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Topic: Mesoamerican languages

Related Topics

Nahuatl language

Nahuatl

Tzeltal language

Chol language

Maya language

Sonora

Hopi language

Turkic languages

Nayarit

Yucatec Maya language

Mesoamerican chronology

Agglutinative language

Ancient Mesoamerican agriculture

Synthetic language

Mesoamerica

	Language Log: No, Really, Oldest Writing Isn't Oldest Known Language
		The Salishan language family of the Pacific Northwest provides one example: the estimated time depth for the whole 24-language family is about 4000 years, which means that the parent language of the family was last spoken ca.
		The method involves systematic comparison of the structures of the daughter languages, which are attested and in most cases still spoken, and it's one of the major success stories in the historical sciences.
		The point is that the existence of the proto-language of a well-established language family is not a matter of guesswork: it is the only viable hypothesis that can account for the systematic correspondences found throughout the vocabulary and structure of all of the proto-language's daughter languages.
	itre.cis.upenn.edu /~myl/languagelog/archives/003591.html (617 words)

	Mesoamerican Voices - Cambridge University Press
		Mesoamericans’ geographical awareness tended to be limited to the particular regions in which they lived, with the exception of a few long-distance traders, and individuals primarily identified themselves with their local ethnic state.
		Mesoamericans so vastly outnumbered the Spaniards that they had little choice but to rely on the well-structured organization and traditions of the local ethnic state and its ruling nobility.
		And it can be seen in the ways that Mesoamericans expressed their views on the Spanish invaders of the sixteenth century (Chapter 3), on religious matters (Chapter 8), and on the moral conduct and responsibilities of children, politicians, and priests (Chapters 4 and 7– 9).
	www.cambridge.org /catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521812798&ss=exc (3537 words)

	AILLA: The Indigenous Languages of Latin America
		The missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics make an effort to maintain statistics about the numbers of languages and speakers around the world in their Ethnologue, but some of the figures that you find on their website (http://www.ethnologue.com) may be 10-20 years out of date.
		Language can function as the keystone in an arc of community traits and values; when the language is lost, this arc disintegrates.
		When a language is lost, all this must be refashioned in the new language--with different word categories, sounds, and grammatical structures--if it is to be kept at all.
	www.ailla.utexas.org /site/la_langs.html (3020 words)

	Mesoamerican Languages Documentation Project
		This reconstruction, and the documentation of the individual Mije-Sokean languages, was to serve as a resource for revising and extending the decipherment of Epi-Olmec writing (Justeson and Kaufman 1993, 1996 [1994], 1997).
		These were to be documented, the ancestral proto-Sapotekan language was to be reconstructed, and the reconstruction, along with the documentation of the individual Sapotekan languages, was to help in the decipherment of Sapoteko hieroglyphic writing, which had been under way since 1992.
		A major feature of the Project is that a set of specialists in each language family is trained in the context of regular and long-term interaction, helping to generate a body of lore that is tested through discussion and comparison of the results of individual investigation.
	www.albany.edu /anthro/maldp (2353 words)

	Stocks and families of Mexican languages
		The indigenous languages of Mexico belong to three major groups, sometimes called 'linguistic stocks', besides six 'linguistic families' that are not related to other languages.
		Regardless of the details of family subgroupings, the Otomanguean stock, which includes languages from as far north as the states of Hidalgo and Querétaro (Otomi) and as far south as Nicaragua (Mangue, now extinct), is a group of languages whose potential for the study of language change over the centuries rivals that of Indo-European languages.
		The genetic relationship of the languages which are today known as the Uto-Aztecan language stock was recognized by the late 19th century and firmly established by the middle of the 20th century.
	www.sil.org /mexico/22i-Stocks.htm (1087 words)

	Quetzalcoatl - Crystalinks
		Mesoamerican priests and kings would sometimes take the name of a deity they were associated with, so Quetzalcoatl and Kukulcan are also the names of historical persons.
		An interesting phenomena that distinguished Quetzalcoatl is that despite the fact he is not the most powerful of gods within the Mesoamerican pantheon, or one of the eldest, he is nonetheless an integral part of the system.
		The image of the serpent rising from the earth and bearing water on its tail is explained in the Nahuatl language by a description of Quetzalcoatl in terms of the rise of a powerful thunderstorm sweeping down, with wind raising dust before bringing rain.
	www.crystalinks.com /quetzalcoatl.html (2490 words)

	Mesoamerica Online
		Prominent languages such as English or Spanish, he says, are "more economically effective for their users." Parents are more likely to want their children to speak Spanish instead of a local dialect, for example, because it will help them advance later in life.
		The language plays a special role in the study of hieroglyphics because it is almost directly descended from Classic Maya, the language on the inscriptions.
		Language diversity, says Goldsmith, is just as important to the study of life as biological diversity.
	www.neh.gov /news/humanities/2005-09/mesoamerica.html (972 words)

