It will be recalled that the
Q’eqchi’ intransitive positional -l-a developed indepen-
dently 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 inno-
vation, since historically the intransitive positional was
∗
-e:’ for Mamean-K’iche’an. Just as in Mam there is a
functional correspondence between -et and Wasteko-
Ch’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 in-
teresting history. It came into the Classic Ch’olti’an lin-
eage 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, per-
sonal communication, 1996). By the end of the Late Clas-
sic period, it had diffused throughout the region with
hieroglyphic texts. In Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’ it had com-
pletely 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 Cat-
alog 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 in-
transitive positional to passive, the subsequent move-
ment 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 Chon-
tal, 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 pre-
serve 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 lan-
guage 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 be-
tween Ch’olti’ and Ch’orti’ are beyond the scope of this
paper (see Robertson 1998), the data presented here dem-
onstrate 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,” impera-
tive: 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 pre-
cise than previous assessments of a general Ch’olan or
Common Wasteko-Ch’olan language affiliation. The ev-
idence has been morphological, focusing on the forms
and historical developments of passives, middle-voice
verbs, and transitive positionals. Some of this informa-
tion, especially that on passives, comes from other schol-
ars (Lacadena 1998a) or has been developed indepen-
dently of their contributions. These data would seem to
contradict geographical arguments, which perceive a nat-
ural 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 Yuka-
tek 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 re-
cords bisyllabic roots [fig. 6]). As mentioned before, a
nearby site, Ikil, contains t’ab’-ay-i, a -V1y verb; Oxkin-
tok, Yucatán, records a verb with the -wan suffix. None-
theless, 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 “di-
glossia” refers to the coexistence of two dialects or re-
lated languages, each performing a distinct social func-
tion. 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 Fig. 6. Ch’olan terms in the texts of north-central Yu-
renovations (Belnap and Gee 1994:144). Through them catán. a, ti-i, ti’, “mouth, doorway” (Chichén Itzá Las
bonds develop between educated minorities (usually but Monjas, Lintel 4, E1); b, yo-to-ti, y-oto:t, “his house,
not always elites) that happen to live in different political dwelling” (Chichén Itzá Temple of the Four Lintels,
zones. High language ossifies through convention and Lintel 2, F1); c, yi-ta-hi, y-ita-hi, “?” (Halakal Lintel 1,
pronounced attention to decorum, with periodic interest A8); d, t’a?-b’a-yi, t’ab’-ay-i, “ascends” (Ikil Lintel 1,
in purification, as in the Medieval Latin of the Carolin- B1).
gian period (Wright 1982:ix, 260–61).14 Above all, high
language emphasizes a written form, low language an unwritten one. The medium of script retards change in
written language by recording, in tomes of acknowledged
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).
prestige, the linguistic habits of previous generations. In
No fewer than four stages of development occur, in which script contrast, low speech is often a localized phenomenon,
at first closely mirrors language (proto-Romance) and later records conditioned by slang and invigorated by changing usage.
traditional spellings that were nonetheless read, despite archaic A prestige language is one that is preponderantly high,
orthography, in local vernaculars. According to Wright’s hypothe- written, employed by trained scribes and exegetes, and
sis, true bilingualism did not exist until 200 years after the Caro-
lingian reforms that standardized liturgy and formal language for suitable for formal or liturgical settings. Its use confers
purely official settings (Wright 1982:104). Yet any parallels with prestige but not necessarily to elites alone—an over-
Maya script are limited. The languages involved (Old French, Old emphasis on social distinction can blur understanding of
Spanish) are far more closely related than Ch’olan and Yukatekan, its other properties, including its tendency to be sacred.
which involve highly contrastive morphology and, as a result, rad-
ically different orthographic accommodations. Verbal forms were
Its appeal is not only to those of wealth and power, al-
simply too distinct to be housed comfortably within the same or though this does seem to have been the case with Mixtec
similar spellings. 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-la-
ke-hi-TOK’, kal-ke:h-tok’, a possible place-name (Yulá
Lintel 1, G1-H1).
words as the primordial language of elites and as em-
bodiments of “true words,” timeless, potent, and sacred
(King 1994:104).
