Download or read book Maya for Travelers and Students written by Gary Bevington and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Yucatan Peninsula draws many North American and European travelers each year to view the ruins of the pre-Columbian Classical Maya civilization and the abundant native flora and fauna. For these travelers, as well as armchair travelers and students, Gary Bevington has prepared the first general English-language introduction to Yucatec Maya, the native language of the people indigenous to the region. Written in nontechnical terms for learners who have a basic knowledge of simple Mexican Spanish, the book presents easily understood, practical information for anyone who would like to communicate with the Maya in their native language. In addition to covering the pronunciation and grammar of Maya, Bevington includes invaluable tips on learning indigenous languages "in the field." Most helpful are his discussions of the cultural and material worlds of the Maya, accompanied by essential words and expressions for common objects and experiences. A Maya-English-Spanish glossary with extensive usage examples and an English-Maya glossary conclude the book. Note: The supplemental audiocasette, Spoken Maya for Travelers and Students, is now available as a free download.
Download or read book The Mayan Languages written by Judith Aissen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-12 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mayan Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the language family associated with the Classic Mayan civilization (AD 200–900), a family whose individual languages are still spoken today by at least six million indigenous Maya in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. This unique resource is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mayan languages and linguistics. Written by a team of experts in the field, The Mayan Languages presents in-depth accounts of the linguistic features that characterize the thirty-one languages of the family, their historical evolution, and the social context in which they are spoken. The Mayan Languages: provides detailed grammatical sketches of approximately a third of the Mayan languages, representing most of the branches of the family; includes a section on the historical development of the family, as well as an entirely new sketch of the grammar of "Classic Maya" as represented in the hieroglyphic script; provides detailed state-of-the-art discussions of the principal advances in grammatical analysis of Mayan languages; includes ample discussion of the use of the languages in social, conversational, and poetic contexts. Consisting of topical chapters on the history, sociolinguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse structure, and acquisition of the Mayan languages, this book will be a resource for researchers and other readers with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language acquisition, and linguistic typology.
Download or read book A Dictionary of the Maya Language written by Victoria Reifler Bricker and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many sample sentences provide a window onto the richness of everyday communication, with its mixture of wit, epithets, insults, riddles and aphorisms, and exchanges of information.
Download or read book The Maya Art of Speaking Writing written by Tiffany D. Creegan Miller and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the distinctions between “old” and “new” media and narratives about the deprecation of orality in favor of inscribed forms, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in the Guatemalan highlands, Tiffany D. Creegan Miller discusses images that are sonic, pictorial, gestural, and alphabetic. She reveals various forms of creativity and agency that are woven through a rich media landscape in Indigenous Guatemala, as well as Maya diasporas in Mexico and the United States. Miller discusses how technologies of inscription and their mediations are shaped by human editors, translators, communities, and audiences, as well as by voices from the natural world. These texts push back not just on linear and compartmentalized Western notions of media but also on the idea of the singular author, creator, scholar, or artist removed from their environment. The persistence of orality and the interweaving of media forms combine to offer a challenge to audiences to participate in decolonial actions through language preservation. The Maya Art of Speaking Writing calls for centering Indigenous epistemologies by doing research in and through Indigenous languages as we engage in debates surrounding Indigenous literatures, anthropology, decoloniality, media studies, orality, and the digital humanities.
Download or read book La tz aw ch written by R. McKenna Brown and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kaqchikel is one of approximately thirty Mayan languages spoken in Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, and, increasingly, the United States. Of the twenty-two Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala, Kaqchikel is one of the four "mayoritarios," those with the largest number of speakers. About half a million people living in the central highlands between Guatemala City and Lake Atitlán speak Kaqchikel. And because native Kaqchikel speakers are prominent in the field of Mayan linguistics, as well as in Mayan cultural activism generally, Kaqchikel has been adopted as a Mayan lingua franca in some circles. This innovative language-learning guide is designed to help students, scholars, and professionals in many fields who work with Kaqchikel speakers, in both Guatemala and the United States, quickly develop basic communication skills. The book will familiarize learners with the words, phrases, and structures used in daily communications, presented in as natural a way as possible, and in a logical sequence. Six chapters introduce the language in context (greetings, the classroom, people, the family, food, and life) followed by exercises and short essays on aspects of Kaqchikel life. A grammar summary provides in-depth linguistic analysis of Kaqchikel, and a glossary supports vocabulary learning from both Kaqchikel to English and English to Kaqchikel. These resources, along with sound files and other media on the Internet at ekaq.stonecenter.tulane.edu, will allow learners to develop proficiency in all five major language skills—listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and sociocultural understanding.