	Ancient Scripts: Mesoamerican Writing Systems
		Some of the familiar Mesoamerican cultures include the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Olmecs, with lesser publicized groups such as Zapotecs, Teotihuacanos, Mixtecs, and Tarascans thrown in the mix.
		For this reason, a sign from a Mesoamerican scripts is often called a "glyph", as a short form of "hieroglyph".
		Because of the similarities among the various Mesoamerican scripts, there's long been a notion that there was a writing system, invented by the Olmecs, that predated all historically-attested scripts and was the progenitor of all subsequent scripts.
	www.ancientscripts.com /ma_ws.html (3744 words)

	Numbers in Over 5000 Languages
		Their ears may not be attuned to the language; or there may be dialectal variation, or even sound change.
		There is nothing inherent in the language variety to tell us what it is. Linguists sometimes use "language" to refer to a mutually intelligible group of dialects (but note that intelligibility can be partial).
		Number of speakers is one of the least interesting attributes of a language; but there are so many languages here that some highlighting of the most common ones seems necessary.
	www.zompist.com /numbers.shtml (926 words)

	Upper Necaxa Totonac Project
		All but the oldest speakers are bilingual, and in most households the language of child-rearing has been switched to Spanish by parents who see proficiency in the dominant language as an advantage for their children.
		Morphologically, UNT is a highly polysynthetic agglutinating language whose verbs combine eight prefixal positions marking categories such as mood, tense, person/number of subject, person of object, number of object, direction, valence-increment, and bodypart with seven suffixal positions for categories such as valence-decrement, manner, quantification, desiderative, second-person object, second-person subject, and aspect.
		Current studies of language acquisition are based almost entirely on data from European languages and many claims about universal patterns and sequences in acquisition and how they are subsumed by the ontological development of human cognition are untested with languages and cultures outside the Western mainstream.
	www.arts.ualberta.ca /~totonaco/Context.html (1374 words)

	American Indian languages
		One influential classification grouped all of the languages of North America into six stocks, but recently specialists have questioned the validity of studying such larger units of relationship before the histories of the individual families are understood.
		However, Guarani is one of the national languages of Paraguay (along with Spanish), and Nahuatl (Aztec) and various Mayan languages are the majority languages of extensive regions of Mexico and Guatemala as is Quechua in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia.
		Indian languages have contributed to the vocabulary of English and many other Old World languages, especially in words for animals, plants, and culture traits unknown to Europeans before their discovery of the New World.
	www.meta-religion.com /Linguistics/Other/american_indian_languages.htm (831 words)

	Traditions of Mexico - Indigenous Languages
		This extensive Mesoamerican Empire was in its ascendancy during the late Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Centuries.
		The Shoshone language is very closely related to the Paiute language, and some Shoshone tribes today live as far north as Idaho and Montana, representing the northernmost stretches of the Uto-Aztecans.
		As you might expect, a family is a group of languages that are genetically and culturally related to one another.
	www.houstonculture.org /mexico/aztec.html (2341 words)

	Genetic Linguistic Relationships of Proto-Mayan or Where did Nab’ee Maya’ Tziij come from?
		Guaraní is a Tupían language spoken in Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia; Quechua is the most widely spoken Native American language in the Americas.
		Sapir is quoted by Campbell in The Languages of Native America as saying that "Middle America, in spite of its special cultural position, is distinctly a part of the whole North American linguistic complex and is connected with North America by innumerable threads"(Campbell and Mithun 959).
		Philological studies in hieroglyphics and Mayan languages identify Cholan as the principle language of the older glyphic texts (Campbell 1990).
	linguistics.byu.edu /classes/ling450ch/reports/proto-maya.html (1980 words)

	Spartanburg SC \| GoUpstate.com \| Spartanburg Herald-Journal (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
		As these groups became predominant, Nahuatl, and especially Classical Nahuatl after the ascendancy of the Aztec empire, was used as a lingua franca in much of Mesoamerica beginning from the 12th century AD until the 16th century, at which time its prominence and influence were eclipsed by the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
		The Nahuatl languages are related to the other Uto-Aztecan languages spoken by peoples such as the Hopi, Comanche, Paiute and Ute, Pima, Shoshone, Tarahumara, Yaqui, TepehuÃ¡n, Huichol and other peoples of western North America.
		They all belong to the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family which is one of the largest and best studied language families of the Americas consisting of at least 61 individual languages, and spoken from the United States to El Salvador.
	www.goupstate.com /apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=NEWS&template=wiki&text=Nahuatl_language (2722 words)

