Talk:Cenote

Meters per year
Are the units "meters per year" really the right ones? I have a hard time picturing what this means. This article cites no sources. krc 19:26, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for adding a citation. I don't have the reference material at hand, so still I ask: are these the correct units? Something like "cubic meters per year" would make more sense to me. krc 04:08, 18 December 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rumpuscat (talk • contribs)

Hi - Yes, flow rates are in units of length per unit time. If the units were volume per time (ie cubic m per second, which is a discharge) then you would take the velocity and multiply by the cross sectional area. Since the vertical cross section of each cenote or cave is different, this is not a good way to provide a typical benchmark value for all cenotes. In contrast, the water flow rate is generally independent of how big the cenote since it is the regional pressure field driving the flow (ie water velocity in a big cave/cenote is not necessarily higher than velocity in a small cave/cenote). As for the numbers cited, they are of the correct order of magnitude, but that is all that was attempted to provide. Groundwater flow rates are generally only quoted to order of magnitude ranges (ie 10, 100, 1000, 10 000 m /day or /year depending on the system). Cheers. Ggpab (talk) 02:16, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your explanation and improvements to the article. krc Rumpuscat (talk) 04:55, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

I found this article very helpful having just snorkeled in Cenote Azul in Yucatan. I tasted the water and found it somewhat brackish. Now I know why. Thanks. Frme2u (talk) 22:42, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

The maya word d'zonot / dzonot etc.
Dear Wikipedia Editor who is asking for a citation on the maya word dzonot. First of all there is no standard orthography in Maya yet, and I am not aware of any formal Yucatec Maya dictionaries that are in print. This is a living language with hundreds of thousands native speakers, and if you go to the Yucatan peninsula they will all tell you that the Maya word for cenote is d'zonot. Second of all, if I were to write "The word table in English has the same latin root as the word "table" in French" - would you be asking for a citation? Cheers ggpb. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ggpab (talk • contribs) 19:59, 7 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Info on the word dzonot is available here at FAMSI, if anyone wants to stick in a cite. Simon Burchell (talk) 20:58, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Excellent! Are there any rules/guidelines on the apostrophe? The FAMSI page has dzonot but I commonly see it written dzonot. Cheers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ggpab (talk • contribs) 21:21, 7 February 2009 (UTC)


 * My Maya is pretty rusty, and is K'iche' not Yucatec, but the apostrophe signifies a glotal, or more explosive consonant. I'm afraid I can't really tell you much more than that. The Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala standardised the orthography of Mayan languages within Guatemala but I don't know what effect, if any, that had upon the writing of Mayan languages in Mexico. You'd need to ask someone who's studied Yucatec formally, there may be someone on Wikipedia but a quick check of users with other languages didn't turn up anything... Simon Burchell (talk)


 * I did some background research on this. Like Simon says, Yucatec and other Mayan languages make a notable phonemic contrast between glottalic consonants and 'normal' (non-glottalic) ones. Which is to say, that to Maya speakers the contrast between the glottalic and non-glottalic versions of those consonantal sounds makes a difference and can lead to a difference in meaning (see for eg the example in the Yucatec Maya article, of t'áan "speech" vs. táan "chest", where the first "t" is glottalized and the second isn't).


 * In the case of the Yucatec Maya word that gave us cenote, the initial phoneme is the glottalized (ejective) voiceless alveolar affricate, which in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) would be written as / / (this contrasts phonemically with the voiceless alveolar affricate, in IPA written as /  / ).


 * The correct or appropriate way to write/spell this word in Yucatec depends upon the orthographical system used, ie depends upon what graphemes the system uses to represent these phonemes, and the rest of the phonemes in the word. As it happens, in Yucatec this particular phoneme is one with apparently just about the most significant variance and controversy, in terms of the different ways it has been written in the past.


 * For eg, the majority of colonial-era grammars and dictionaries traditionally used a "reversed c" () for this ejective consonant, but since the advent of modern printing techniques this has been pretty much discarded. Common replacements since then have been dz, tz', and ts'.


 * Modern-day Yucatec lacks a universal, formally defined orthography. However, it seems that the most widely recognised and used convention that comes closest to a current "official" orthography is one arising from a 1984 meeting convened by the Yucatan govt.'s Instituto Nacional para la Educación de los Adultos (INEA), with participation of several state & federal agencies like INI and INAH, and representatives from the state university UADY. This 1984 alphabet (designated as the alfabeto aceptado by the mtg) decided upon using ts' for this ejective consonant, supplanting the commonly used dz that was proposed in a precursor meeting. This adoption of ts' also agrees with the grapheme used in the most authoritative and comprehensive recent Yucatec Maya dictionary (Alfredo Barrera Vásquez’ Cordemex dictionary of 1980), and largely parallels the conventions defined by ALMG for writing Guatemalan Maya languages. However in practice there is considerable persistence in using dz since this 1984 alphabet came out, the source I consulted estimates abt 40% of Yucatec publications keep using dz, and of course placenames have done so for a long time. Using dz instead of ts' (and tz instead of ts) is noted as being almost "iconically" Maya-traditionalist.


