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Mayan languages tend to have a rich set of grammatical voices. Proto-Mayan had at least one passive construction as well as an antipassive rule for downplaying the importance of the agent in relation to the patient. Modern Kʼicheʼ has two antipassives: one which ascribes focus to the object and another that emphasizes the verbal action. [76]
Although the Maya did not actually write alphabetically, nevertheless he recorded a glossary of Maya sounds and related symbols, which was long dismissed as nonsense (for instance, by leading Mayanist J. E. S. Thompson in his 1950 book Maya Hieroglyphic Writing) [21] but eventually became a key resource in deciphering the Maya script.
The writing system used is very close to the Maya script, using affixal glyphs and Long Count dates, but is read only in one column at a time as is the Zapotec script. It has been suggested that this Isthmian or Epi-Olmec script is the direct predecessor of the Maya script, thus giving the Maya script a non-Maya origin.
The Mayan languages are a group of languages spoken by the Maya peoples. The Maya form an enormous group of approximately 7 million people who are descended from an ancient Mesoamerican civilization and spread across the modern-day countries of: Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
Terrence Kaufman has argued that Nahuatl is an unlikely candidate because Proto-Nahuan did not enter Mesoamerica until around the time of the fall of Teotihuacan (c. 600 AD), and that Totonac or Mixe–Zoque are likely candidates because many Mesoamerican languages have borrowed from these two languages during the Classic period. [14]
The Mayan calendar’s 819-day cycle has confounded scholars for decades, but new research shows how it matches up to planetary cycles over a 45-year span.
Satellite view of the Yucatán Peninsula. The Maya civilization occupied the Maya Region, a wide territory that included southeastern Mexico and northern Central America; this area included the entire Yucatán Peninsula, and all of the territory now incorporated into the modern countries of Guatemala and Belize, as well as the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. [4]
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