Download or read book Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity written by Brigittine M. French and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this valuable book, ethnographer and anthropologist Brigittine French mobilizes new critical-theoretical perspectives in linguistic anthropology, applying them to the politically charged context of contemporary Guatemala. Beginning with an examination of the Ònationalist projectÓ that has been ongoing since the end of the colonial period, French interrogates the ÒGuatemalan/indigenous binary.Ó In Guatemala, ÒLadinoÓ refers to the Spanish-speaking minority of the population, who are of mixed European, usually Spanish, and indigenous ancestry; ÒIndianÓ is understood to mean the majority of GuatemalaÕs population, who speak one of the twenty-one languages in the Maya linguistic groups of the country, although levels of bilingualism are very high among most Maya communities. As French shows, the Guatemalan state has actively promoted a racialized, essentialized notion of ÒIndiansÓ as an undifferentiated, inherently inferior group that has stood stubbornly in the way of national progress, unity, and developmentÑwhich are, implicitly, the goals of Òtrue GuatemalansÓ (that is, Ladinos). French shows, with useful examples, how constructions of language and collective identity are in fact strategies undertaken to serve the goals of institutions (including the government, the military, the educational system, and the church) and social actors (including linguists, scholars, and activists). But by incorporating in-depth fieldwork with groups that speak Kaqchikel and KÕicheÕ along with analyses of Spanish-language discourses, Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity also shows how some individuals in urban, bilingual Indian communities have disrupted the essentializing projects of multiculturalism. And by focusing on ideologies of language, the author is able to explicitly link linguistic forms and functions with larger issues of consciousness, gender politics, social positions, and the forging of hegemonic power relations.
Download or read book Referential Practice written by William F. Hanks and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1990-11-29 with total page 620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Referential Practice is an anthropological study of language use in a contemporary Maya community. It examines the routine conversational practices in which Maya speakers make reference to themselves and to each other, to their immediate contexts, and to their world. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Oxkutzcab, Yucatán, William F. Hanks develops a sociocultural approach to reference in natural languages. The core of this approach lies in treating speech as a social engagement and reference as a practice through which actors orient themselves in the world. The conceptual framework derives from cultural anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, interpretive sociology, and cognitive semantics. As his central case, Hanks undertakes a comprehensive analysis of deixis—linguistic forms that fix reference in context, such as English I, you, this, that, here, and there. He shows that Maya deixis is a basic cultural construct linking language with body space, domestic space, agricultural and ritual practices, and other fields of social activity. Using this as a guide to ethnographic description, he discovers striking regularities in person reference and modes of participation, the role of perception in reference, and varieties of spatial orientation, including locative deixis. Traditionally considered a marginal area in linguistics and virtually untouched in the ethnographic literature, the study of referential deixis becomes in Hanks's treatment an innovative and revealing methodology. Referential Practice is the first full-length study of actual deictic use in a non-Western language, the first in-depth study of speech practice in Yucatec Maya culture, and the first detailed account of the relation between routine conversation, embodiment, and ritual discourse.
Download or read book An Introduction to the Study of the Maya Hieroglyphs written by Sylvanus Griswold Morley and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 1975 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Popol Vuh written by Lewis Spence and published by New York : AMS Press. This book was released on 1908 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Thinking Linguistically written by Maya Honda and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2007-11-05 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking Linguistically is a unique and clearly written introduction to the nature of linguistic analysis and issues in language acquisition. The book is for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, education, and psychology. Through twenty problem sets, based in languages not only from the Americas but from other continents as well, Thinking Linguistically: • Initiates students to the linguists’ way of observing and analyzing data by making the methods and the process of inquiry visible and accessible. • Engages students in analyzing the breadth and depth of two phenomena in a variety of languages—the expression of noun phrase plurality and the formation of questions. • Integrates analysis of these phenomena with results from first and second language acquisition research. • Emphasizes the interface between phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. • Exemplifies how linguistic analysis can be used for the teaching of critical thinking, problem solving, and the nature of scientific inquiry in general. • Is ideal for future language teachers for understanding acquisition and linguistic phenomena
Download or read book Chiapas Maya Awakening written by Sean S. Sell and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2017-01-13 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mexico’s indigenous people speak a number of rich and complex languages today, as they did before the arrival of the Spanish. Yet a common misperception is that Mayas have no languages of their own, only dialectos, and therefore live in silence. In reality, contemporary Mayas are anything but voiceless. Chiapas Maya Awakening, a collection of poems and short stories by indigenous authors from Chiapas, Mexico, is an inspiring testimony to their literary achievements. A unique trilingual edition, it presents the contributors’ works in the living Chiapas Mayan languages of Tsotsil and Tseltal, along with English and Spanish translations. As Sean S. Sell, Marceal Méndez, and Inés Hernández-Ávila explain in their thoughtful introductory pieces, the indigenous authors of this volume were born between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, a time of growing cultural awareness among the native communities of Chiapas. Although the authors received a formal education, their language of instruction was Spanish, and they had to pursue independent paths to learn to read and write in their native tongues. In the book’s first half, devoted to poetry, the writers consciously speak for their communities. Their verses evoke the quetzal, the moon, and the sea and reflect the identities of those who celebrate them. The short stories that follow address aspects of modern Maya life. In these stories, mistrust and desperation yield violence among a people whose connection to the land is powerful but still precarious. Chiapas Maya Awakening demonstrates that Mayas are neither a vanished ancient civilization nor a remote, undeveloped people. Instead, through their memorable poems and stories, the indigenous writers of this volume claim a place of their own within the broader fields of national and global literature.