Diglossia and prestige languages are abundantly at-
tested 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 (Tut-
tle 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 re-
mained relatively small and the need for learning aids
insignificant. When Sumerian became extinct, Akkadian
interference intensified, as did the necessity for gram-
matical explications (Vanstiphout 1979:124–25); a sim-
ilar process probably occurred with Ch’olti’an in the
Postclassic Yucatán Peninsula. Scribal schools clearly re-
garded Sumerian as a foreign language, although they
probably spoke it within their academies for at least an-
other 1,000 years (Cooper 1973:244). Akkadian too per-
sisted 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 Su-
merian 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 Egyp-
tian), 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 Egyp-
tian civilization it existed as a religious language along-
side spoken forms of later Egyptian. John Baines suggests
that, as the spoken language evolved, various scripts,
hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic, preserved earlier lan-
guages (1983:582). The archaic quality of Middle Egyp-
tian made it attractive in a civilization that self-con-
sciously 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 hor-
izontal 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 simul-
taneously establish closeness (solidarity) and distance
(formality), depending on who is doing the reading, lis-
tening, and responding (see also Errington 1985:14). Lat-
eral 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 distanc-
ing and language etiquette in comparable palace societies
(e.g., Errington 1985:12–21; 1988:194).16 Nor can we for-
get that the forms reconstructed from historical linguis-
tics probably reflect vernaculars rather than the high
forms expressed in script. Depending on the stage of writ-
ten 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 Pen-
15. 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 transmit-
ted 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 prob-
lems with this argument, if, indeed, we have understood the claim
and its requisite assumptions. First, a local scribal tradition is de-
monstrably 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 infu-
sion of -wan into Classic Ch’olti’an from a substrate that is an-
cestral to modern Chontal.
16. The Classic Maya did perceive distinctive speech styles in a
very few inscriptions. These are characterized by quotative for-
mulae beginning with first- and second-person statements and end-
ing with a verb phrase that alludes to speech acts (“he said it”) and
identifying interlocutors (Houston and Stuart 1993). Such state-
ments typically appear in mythological contexts on decorated ce-
ramics 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 state-
ments 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
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, yo-
OTO: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 el-
ements from Common Mayan including vowel length
(Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998), transitive posi-
tionals of a certain form, a distinct pronominal set, an -
aj nominal absolutizer (Robertson and Houston 1997),
and, as suggested before, a declarative suffix for intran-
sitives. We also find isolated lexical items that may re-
flect 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, contem-
porary 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 Clas-
sic 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
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 anal-
ysis 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 attri-
butes 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 lan-
guage 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 ex-
amples of this second, poorly attested language (deVos
1988:159–63).
Necessarily, this research will continue to be com-
parative, 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)—schol-
ars can begin to research subtle dialect differences such
as those registered in variant patterns of vowel short-
ening (Houston, Stuart, and Robertson 1998). Substan-
tively, 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 (Robert-
son 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 Clas-
sic 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 com-
munications 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 at-
tention 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 infor-
mation 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 pres-
tigious? 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, monu-
mental 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 de-
velopments). 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. 70803-
4105, U.S.A. 15 xi 99
Consideration of the social role of Mayan writing is ap-
propriate as knowledge from glyph translation increases.
From what we know about the ancient Maya archaeo-
logically 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, al-
though 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. at-
tempt to have it both ways: they recognize the impor-
tance of geographical contiguity in arguments that they
themselves use and mention the considerable borrow-
ings of glyphic lexicon between neighboring languages
but go on to state that the geography of colonial lan-
guages is “hardly very direct evidence” for language af-
filiation. While linguistic evidence must be given pri-
ority, 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 availa-
bility 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. Simi-
larly, 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 Ma-
yan 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 impre-
cision 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-Mo-
pan” and “Choloid” without reference to what level of
generalization either represents in relation to the tax-
onomy 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 lan-
guages 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 re-
cently relied more on morphology than other historical
studies of Mayan languages, but reliance on the pho-
nological similarities and differences between lexical
cognates across languages has actually been the “com-
mon convention[s]” of Mayan historical linguistics, re-
sulting 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 mor-
phologically 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 com-
parative 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 rep-
resents an elite language, a number of factors are given
too little attention. Elite or high written languages usu-
ally 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 usu-
ally unavailable when dealing with ancient scripts. This
is doubtless because of the impossibility of reconstruct-
ing the precise social situations of ancient times. Ex-
planatory power can be found only in an argument link-
ing 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 treat-
ment of the historical development of the Mayan lan-
