Everything about The Classic Maya Language totally explained
The
Classic Maya language is the oldest historically-attested member of the
Mayan language family. It is the main language documented in the
pre-Columbian inscriptions of the
Classic Era Maya civilization.
Relationships
Classic Maya is a direct descendent of
Proto-Mayan and the common ancestor of three branches of Mayan languages - Cholan, Yucatecan and the more distantly related Huastecan. These branches have contemporary living descendant languages, which include the
Ch'ol language and
Yukatek (Yucatec) Maya. Modern Ch'ol and Yucatec speakers can understand many words in Classic Maya.
Writing system
Classic Maya is the principal language documented in the
writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya, and is particularly represented in inscriptions from the lowland regions and the period c. 200—900
CE. The writing system (generally known as
Maya hieroglyphics) has some similarities in function (but isn't related to) other
logosyllabic writing systems such as
Egyptian hieroglyphs, in which a combination of
logographic and
syllabic signs (
graphemes) are used. The script's corpus of
graphemes features a core of
syllabic signs which reflect the
phonology of the Classic Maya language spoken in the region and at that time, which were also combined or complemented by a larger number of
logographs. Thus the expressions of Classic Maya could be written in a variety of ways, represented either as logograms, logograms with
phonetic complements, logograms plus syllables, or in a purely syllabic combination. For example, in one common pattern many verb and noun roots are given by logographs, while their grammatical
affixes were written syllabically, much like modern
Japanese.
Grammar
Like the other Mayan languages, Classic Maya is
Verb Subject Object and
ergative in its basic typology. Being
polysynthetic, it uses both prefixes and suffixes to show grammatical function. Nouns, therefore, are not inflected for
case or
gender. There is also an entire class of intransitives that convey the object's spatial position. In addition, the language employs
counter words when quantifying nouns and uses a
vigesimal number system.
Verbs are not conjugated according to tense, but rather are semantically altered by a series of
aspect particles.
Further Information
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