Download or read book Converting Words written by William F. Hanks and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-03-17 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pathbreaking synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives an unprecedented view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on an extraordinary range and depth of sources, William F. Hanks documents for the first time the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language of indigenous literature, and how it ultimately became the language of rebellion against the system that produced it. Converting Words includes original analyses of the linguistic practices of both missionaries and Mayas-as found in bilingual dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, land documents, native chronicles, petitions, and the forbidden Maya Books of Chilam Balam. Lucidly written and vividly detailed, this important work presents a new approach to the study of religious and cultural conversion that will illuminate the history of Latin America and beyond, and will be essential reading across disciplinary boundaries.
Download or read book Breaking the Maya Code written by Michael D. Coe and published by . This book was released on 1994-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of how the Mayan glyphs found in the ancient ruins of Copan and other Mayan sites have been deciphered within the last 20 years. Michael Coe worked with all the leading players in this field. Although the Mayan cities were discovered a century and a half ago, the field of Mayan scholarship was dominated by scholars who had a dogmatic approach to the decipherment.
Download or read book The Life of Our Language written by Susan Garzon and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010-07-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The native Maya peoples of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize have been remarkably successful in maintaining their cultural identity during centuries of contact with and domination by outside groups. Yet change is occurring in all Mayan communities as contact with Spanish-speaking Ladino society increases. This book explores change and continuity in one of the most vital areas of Mayan culture—language use. The authors look specifically at Kaqchikel, one of the most commonly spoken Mayan languages. Following an examination of language contact situations among indigenous groups in the Americas, the authors proceed to a historical overview of the use of Kaqchikel in the Guatemalan Highlands. They then present case studies of three highland communities in which the balance is shifting between Kaqchikel and Spanish. Wuqu' Ajpub', a native Kaqchikel speaker, gives a personal account of growing up negotiating between the two languages and the different world views they encode. The authors conclude with a look at the Mayan language revitalization movement and offer a scenario in which Kaqchikel and other Mayan languages can continue to thrive.
Download or read book Philosophy of the Ancient Maya written by Alexus McLeod and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-12-26 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates some of the central topics of metaphysics in the philosophical thought of the Maya people of Mesoamerica, particularly from the Preclassic through Postclassic periods. This book covers the topics of time, change, identity, and truth, through comparative investigation integrating Maya texts and practices—such as Classic Period stelae, Postclassic Codices, and Colonial-era texts such as the Popol Vuh and the books of Chilam Balam—and early Chinese philosophy.
Download or read book Maya Glyphs written by Linda Schele and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The key to the study of the language and history of the Classic Maya (A.D. 293–900) is the verb. Maya Glyphs: The Verbs is a comprehensive study of the verb morphology and syntax of the Maya writing system. Linda Schele's summary of methodology makes available in a single place many important discoveries and approaches to the Maya language. Hers is the first sourcebook to include so broad a range of dates and to identify for the first time so many Maya rulers and events. The admirably lucid text provides an excellent introduction to Maya hieroglyphics for the beginner, and, for the experienced Mayanist, it offers a fascinating explanation of methodology, including paraphrasing, and important information about syntactical structures, special verbal constructions, and literary conventions. Schele's extensive catalog of known verbal phrases is useful for a variety of purposes. Because it is organized according to verbal affix patterns, it provides the only available source for the distribution of such patterns in the writing system. At the same time it registers the date of each event, its agent and patient (if recorded), the dedication date of the monument on which the glyphs occur, and a pictorial illustration, rather than a T-number transcription, of each example. Extensive notes treating problems of dating, interpretation, and dynastic information contain theories about the meaning and function of the events recorded in the Maya inscriptions.
Download or read book The Heart of the Matter written by Wesley M. Collins and published by SIL International. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can a culture have a theme that unifies seemingly unrelated practices? In this volume, Collins suggests that Maya-Mam customs as different as constructing a house, staying healthy, seeking God, disciplining children, agreeing to a contract, or just speaking the language, all originate from the same concept- a search for the center. This is far more than mere balance, long recognized as a Mayan cultural value. Rather, center space is a place of physical and metaphysical peace, acceptance, meaning, health, happiness and "home." Collins also shows how cenderedness is deeply embedded in the grammar of Mam- its lexicon, morphology, syntax, and discourse structure. This relatedness of Mam culture and linguistics provides an unusually detailed contribution to the debate on linguistic relativity and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Collins combines historical accounts with firsthand ethnographic and linguistic methodology to explore the concept of centeredness. Detailed accounts of his personal interaction with the Mam illustrate and enrich the book's concepts. This volume will interest students of the relationship between language and culture generally, and specifically those interested in the study of Maya of Mexico and Guatemala.