guage family falls below internationally accepted stan-
dards of method, argument, and evidence in historical
and comparative linguistics. He relies on an idiosyn-
cratic 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 or-
igins and relevance to the Mayan languages he never
explains and through which the actual forms of the lan-
guage 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 pat-
terned relationships among forms at the expense of oth-
ers. 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, in-
terconnected findings built up in more than a century of
comparative linguistic study grows largely from the in-
teractions 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 un-
derstand 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 fea-
tures. 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 “po-
tential” infixed -h- formation of Chorti. He fails to rec-
ognize exact counterparts of Chorti imperfective abso-
lutive 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 anony-
mous 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 em-
bodying “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 trust-
worthy 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 suc-
ceed 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 re-
lationship of the script to spoken language is oversim-
plified to the point that it is misleading. Many of the
authors cited in table 1 as favoring one linguistic affili-
ation or another in fact hold more complex views, gen-
erally involving components of both Ch’olan and Yu-
katekan 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 con-
nections 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 chang-
ing 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 mor-
phology, however, is overstated. Both phonology and syn-
tax are also quite relevant and are routinely considered
in historical linguistic research. They argue persuasively
for the importance of increased collaboration among lin-
guists 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 unre-
liable and that “datable inscriptions will provide far bet-
ter, 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 archi-
tecture. They suggest that variation may come from “in-
dividual 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 au-
thors accept is that a Western Ch’olan pattern for posi-
tionals 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 mor-
phology that they propose for “Classic Ch’olti’an.” Cu-
riously, and disturbingly, it is significantly different from
systems previously described by these authors. They pro-
pose here that active transitive verbs took a vowel-har-
monic ∗-V1w suffix in the declarative mood, which, fol-
lowing 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 intransi-
tives, 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 pro-
noun” to imply that they consider the system to be com-
pletely ergative (as claimed in Houston 1997). In all ex-
tant 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 essen-
tialist 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 East-
ern Ch’olan, the absence of references to modern lin-
guistic 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 mor-
phology 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 ex-
ample, 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 (La-
cadena 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 dif-
ferent language varieties are used in different contexts
and thus involves differences of register and genre. Ma-
yan 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 reg-
ister and welcomes a reevaluation of Classic Maya lin-
guistic practices from a sociolinguistic perspective. The
assertion that it is unchanging and Eastern Ch’olan re-
quires 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. (mcanany@radcliffe.edu). 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 Bos-
ton. 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 mor-
phology of verb phrases and employing principles of his-
torical linguistics, Houston et al. suggest that the in-
scriptions were written in an ancestral form of Ch’orti’,
one of the least-studied Mayan languages. The parsi-
mony of this proposal is appealing. Historically, the mul-
tilingual character of the Maya region has posed a co-
nundrum 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 sup-
ported with epigraphic data. If it did indeed exist as a
written language, then who spoke it? The authors pro-
pose 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 dis-
tributed, 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 so-
ciety, 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 hy-
pothesized vernacular “low-Mayan” employed by com-
moners during the Classic period. There is one class of
information—“pseudo-glyphs”—that has received no
scholarly attention but appears commonly on poly-
chrome 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 abun-
dance, complexity, and logo-syllabic structure of the hi-
eroglyphic 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 archaeolo-
gists studying “Old World” civilizations have long in-
cluded philology as an essential element of their tool kit,
those working in the Americas have not considered lin-
guistics (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 se-
quences 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 indig-
enous 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 margin-
alized from mainstream anthropological archaeology, ac-
cused 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 ad-
versely 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 ar-
gument 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 com-
parative 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 spe-
cific dialect, this would not necessarily prevent peoples
from formulating words in their own dialects or even
introducing foreign terms if they so desired. The evi-
dence points to the continued usage of Ch’olt’i by ven-
erable 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 picto-
graphic 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 sug-
gest what relationship elite discourse might have had
with the vernaculars still in use today. Some compara-
tive insight might come from consideration of the Post-
classic 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 Mixteca-
Puebla 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 nec-
essarily 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 in-
dicates 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 in-
tended to bind families into competitive monopolies
probably regulated social interaction among their con-
stituent populations as well. We do not know if the Mix-
tec elite spoke a special dialect as a class of people, but
they certainly shared a special vocabulary rooted in hom-
onyms 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 met-
aphors are evident in the rebus signs that are so prolific
throughout the Mixtec codices. Remembering that Clas-
sic 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 pre-
Columbian court languages as well.
