Talk:Mayan languages/Miscellaneous debate (archive)

Mayance languages
I only get about 500 hits on google for "mayance maya", and one of the first two hits is wikipedia. Is this actually a significant enough term that it deserves to be bolded, with a two-sentence explanation?

Rather than saying "belief that it bears...", it seems to me that it would be simpler to say simply something like "The Maya of today are the direct descendants of the Classic Maya."

Ladino?!?!
Somebody please figure out what the reference to Ladino is doing in this article. Cbdorsett 20:13, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Here it meant people of Hispanic culture. I changed it to be less ambiguous, but the Ladino and Ladinos articles need to be more clear on this and other alternative meanings for the term. -- Infrogmation 05:24, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * Infrogmation, I'm quite sure you are confusing the two terms Ladino and Latino. &mdash; Hippietrail 14:14, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * As I've both heard and read "Ladino" with the above meaning, I don't believe so. Either way, the possibly confusing term is now out of this article. -- Infrogmation 18:29, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * This issue is being dealt with. The Judæo-Spanish/Ladino article is now at Ladino language.  Ladino is being changed to a disambig page (Ladino (disambiguation)) as I write this.  Tomer TALK  06:05, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)

Doesn't "ladino" mean "astute"? Were the indigenous people who adopted the Spanish language and modern dress considered astute? David Brown CSULB dabro@csulb.edu Apr. 10, 2005


 * (1)Yes (2)No. This is why there is a disambig page at Ladino (disambiguation).  Tomer TALK  20:12, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * I have edited Ladino people to answer that question.

i have heard of people called ladinos, in central america. from what i can tell, they aren't connected to the ladino language spoken by sephardic jews. Gringo300 12:54, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Ladino is the expression used especially in Guatemala to refer to the europeanized peopulation called "Mestizo" in Mexico.Maunus 20:38, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Removal of fringe material
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)

mayan tribes and languages
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)
 * Oh my. well isn't that nice.  Anything else?  Tom e r TALK  12:18, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

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

Bloodletting
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)


 * 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)


 * 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)

Proto-mayan area?
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)
 * 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. [[Image:HuastecRoute.jpg|left|300px|Fig. 1. Approximate routes and dates of the proto-Huastec and other Maya-speaking groups]]Maunus 08:40, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
 * 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)

GA nomination
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)
 * 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)

Grammar section
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)

Refs and citations
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)

Article length
The article is growing long. If you can think of ways to trim it, make language or sections more precise or have ideas for splitting out some topics in smaller articles I'll be glad to hear suggestions, or you can go ahead and we'll see how it turns out. I think I am currently too close to the article to propose splits myself: I think all of what I have written is important for an adequate coverage of a broad topic - but that doesn't mean that I can't be convinced otherwise. I am aware that there are many examples, I would like to have even more since they are the best way of conveying condensed information, but they do take up a lot of space and can never go without explicit comments on what is being examplified.Maunus 11:28, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Yipes, it really does feel like information overload here. It gets heavy on jargon in pretty much all of the sections. A few suggestions for improvement
 * try to make at least section-heads as meaningful and jargon-free as possible. For instance, rather than saying "morphosyntactic alignment", say "Treatment of subjects and objects".
 * Honestly, the Lenkersdorf stuff is useful here: he suggests that transitive verbs are cognitively "read" backwards, as in "you guys experienced his/her taking". His whole thesis on Sapir-Worf may be hyperbole, but at least it gives you some way to understand what is being said without relying on the bloodless formality of "set A" and "set B". Is there some way to include such Lenkersdorf-style glosses as "understanding aids" without giving them too much weight as "this is really what is being said"?
 * Definitely we need to start to split some of the heavier stuff out into sub-articles. I understand that the new grammar section has a lot of good new info but the quick list of features was much less daunting. As I see it, there is no "natural" article-that-people-would-ever-search-for, but there are clear sections for geneology and linguistics which could go in Mayan Languages (x)...
 * As work towards splitting off the sections, a quick, readable, header section/paragraph each for grammar and phonology - the geneaology is well-covered by the tree.
 * Unrelated - I'd really like to see the ALMG side-by-side with IPA, when both exist solo the distinction between [x] and 'x' is confusing to say the least. In fact, if we consistently put ALMG first, we can get away with that only in some cases, because the IPA brackets cue it as secondary.
 * ...Well, as you can see, I'm a little lost myself, but count this as a vote that there has to be a simpler way to build up to the heavy stuff here. --Homunq 01:06, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I disagree very much with your idea of changing established linguistic terminology into laymans terms - "treatment of subject and object" simply isn't informative and is in fact wildly incorrect linguistically (subject and object are not useful categories for describiing many phenomena of non accusative languages). I have read a bit up on Carlos Lenkersdorf and the reason I hesitate to include him here is firstly that his ideas about morphosyntactical alignment are controversial and that their conclusions are of a more philosophical than grammatical nature. Linguistically speaking they just don't hold water and none of the standard literature on ergativity in mayan as much as mentions his ideas. Standard literatre do use the terminology of set A and B which serve to not confuse the form level of language with the meaning level: this is important because in these cases the same prefix forms are used to express different meanings in different contexts (Set B expresses both the ergative case (agent of transitive verb) and possessor of a noun for example). I wouldn't mind including Lenkersdorf in a section on Mayan languages and studies of linguistic relativity though - there are enough studies made about mayan to make an article on that topic alone. In the choice between IPA and ALMG in examples IPA must be most important because that is the accepted standard and the one we can expect our readers to know beforehand. Maybe you are right that the Grammar and phonology sections could be summarized and moved to different pages. Maybe we could make a Mayan languages (typological overview) article like the ones A.R.King has made for Miskito and Pipil Maunus 04:52, 13 December 2006 (UTC)


