Chʼortiʼ language

Chʼortiʼ can be called a living "Rosetta Stone" of Mayan languages. Chʼortiʼ is an important tool for interpreting the contents of Maya glyphic writings, some of which are not yet fully understood. For several years, many linguists and anthropologists expected to grasp the Chʼortiʼ culture and language by studying its words and expressions.^[3] Chʼortiʼ is spoken mainly in and around Jocotán and Camotán, Chiquimula department, Guatemala, as well as in adjacent areas of parts of western Honduras near the Copán Ruins.^[4] Because the Classic Mayan language was ancestral to the modern Chʼorti, it can be used to decipher the ancient language.^[2] Researchers realized that the ancient language was based more on phonetics than previously thought.^[2]

 

The name Chʼortiʼ (with unglottalized <ch>) means 'language of the corn farmers', a reference to the traditional agricultural activity of Chʼortiʼ families. It is one of the three modern descendants of the Chʼolan language, which constitute a sub-group of Mayan languages. The other two are Chontal and Chʼol.^[5] These three descendants are still spoken today. Chʼortiʼ and Chʼolti are two sub-branches belonging to Eastern Chʼolan; Chʼolti is, however, already extinct.

There are some debates among scholars about how Chʼolan should be classified. John Robertson considered the direct ancestor of colonial Chʼoltiʼ to be the language of the Mayan script (also known as Mayan Glyphs). The language of the Mayan Glyphs is described as 'Classic Chʼoltiʼan' by John Robertson, David Stuart, and Stephen Houston. The language of the Mayan script is thus the ancestor of Chʼortiʼ. The relationship is shown in the chart below.^[4]

The Chʼortiʼ people are descendants of the people who lived in and around Copán, one of the cultural capitals of the ancient Maya area. This covers parts of modern-day Honduras and Guatemala. Chʼorti is considered an endangered language as well as an endangered culture.

 

This region is the only region in the world that Chʼorti speakers can be found. Although the area is completely shaded in, the majority of speakers reside in Guatemala, while the rest are sparsely distributed throughout the rest of the area.^[6]

The government of Honduras has been trying to promote a uniform national language of Spanish, and therefore discourages the use and teaching of native languages such as Chʼorti. The Chʼortiʼ people in Honduras face homogenization and have to assimilate to their surroundings. The government has been clashing with the Chʼorti people over land disputes from the 1800s, which puts the people (and thus the language) at risk. In 1997, 2 prominent Chʼorti leaders were assassinated. This assassination is just one example of many cases where Chʼorti advocates have been harmed or killed. Every one of these killings reduces the number of Chʼorti speakers. As of right now, there are only 10 remaining native speakers in Honduras.^[7]

The government of Guatemala has been more supportive of Chʼorti speakers and has promoted programs that encourage the learning and teaching of Chʼorti. The Chʼorti's in Guatemala wear traditional clothing, unlike their counterparts in Honduras, who wear modern-day clothing.^[7] Currently there are about 55,250 Chʼorti speakers in Guatemala. Even though Guatemala has established Spanish as its official language, it supports the teaching of these native languages.

The majority of Chʼortiʼ live in the Chiquimula Department of Guatemala, approximately 52,000. The remaining 4,000 live in Copán, Honduras. The Kʼicheʼ Maya however, dominated the Chʼortiʼ dating back to the early fifteenth century. Warfare as well as disease devastated much of the Chʼortiʼ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Much of their land was lost to the Guatemalan government in the nineteenth century as well. More recently, 25 percent of the Guatemalan Chʼortiʼ went to the United States during the 1980s to escape political persecution.^[8]

The Chʼortiʼ have their own standard way of writing their language. However, inaccurate ways to represent phonemes led to some variation among recent publications.^[9][10]

The consonants of Chʼortiʼ include glottal stop [ʼ], b, bʼ, ch, chʼ, d, g, j, k, kʼ, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, tʼ, tz, tzʼ, w, x, y.

The ⟨w⟩ and ⟨y⟩ are semivowels.

The vowels consist of a, e, i, o, and u.^[10]

When two vowels are put together in Chʼortiʼ the second vowel always takes precedence and then is always followed by a glottal stop. Chʼortiʼ doesn't have any long vowels. According to historians, long vowels occur in Classical Mayan, but have been lost in modern Chʼortiʼ.

In Chʼortiʼ language, aa or a꞉ is used as aʼ or Aʼ, we can see this pattern with all vowel clusters including eʼ, Iʼ, oʼ and uʼ.

Some examples of words with vowel clusters are꞉

• Jaʼx [xaʔʃ] = Her, ella
• Weʼr [weʔr] = meat, carne  
• Bʼiʼx [pʼiʔʃ] = seed, semilla
• Tunoʼron [tunoʔɾon] = everyone, todos
• Kuʼm [kuʔm] = egg, huevo ^[11]

The aspectual system of Chʼortiʼ language changed to a tripartite pronominal system which comes with different morphemes used for the subject of transitive verbs, the object of transitive verbs and the subject of intransitive completive verbs, and a third set of pronouns only used for the subject of incompletive intransitive verbs.^[12]

Chʼortiʼ tripartite pronominal system (data from Hull 2005)

In the Chʼortiʼ language and other Mayan sentences it always starts with verbs but also there are agents or patients added and in which they are commonly represented by the acronym VOS, meaning verb-object-subject. The following rules apply VSO, SVO, SOV, OVS, OSV.^[13]

In most of the Chʼortiʼ language there are phrases surrounding transitive verbs and they are order subject first (first-most) and it's followed by the verb then the object (SVO).^[14]

The adjective works together with the nouns as a modifier formed with a noun phrase that plays some syntactic role, object etc.^[13]

Predicative adjective indicate the size, color or state

Chʼortiʼ has many other different forms, in the following sentence the words that appear to be bold is a preposition and underline one is a relational noun.^[13]

Examples of inflected verbs from Isidro González's stories (John Fought, 1972):

^[9]

Tak is plural for women and childrenʼ

• ijchʼok-tak "little girls"
• max-tak "children, young ones, family" (max does not occur without -tak)
• ixik-tak "women"

These are the only instances encountered. It is worthy of notice that ixkaʼr "wife", chʼurkabʼ "baby" and ar "offspring" take -ob'.

obʼ is a general plural. The suffix can be found in nouns, verbs, adjectives, and participials.

Examples on possessives:

^[16]

The following list contains examples of common words in the Chʼortiʼ language:

According to "A Dictionary of Chʼortiʼ Maya, Guatemala" by Kerry Hull, some words may be used as nouns (as shown above) or can double as a verb as well. For example "Witzir" can mean mountain as a noun, or 'to go uphill' as a verb. ^[9]

• Online version of Wisdom's Chorti Dictionary (1950)
• Oral Histories of the Chʼortiʼ Maya (2011)
• Mayan Languages Collection of John Fought Archived 2020-09-26 at the Wayback Machine at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America, containing several hundred recordings of Chʼortiʼ made between 1964 and 1967 in Guatemala, field notes and photographs.
• Information about Chʼortiʼ language

• Linguamón Ch'orti'