andrea stone
Department of Art History, University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, 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 com-
prehend such texts or whether they were for rote reci-
tation 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 lan-
guage 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 hor-
izontally among elites who shared the specialized knowl-
edge of the prestige language and left the masses to ad-
mire 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 conser-
vatism 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 lan-
guage 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” (Hous-
ton and Stuart 1994:44; Stone 1996). Phonetic clues un-
equivocally 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” (Kauf-
man and Norman 1984:132), indicating that it was a late
borrowing into Ch’olt’i. Such mixed evidence for lin-
guistic 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 mor-
phology specific to that language but reflected widely in
the writing system. This assertion needs to be scruti-
nized 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 im-
agery. 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 per-
fectly 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 Ma-
yanists’ 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 mor-
phological components of the Classic-period script to de-
termine its structure and grammar. Although their ar-
ticle 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 epi-
graphic 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, show-
ing Ch’olti as the direct ancestor of Ch’orti. The shared
innovations that set Ch’olti and Ch’orti apart from West-
ern Ch’olan make these two languages candidates for
subgrouping, therefore making them sister languages de-
scendant 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 sub-
sequent claims and proposals concerning the history of
the speakers in real time.
The primary verbal categories in the article are con-
fusing 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 na-
ture. In Ch’orti verbal positionals are formed by adding
-Vn/-Vm to the root. They are completive in aspect (un-
marked 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 predica-
tion—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. The-
matic suffixes seem to occur systematically only in East-
ern 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 tran-
sitives when they are placed contextually within the nar-
rative syntax of the inscriptions (Barbara MacLeod, per-
sonal 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, Robert-
son, and Stuart present regarding the structure of the
verbal system of what they call “Classic Ch’olti’an” con-
tinue to be actively debated (Lacadena 2000). A complete
monograph including documentation from their distri-
butional studies of the inscriptions and presenting their
thoroughly worked-out historical and comparative as-
sertions would be welcome. In spite of the brevity with
which they have presented their conclusions, their
groundbreaking work will lead to real progress in an-
swering a plethora of questions concerning cultural, lin-
guistic, 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 compara-
tive 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
(E.Taladoire@univ.paris1.fr). 24 x 99
While the understanding of glyphic inscriptions has al-
ways been a crucial issue for Maya archaeology, their
decipherment belongs rather to the linguists and epig-
raphers, 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 interpre-
tations. Among the weak points, for instance, a simple,
even strong, rejection cannot be accepted as a valid ar-
gument 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 meth-
odology employed largely compensates for these diffi-
culties: through their grammatical and, more specifi-
cally, 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 countercheck-
ing 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 co-
herent with what we currently know about Maya socio-
political structure, and, generally speaking, it does in-
deed show strong similarities with other prestige lan-
guages. But it needs to be stressed that they themselves
changed over space and time. Therefore, a call for pru-
dence 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 in-
terpret 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 influ-
ences? 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 struc-
ture. Granting them this probability, it must be coun-
terchecked against the archaeological record. Whereas
Maya sociopolitical stratification seems generally to sup-
port this view, one can always point to contrary evidence,
such as the Petexbatun realm history, where at least ver-
tical cohesion seem to counterbalance the common lat-
eral 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. Inscrip-
tions figured heavily in this perception of sameness. Syl-
vanus Morley (1977:149), summarizing the epigraphic
situation in 1940, concluded that even though the non-
calendrical content of the glyphs could not be read, in-
scriptions 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 relig-
ious philosophy arising therefrom, and not of purely
local matters. Throughout the Maya area, the unde-
ciphered glyphs deal with an extremely limited sub-
ject 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 cul-
ture of commoner Maya households shows unexpected
variation. More to the point, since about 1980 our much
more sophisticated understanding of the content of non-
calendrical glyphs has also reinforced this impression of
variety. Behind the formal similarities in the Classic hi-
eroglyphic 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 topo-
nyms are by definition local. The inscriptions of Yax-
chilan are replete with references to warfare, while those
of Copan are more heavily religious and ritual in content.