 * First off, IANAL (I am not a linguist), so I clearly defer to you on inaccuracy. But I really would like to move away from jargon here, and am searching for ways to do it. Compare French language - our audience should be about the same, high-school non-linguists. As it stands, the article is tough going for me, a non-linguist who has been exposed to all the concepts it contains. It is in that context that I bring in Lenkersdorf, and in that context that I wish to present him. Something like: "Readings in the style of Carlos Lenkersdorf (who originated them in the context of Tojolabal) are not widely accepted linguistically, but are presented here in order to help distinguish the usage of sets A and B."... Personally, I'm fully aware that he's an anthropologist and NOT a lingust, and linguistically he goes way out on a limb to say the least; but his readings have been a very invaluable tool to me as I learn Kaqchikel, and I have seen them help as I have shared them with my teacher and fellow students, too. (My teacher, a native speaker, found them neither obvious nor ridiculous from an intuitive standpoint, for what it's worth.) At the very least, treat all uses of A and B (possessives, relational nouns, verbs, and set A with adjectives-used-as-intransitive-verbs) together, rather than peppering them around in sections based on extramayan linguistic criteria.
 * As to IPA and ALMG, again, I refer to French language, which has standard orthography with or without IPA, but never IPA alone. I see no reason to assume that the average person with an interest in this article will have had more exposure to IPA than to latinized Mayan, nor any reason to want to teach them IPA here.
 * As to splitting the article, I think we should first edit it here, but with an eye to splitting off the heavier linguistic stuff (both phonological and grammatical) later - and perhaps we'll find that after writing good summary sections no split is needed. I'm waiting till we reach some consensus here to start that, though.--201.216.149.47 16:37, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't really know who else might build consensus with us - there aren't so many interested parties. I'll try to give some if you do - let's do it that way. If you start editing your suggestions in and trimming the language I'll check it over and we'll discuss any controversies here in good spirit like we usually do. How does that strike you? (as for the ALMG I am not at all against putting it next to IPA as in French language - but my sourcs don't present ALMG so I would have to venture the spellings myself at risk of error - something that I would rather not. I f you feel confident in ALMG spellings please provide them where ever you deem necessary)Maunus 16:44, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I can add the ALMG orthography when it's called for in most cases (and there are still some corrections/additions to be made in what's been said about it already, especially for K'iche'), but we have to remember that it will only work for the Guatemalan languages. The Mexican languages have their own standards, which sometimes deviate from ALMG conventions (for example, the use of b for b' ).  That said, it would make sense to include standard orthography alongside IPA, whatever the language. &mdash; MikeG (talk) 17:47, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Table: Uses of sets A and B
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)


 * 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)
 * 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)

Starting to really pick nits
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)


 * 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)

FA?
I think this article is ready to be nominated for Featured Article. What do you guys think?Maunus 13:16, 17 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I'd say we are just about there, and this article is a credit to the diligent and collaborative efforts by Maunus, Homunq and others. Perhaps it might still need another passthrough or two for spelling, consistent orthography and grammatical checking, and there may be a couple of statements for which some direct in-line citation and attribution are called for.


 * Possibly the main potential for critique in an FA review would be that portions of it could be made more accessible to folks unfamiliar with linguistic concepts and terminology.


 * It might also be worthwhile to do a comparison with other languages' articles which have already achieved FA, such as Gbe languages, Tamil language, Aramaic language, to see if there's any scope or subtopic 'missing' which could or should be better documented here as well. IMO the present article stacks up pretty well against these, however.


 * In any case, submission to FA after a final runthrough would at least have the merit of establishing for sure what any critiques may be, which could either be addressed during the nomination run or, if unsuccessful, worked on afterwards for renomination. I think there's a reasonable chance of success now, I guess there's one way to find out...--cjllw | TALK  03:12, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
 * I'll give it a complete run-thru in the next couple of days. I'm still working on finishing the new genealogy tree and re-doing the map. Should you take it thru Good Article first?  Madman 05:46, 18 December 2006 (UTC)


 * There's no great rush, I think we'd have time for Madman to work on the diag and map first. As for going thru GA first, perhaps, though it's not a pre-requisite and since GA was originally designed for "shorter articles" it can take some time for the GA assessment on article of this size to go through.--cjllw | TALK  06:53, 18 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I'd like to wait until a couple of weeks into 2007, I want time to make a few polishing edits (and time for others to see, and revise if necessary, those edits). In particular, I think Phonology is fundamentally there but a little overwhelming as it stands; and I was thinking of putting (very) approximate dates and modern speaker numbers into the geneology tree once Madman had that ready. (Madman - is it going to be SVG? Or if not, what underlying format are you using?) At that point, I think we can skip GA :). --Homunq 10:44, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Discrepencies in History section
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)
 * 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)