 * Therefore, there are two acceptable variant modern spellings for this word in Yucatec Maya:
 * ts'onot &mdash; in the "official", formalised 1984 alphabet orthog, often in urban, educated, formal literature
 * dzonot &mdash; in common, popular-traditionalist, conservative, often rural, contexts (and place names).


 * Either of these would do, both should be mentioned with their respective backgrounds.


 * Actually, to be even more precise in marking all the sounds that are contrastive in Yucatec, the first vowel would be marked to indicate it is creaky voiced, since this is phonemically contrastive. So, the "complete" spellings would be (1)ts'o'onot, and (2)dzonot.


 * The spelling d'zonot would be perceived as incorrect, since the glottalisation applies to the [dz] and not the [d] (ie the "d" is not a phoneme or even a phone in Yucatec Maya).


 * The spelling dzonot does appear in quite a few sources, but at the moment I can't see the rationalisation for this. Writing the ejective consonant as dz' would seem to imply the non-ejective  ought to be written as dz, but I don't think that any of these orthographical systems have that pairing. It might well be that the practice of marking glottalisation with   here is a redundant, mistaken one. But since it's found in use (but not in actual Yucatec Maya texts as far as I have seen), it could be mentioned also. --cjllw  ʘ  TALK 04:54, 9 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks zillow. That just about clears that up... Simon Burchell (talk) 11:22, 9 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I just came upon a ref in Sharer & Traxler's The Ancient Maya (6th ed.), which gives dzonot, with apostrophe, on p52. I've put in a cite, and since the ref uses the apostrophe, I've put an apostrophe in dzonot too. Simon Burchell (talk) 14:32, 11 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, and I've seen a few other respectable archaeological sources use the dzonot spelling too.


 * But I still think that this is an incorrect, or at least inconsistent, spelling.


 * In this word, the apostrophe char is not marking a glottal stop, but instead should be indicating that the initial phoneme in this word is an ejective consonant. Yucatec orthography has always distinguished between the ejective and non-ejective consonantal pairs the language has, because the difference is phonemic. Each of the orthographical systems that have been used for Yucatec has particular symbols for the non-ejective affricate / ' / phoneme and its paired ejective affricate phoneme,  / ' / .  But I don't think that any of these systems has used dz' for the ejective affricate; that would imply that the non-ejective one ought to be dz, instead of tz (or ts in 1984 alphabet / ALMG).


 * Sharer & Traxler's writing dzonot is inconsistent with their own table of yucatec orthographical signs that they provide on p.124 of the same edition. In the table they show tz for plain and tz' for ejective affricate, giving also dz as an alternative. It looks like a mistake for them to write dzonot, and now I've come across an Amazon review of their book by UC Riverside anthropologist Eugene Anderson who makes pretty much exactly that same point (see here). Could just be a proofing error, or maybe they just weren't sure themselves about the orthography.


 * I've come across some more helpful material, so I will add in perhaps a brief etymology section & sources to the article, soon when I'm next online. --cjllw ʘ  TALK 07:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I must admit, based on your earlier post, that I thought the apostrophe was mistaken but, on the other hand, that's what the cited source said... Best regards, Simon Burchell (talk) 08:49, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Pronunciation
Why does the Spanish IPA transcription contain the word-initial non-sibilant? That is surely not the pronunciation of this word in its "native" environment (the Yucutan) where native speakers of regional Spanish would use a related sibilant. Anyway, I'm changing the IPA to have word-initial [s], please discuss if this is unsatisfactory. Kolbe (talk) 17:11, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Chixlub crater section
As it stands, this section is a wp:coat rack, and talks more about the crater than cenotes. --OpenFuture (talk) 20:59, 18 June 2012 (UTC)


 * IMHO the section is relevant to the article's topic. Feel free to shorten it as you like. Alfie  ↑↓ © 18:44, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

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External links modified (January 2018)
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Weird summary
Summary reads: "It is one of an estimated 10,000 cenotes" What is? Lol. "It" refers to nothing, this is not the page for a specific cenote and no specific cenote has been mentioned prior to this. 97.94.140.148 (talk) 04:18, 26 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Well pointed out. Text corrected in accordance with link. -- Infrogmation (talk) 04:33, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Number of cenotes in Yucatan
In the summary it says and estimated 10,000 and elsewhere it says at least 6,000. This isn't inconsistent but would be good to have the same number 200.68.172.33 (talk) 11:59, 3 May 2024 (UTC)