The scribes of Palenque recorded genealogical informa-
tion 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 mar-
gins of the lowlands than anywhere else. Nonregnal
elites at some centers seem to have had much more abil-
ity to possess or use inscribed monuments and the as-
sociated 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 “Maya-
ness,” 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 con-
vinced 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 ques-
tions. 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 rela-
tionship 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 prob-
ably Calakmul and Caracol by the 8th century) were
essentially literate chiefdoms without much well-devel-
oped stratification. This is not such a renegade idea as
it might first appear, because we know that some soci-
eties entirely lacking in complex integrative political in-
stitutions 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, Rob-
ertson, and Stuart point out, however, prestige languages
are powerful instruments for social differentiation
(among other things), and all the examples they give in-
volve societies with one or another form of class struc-
ture. Does anyone know of such a prestige language op-
erating 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 any-
thing 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 con-
ceptions 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 dec-
ades. Houston et al. have demonstrated beyond reason-
able equivocation that morphological features diagnostic
of Ch’olti’an are attested throughout the script, regard-
less 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 argu-
ments 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, in-
dicating ROOT-i (e.g., hul-i, “arrived”), numerous CV-
Ci-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), oc-
cur 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 posi-
tional roots, intransitive or other. Of all the Ch’olan lan-
guages, 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 intransitivi-
zed verbs, including -V1y and -i intransitives and -u and
-o antipassives (Wichmann 1999:11–13; Wisdom 1950),
and likewise avoids positional intransitives. The wide-
spread presence in the script of this diagnostic suffix
further highlights the importance of Eastern Ch’olan.
Strengthening such considerations is the script’s pleth-
ora of -V1y suffixes marking both medio-passives (e.g.,
pul-uy-i, “it got burned”) and intransitives (e.g., lok’-oy-
i, “he/she/it emerged”). Such a pattern, as Houston et
al. have recognized, “is unique to the Ch’olti’an sub-
group.” 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 pas-
sive-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 testi-
mony that -V1y also functions throughout Ch’olti’an to
mark completive intransitives involving motion and
change of state (Morán 1935; Fought 1984:49, 53; Wis-
dom 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 ap-
pearance—both geographically and diachroni-
cally—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 mor-
phology (such as ERG-CVC-aj transitives and CVC-i pas-
sives) 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 in-
cludes written texts from throughout the Maya low-
lands, diachronically spanning more than a millennium.
In this regard, it is perhaps relevant that Ch’olti’-speakers
enjoyed the largest documented geographical distribu-
tion 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 sug-
gested improvements to this response. The comments
fall into two general categories, those from linguists or
linguistically minded epigraphers and those from ar-
chaeologists. Some of the linguistic comments are sur-
prising 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 re-
construction. In training and outlook, Americanist lin-
guists tend to be synchronic and noncomparative, de-
voting 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 morpholog-
ical 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 “ge-
ographic 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 pe-
riods. Her assertion that we overemphasize the Yukatek
bias is baffling in view of the immense concentration of
linguistic and archaeological investigation on that lan-
guage 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 Toz-
zer 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 eth-
nography of the Lacandon Maya—supposedly the last
“pagan” Maya and thus purported exemplars of past life-
ways (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 Yuka-
tekan 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 Car-
negie 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 in-
teract 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 reac-
tionary (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 there-
fore there is no reason at all for us to justify “what level
of generalization either represents in relation to the tax-
onomy.” 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 Ma-
yan historical reconstructions. The complaint, made also
by Hofling and Storniolo, that the paper is not a mon-
ograph is unrealistic given the page limitations in this
journal. Since these commentators do not precisely dis-
pute 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 “authorita-
tive 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 top-
down 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 evo-
lution 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 epi-
graphically invalid: they rest heavily on the theory that
similar glyphic forms record entirely different values de-
pending 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 profes-
sional focus, the Yukatekan Itzaj language now spoken
(barely) in the central Petén. We discern a covert “geo-
graphic 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 Hous-
ton 1998, Houston, Robertson, and Stuart 1999, Stuart,
Houston, and Robertson 1999). Variation must be an im-
portant theme in epigraphic research, but it is important
to explore the linguistic commonalities first. The hier-
archy 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 re-
constructed 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 in-
tellectual development. As such, it is subject to
change, just as all intellectual artifacts or scientific
propositions are. Linguists are for some reason con-
tinually 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 Ma-
yan 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 cir-
cular) 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 ERG-
verbtrans. -wa (e.g., as at Palenque, Temple of the Inscrip-
tions, East Tablet, K7–L7, P11–O12, ya-k’a-wa/u-PIK , y-
ak’-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-er-
gativity in general and the u-verbintrans.-wa as a split-er-
gative, antipassive marker in particular. The most com-
pelling 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 Hof-
ling’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 un-
incorporable, 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, split-
ergative -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 Chon-
tal, 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 in-
dicated by its pronominal system, which essentially pre-
serves the Common Mayan system except for the erga-
tive 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 (Hous-
ton, 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 in-
novations 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, ask-
ing 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-erga-
tive is the so-called progressive, which takes the follow-
ing 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 fur-
ther developed. The verb iuual is now detached from the
construction and has become an adverb, so that the orig-
inal 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 ∗iyu-
wal, 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 nomin-
alizing -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 dis-
course in anthropology (cf. Fischer 1999). Our point was
simply that the Ch’orti’ and their Ch’olti’ ancestors de-
serve 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 en-
tities and structures of meaning entwined with precur-
sors, 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 criti-
cism of research that assumes “fossilized” or “ahistori-
cal” non-Westerners is appropriate (Price 1989). Given
our model, a more reasonable approach is to see the mod-
ern Ch’orti’ as plausible homologies for the Classic
Maya, as the source of crucial linguistic insights yet un-
gleaned, and as people deserving far more attention from
ethnohistorians.
