Talk:Mayan languages/Miscellaneous debate (archive)

message: I removed the reference to "Mayance languages".  See comment above.  Also see:
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/excerpts/exbevmay.html
"There are various devices that have been used by scholars to disambiguate the term. One such attempt, which failed, was to introduce the term "Mayance" for the family, keeping "Maya" for the language. The current accepted terminology is to call the language "Yucatec" or "Yucatec Maya," saving "Maya" for the family."
I also removed the claim about an "African substratum".  See discussion in Talk:Maya hieroglyphics.
Benwing 05:06, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of fringe material 

message: i've recently begun doing research on the mayan tribes and languages.
i'm much more familiar with the ancient maya.
Gringo300 12:56, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh my.  well isn't that nice.  Anything else?  Tomer TALK 12:18, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: mayan tribes and languages

message: Shouldn't the pronunciation begin with [ts]?  I'm assuming [s] is a typo? -- MikeGasser (talk) 15:10, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Tzotzil

message: I have no idea how to edit the template that causes the box on the right, but I feel strongly that a link to the (classic) Mayan religious practice of bloodletting does not belong on a page about the (modern) Mayan languages. --Homunq 16:55, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That template is more about covering the main topical areas relating to pre-Columbian Maya, so perhaps it could be removed from here altogether. However, I don't myself see the template as being out-of-place here, and note also that it is still very much under development & can and should be revised and expanded. I do agree that in terms of comparative levels of subject matter bloodletting does look out-of-place in that list, which should really be a collection of higher-level topic areas. I'll revise the template with something a little more general and widely-applicable.--cjllw | TALK 00:17, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I dont even see why bloodletting is encyclopedic enough to have its own article. Let alone be shown as a "general maya related article"". Sounds like you are going to do something reasonable about it.Maunus 08:11, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bloodletting 

message: Was there ever really a single language spoken from Yucatan to Pacific? Seems more likely that it started from a smaller area and spread (as it simultaneously lost unity) through conquest, association with effective cultural practices, and/or religion/literature. What do linguists think, this issue is obviously true for a lotta "proto" languages? Meanwhile, I'm adding "...the ancestor of languages now...", though I worry I'm bordering on original research. --Homunq 06:08, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is not really true. The Protomayan homeland is thought to have been in the the northern highlands or southern lowlands of Guatemala, (around the rio pasion and usumacinta) this is where the greatest linbnguistic diversity is today and sos looks to bee the center of expansion. Look at the article on the Huastecs - which is well referenced and has this nice map: , maybe we should include it. Maunus 08:40, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Great map, I stuck it in but I had to move the other boxes around not to clutter things up, see if you like the result. --Homunq 04:59, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proto-mayan area? 

message: I have nominated this article for Good Article status. I hope you will all help to fix it up when the comments and suggestions start coming. Maunus 12:11, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have decided to de nominate and instead have it peer reviewed that gives us more time to fix it up according to the reviewers comments. Maunus 21:58, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: GA nomination

message: I have begun building a grammar section from scratch as I go along i will incorporte and explain the current factbites into the prose section - but meanwhile I have put them in a subsection called "further grammatical comments" this section will be eliminated when I am done. I am downplaying Carlos Lenkesdorf because I am planning a section called linguistic studies which will deal with Lenkersdorfs and John A Lucys studies about Mayan languages and the Sapir/whorf hypothesisMaunus 15:21, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Grammar section

message: In tidying up the references and citations, we have an entry for two of the vols in the Handbook of Middle American Indians series. Were any specific papers in these vols used (and which could therefore be more directly cited)? I have a copy of Vol 5 (Linguistics) but not Vol 7 {Ethnology), and I'm unable to make out what the LCC F 1434, H 3, LAC attribution affixed may be - is this some library catalogue ref? --cjllw | TALK 08:49, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Refs and citations 

message: Homunq, first I didn't understand your table at all but then I understood it - and thought that it was just the layout that made it complicated. I decided to split it up into two separate tables. I think it works better this way - I hope you see my point. I have provided the linguistically acceptable definition of ergativity and made a more predagogical prose explanation of Lenkersdorfs line of arguments - I hope I understand them well enough, otherwise correct it. But I think it is important to have a prose explanation of the tables and lenkersdorfs way of seeing it if it is going to help the linguistically unprepared reader and make any sense to the linguistically prepared one as well. I have made minor corrections to language. At first I found your edits horrible and destructive to "my article" but reading them a couple of times I understood that it actually does make an interesting and welcome addition. I hope my changes to them are acceptable to you.Maunus 21:32, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks - I think :). Your changes are a definite improvement. I understand that that was a bit of a mess - it was a first draft, and I couldn't even see the table as I edited it because I was doing it offline. I like your solution of repeating the transitive verb line. I still plan to fix up some loose ends I left but I think this is coming together. Just a point of curiosity: do you know if in Basque, set B is possessive?--Homunq 04:58, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Basque doesn't mark ergativity by crossreferencing the pronominal markers like Mayan and Mixe-Zoquean do basque uses a case system marking nouns for ergative or absolutive case I don't know if they use ergative for possessors that aren't agents or if they just use genitive case on the possessed noun. (I do know that Greenlandic which is also ergative does use the ergative case to mark possessors)Maunus 05:46, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Table: Uses of sets A and B

message: The article claims that the structure is CV or CVC and consonant clusters only happen across syllable boundaries. My experience in practice is that there are occasionally hard-to-pronounce series of three or more (?) consonants, usually involving one-consonant affixes such as "x-" (completive). My uninformed intuition says that the sentence should read "C, CV, or CVC". Or does the "x-" have a dropped vowel in there? --Homunq 22:39, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What I have written is not entirely true, it was probably true for the protolanguage but not at all for modern mayan languages (i do believe most of the clusters arise originally from dropped vowels). I will try to find a better description of syllable structure in mayan in general. Your concern is valid.Maunus 06:03, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Starting to really pick nits 

message: There are some apparent discrepancies in the "History" section relating to the estimated times of the splits of the main groups- the dates in the text (eg Huastecan ca 2200BCE) do not match up with the dates appearing in the map, which are later, and the sentence "In the Archaic period particularly loanwords from Mixe-Zoquean seem to have entered the Mayan language at an early state" seems to be at odds with the timing given for Cholan movement into the chiapas region & their contact with Mixe-Zoque speakers (Archaic period would be before ca. 2200BCE).
Also, there's an unresolved ambiguity in the reading of that sentence - is it meant to mean "particularly in the Archaic period, loanwords from Mixe-Zoque...", or "In the Archaic period loanwords from Mixe-Zoque particularly..."  ? --cjllw | TALK 06:50, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The last one is what is meant "particularly from mixe-zoque" The date 1300 is when Wastek arrives in northern mexico. Campbell writes that protomayan was unified until about 2200 and he also writes that there is general consensus that wastek was the first to split. As for the M-Z contact it was already with proto-mayan since th m-z loan words are present in all the mayan languages - and M-Z was spoken outside of Chiapas and occupied a much greater area than it does now stretching well into highland Guatemala.Maunus 09:29, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discrepencies in History section