Discourse in the Longue Durée: A View of Mayan Poetic Inertia (original) (raw)
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Since the 1500s, Mayan language and glyphic systems have been romanticized by Eurocentric interpretations. In recent years, many anthropological works have perpetuated these myths by presenting inaccurate analyses of Maya linguistics. Rather than showing the Maya as an advance and civilized people, these texts promoted a weak, barbarous Maya who could be easily manipulated by European culture, language, and written form. Utilizing French poet Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-1867) idea of the Palimpsest, traditional anthropologists have perpetuated the Mayan Palimpsest, or the masking over of the original Mayan culture with the new. Rather than revealing the underlying cultural characteristics of the Mayan languages, as Baudelaire’s theory would have presumably encouraged, Westerners have reinvented the Mayan past and masked over Mayan spoken and written languages with new vague and biased interpretations of their peoples and languages. The underlying goal of this paper is to deconstruct the Mayan Palimpsest; that is, the Eurocentric views within traditional Mayan language studies, in order to promote a more accurate interpretation of the Mayan linguistic past.
Toward a Poetics of Maya Art and Writing
Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2024
This article identifies large-scale chiastic and bracketing structures in contemporary, colonial and Classic Maya verbal art and literature. These structures are composed of the repetition of lines, verses and stanzas that frame sections of texts and sometimes images. Initially, the argument focuses on an ethnopoetic analysis that directs attention to such forms in modern and colonial narrative and presents an extended contemporary Yucatecan story to illustrate key forms. Second, it turns to similar structures in Classic Mayan narrative written in Maya hieroglyphs to examine the way rhetorical and linguistic tropes intertwined with corresponding features in visual compositions to craft highly sophisticated artistic programmes. By tracking how specific structures are deployed and in what contexts, this article defines an aesthetic that not only sheds light on verbal narratives, but also elucidates visual programmes and their interrelationship with text to reveal a fundamental principle in Maya world conceptualization. This literary and visual analysis develops a cross-medial Maya aesthetics comparable to other global poetic traditions.
Editions La Dondaine, 1979
Linguists have to realize language is a living mental organism. It does not have chromosomes and it does not have any biological genetic history. But it has a phylogenetic history. The main engine that creates and develops language is the specific and unique human communicational situation in which Homo Sapiens found himself 300,000 years ago. This is still true and this communicational situation provides the language it develops with a dynamic that is inescapable. The second engine of language is its inner architecture that can only be what it is: three articulations in a precise order, phonology (rotation of vowels and consonants), morphology (spatial and temporal categorizations) and syntax (functional relations between the various categorized elements. The third level is in fact the articulation between these first two and it creates discourse. No matter what level of phylogenetic development a language has reached, the discourse it will produce will take from the communicational situation what it needs to produce a full discourse at the three levels of phonology, morphology and syntax. That creates and founds three vast families of languages and my main objective is to position Maya in this model and then to study how the written system they used went a lot deeper than just phonology but integrated a lot of cultural elements that have disappeared from the written language when transliteration finally became dominant. The cultural and mental loss is enormous, but at the same time, the educational and longer-distance communicational gain is enormous. Then we have to recapture the cultural part that has been lost and we have to develop traditional and modern cultural products, including linguistic and anthropological analyses to provide rebirth and a second life to that distant culture. Of course, the objective is not to reintroduce blood-sacrifice, but the objective is to understand how this practice of blood-sacrifice over more than one millennium has guided the Maya culture and civilization into development and in the end, has misguided it into extinction, at least on the surface of things, and into its perduration in deeper layers of mental and psychic architecture and creativity. In fact, this blood-sacrifice culture has inspired the resistance of the Maya against all colonializations from the Aztec and then from the Spaniards. I here present where I stand as for the language right now. In two or three years I will be far ahead of this, if Jun Nal Ye, the Maize God, lends me some more years of life. The center of this research is the written language of the pre-Classic and Classic periods.
"Despite recent developments in epigraphy, ethnopoetics, and the literary investigation of colonial and modern materials, few studies have compared glyphic texts and historic Maya literatures. Parallel Worlds examines Maya writing and literary traditions from the Classic period until today, revealing remarkable continuities across time. In this volume, contributions from leading scholars in Maya literary studies examine Maya discourse from Classic period hieroglyphic inscriptions to contemporary spoken narratives, focusing on parallelism to unite the literature historically. Contributors take an ethnopoetic approach, examining literary and verbal arts from a historical perspective, acknowledgeing that poetic form is as important as narrative content in deciphering what these writings reveal about ancient and contemporary worldviews. Encompassing a variety of literary motifs, including humor, folklore, incantation, mythology, and more specific forms of parallelism such as couplets, chiasms, kennings, and hyperbatons, Parallel Worlds is a rich journey through Maya culture and pre-Columbian literature that will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, ethnography, Latin American history, epigraphy, comparative literature, language studies, indigenous studies, and mythology."
This paper applies an historical sociolinguistic approach (Romaine 1982) to the study of Classic Lowland Mayan (CLM) inscriptions. Such approach analyzes the spread of innovative linguistic variables through geographic and social space, over time. The paper, revisiting the case study first outlined in Mora-Marín (2011), applies a quantitative analysis to two examples of real-time change in CLM texts, the spread of -(a)wan and -(V)lel, to determine to what extent such spread exhibits a hierarchical geographic diffusion (Trudgill 1974; Chambers and Trudgill 1998), based on site size rankings (Brown and Witschey 2002), and whether their spread was interrelated, with positive results in both regards. In addition, implicational scaling (Bailey 1973; Bailey et al. 1993:368-372) is also employed to better understand the linguistic embedding of -(a)wan. The results point to a hierarchy of lexical and syntactic diffusion. The paper then revisits the comparative evidence from the postconquest Ch’olan languages, from a variationist perspective, resulting in a complex scenario: -(V)lel emerged in the western Maya lowlands (Chontal region); -(a)wan exhibits a more complex scenario, showing greater categoricization in the eastern Maya lowlands (Ch’orti’, but not Ch’olti’), followed by the western Maya lowlands (Chontal, but not Ch’ol), a pattern that could correlate with the close interaction between Copan and Palenque evident in CLM texts. In conclusion, a historical sociolinguistic approach offers scholars a chance to develop more realistic models of linguistic development and interaction than is possible through the exclusive application of the comparative method and family tree model alone.