Storniolo appears more receptive to the general argu-
ments 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 proposi-
tion—by new data.” Such revisions in family trees are
not only normal in comparative research but to be ex-
pected where new data warrant them. The unique as-
pectual 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 com-
munication, which we imagine was that certain second-
ary 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 in-
directly pertinent to the arguments of this paper, Stor-
niolo’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 Com-
mon Mayan had aspectual morphemes (∗k[V]-incomple-
tive 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 refu-
tation. 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 pro-
pounds: Analogic change “extends the scope of some pat-
terned relationships among forms,” resulting in the pos-
sibility 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 meaning-
less metaphysics can work only on formal grounds, prac-
titioners 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 mark-
ing 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 gram-
matical change. Furthermore, despite Fought’s state-
ment 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 hy-
potheses 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 cate-
gories in which they reside. Analogy in structured gram-
matical categories has not gone away and never will if
one is intent on explaining grammatical change, because
grammatical categories are by their very nature analog-
ically structured.
The task of the comparatist, according to Watkins
(1973:101), is “to construct hypotheses, and to demon-
strate precisely how it is possible, within a linguistic
tradition or traditions, for language to pass from one sys-
tem 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” appar-
ently refers to Robertson (1992), but here the so-called
grid in every category includes the morphological recon-
structions for both the intransitive and transitive verbs
(p. 217). His statement that Robertson does not under-
stand the ergative-absolutive predication system of the
Mayan languages seems to overlook Robertson’s disser-
tation, 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 be-
cause, 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 meth-
odologically 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].) Co-
lonial sources are at once linguistic and historical doc-
uments 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 abso-
lutive because it is not a pronoun. According to the Span-
ish 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 a-
attaches 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 Po-
qomam, 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 re-
quire 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 log-
ograph. 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 low-
lands 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 re-
corded in script (Parkinson 1999:fig. 18, 48–49)—al-
though, 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 sur-
prisingly 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 con-
nected 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 pro-
verbial 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” (Par-
kinson 1999:49), with negative consequences for “social
cohesion” (Loprieno 1996:516). Mixings with “low lan-
guage” or penetrations from spoken language helped re-
solve “communicative tensions” with intermediate va-
rieties 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 com-
plexity. 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 “do-
mains“ 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. In-
evitably, 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; Wich-
mann 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. Pre-
sumably, language ideology and authoritative discourse
in such communities would have been sharply defined;
elite/nonelite relations may have been expressed lin-
guistically 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 (Lo-
prieno 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 alto-
gether 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 un-
readable 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 knowl-
edge. Nonetheless, we cannot assume that two different
sets of painters produced glyphs and their unintelligible
imitations. There is some evidence that scribes respon-
sible 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 ig-
nore pseudo-glyphs and that these marks are intriguing
cultural productions worthy of scholarly study. The rel-
ative 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 be-
come 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; For-
syth 1983:fig. 22), where legible characters are also rare
(Smith 1971:fig. 40a) and, when they do occur, often ap-
pear 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 Yukatek-
Ch’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 distin-
guish 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 sa-
cred 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 (Mon-
aghan 1995, n.d.; Houston 1999). We have a strong sus-
picion, too, that Classic society was organized into
distinct “houses” rather like the Aztec calpōlli, involv-
ing 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 var-
iability (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 intro-
duction of split-ergativity. Stone correctly emphasizes
the importance of looking carefully at lexical items in
understanding such percolations from vernaculars, al-
though, 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. Con-
versely, Taladoire suggests that Yukatekan must be
found at Chichén Itzá, but epigraphically the connec-
tions are not strong, although Wichmann and Lacadena
(1999) have made a compelling case for Yukatek forms
from inscriptions in the northwestern reaches of the Yu-
catán peninsula.
We do not pretend to have the final word on this dif-
ficult 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 inter-
national scale will lead to consensus about Classic-pe-
riod 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 yea-
saying (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.
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