	Amazon.com: Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations: Books: Joyce ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
		Her basic contention is that ancient Mesoamerican writing was a tool used by an elite minority in their competition for positions of leadership, prestige, territory, tribute, and advantageous marriages.
		Marcus convincingly demonstrates that while it may have been based on actual persons and events, this body of prehistoric writing is a deliberately created tangle of what we could call propaganda, myth, and fact, written for political purposes, and not (as many contemporary scholars have come to believe) reliable "history" in a modern sense.
		In short, she views Mesoamerican writing systems as part propaganda, part myth, and part history; thus, as she states, it was both a tool and a by-product of competition for prestige and leadership positions.
	www.amazon.com /Mesoamerican-Writing-Systems-Propaganda-Civilizations/dp/0691094748 (1172 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
		Five areal traits are shared by nearly all Mesoamerican languages, but not by neighboring languages beyond this area, and these are considered particularly diagnostic of the linguistic area: (1) Nominal possession of the type his-dog the man ‘the man’s dog’, as in Pipil (Uto-Aztecan): ipe:lu ne ta:kat, literally ‘hisdog the man’.
		Northwest Coast languages also have lexically paired singular and plural verb stems (that is, a lexical root may be required with a plural subject which is entirely different from the root used with a singular subject).
		Their presence in Ethiopian Semitic languages (some with all of these, others with somewhat fewer) might seem to reflect several different diffused traits (SOV counted as one, Noun-Postposition as another, and so on), and might be taken as several independent pieces of evidence supporting the existence of the linguistic area.
	www.linguistics.utah.edu /Faculty/campbell/CampbellArealLingEnc.doc (3199 words)

	Mesoamerican Languages Project (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
		The Mesoamerican Languages Project at the Linguistics Research Center began in 1978.
		Several Nahuatl courses were sponsored by the LRC's Mesoamerican Languages Project:
		The Mesoamerican Languages Project came to an end when the Director retired and moved away in 2000.
	www.utexas.edu /cola/depts/lrc/general/meso.html (236 words)

	AMERICAS SOCIETY
		The syllabic chart of the Maya language provided in the book is useful, as it underscores that the Maya had a writing system—a fact that was denied for some time by an influential group of anthropologists.
		Its language illustrates the nature of Spanish-Indigenous relations in ecclesiastical quarters during colonial times: Juan Diego is viewed as a simpleton whose word is suspect by many in low and high positions.
		During the journey we establish a dialogue with the ancient and modern Mesoamerican keepers of the word; we traverse chronological and cultural frontiers; we arrive at the place “where there is no death, where death is overcome,” where our shared humanity is enriched by the magic and the beauty of the Mesoamerican word.
	www.americas-society.org /as/literature/br67changrodriguez.html (1056 words)

	Mesoamerican Voices - Cambridge University Press
		Mesoamerican Voices presents a collection of indigenous-language writings from the colonial period, translated into English.
		It is the first collection to present the translated writings of so many native groups and to address such a variety of topics, including conquest, government, land, household, society, gender, religion, writing, law, crime, and morality.
		Mesoamericans and Spaniards in the sixteenth century; 2.
	www.cambridge.org /catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=052101221X (177 words)

	Numbers in Over 5000 Languages
		Click here to see the entire collection, or click on the map to move to the languages for that area.
		The standard orthography or standard dialect may have changed since my source on a language was published.
		For non-African languages, a macron indicates length and is indicated :.
	www.zompist.com /numbersu.htm (968 words)

	Untitled Document
		Titles pertaining to languages which are not taught regularly by the University, or which are taught only in the Anthropology Department, are acquired primarily through the Linguistics Program.
		Materials on American Indian languages are generally selected by the Anthropology Bibliographer; materials on other languages are generally selected by the Linguistics Bibliographer.
		Languages: English is the major language of the basic collection.
	library.albany.edu /subject/cdp/linguistics.html (480 words)

	Ancient Scripts: Epi-Olmec
		Among one of the most important was the discovery of an inscribed slab found under the waters of the Acula River near the village of La Mojarra in 1986 in the Mexican state of Veracruz.
		Justeson and Kaufman proposed that the language this script recorded was pre-proto-Zoquean, which belongs to a small language family called Mixe-Zoquean.
		Secondly, there are a lot of Mixe-Zoquean loanwords in other Mesoamerican languages, such as pom, or copal incense, a very important component of any ritual (even today), and kakawa, or cacao beans, used for preparing ritual drinks as well as currency.
	www.ancientscripts.com /epiolmec.html (1318 words)

	Mayan Gods and Goddesses - Crystalinks
		In art, he was sometimes depicted as an old man with some reptilian or amphibian features, with fangs and a long nose, sometimes tears coming from his eyes (symbolizing rain) and carrying an axe (which caused thunder).
		While most of the ancient Mesoamerican gods are long forgotten by the descendants of the original inhabitants today, prayers to the Chaacs, most generally as a routine and not in times of drought, are documented in Yucatán as continuing into the 21st century among nominal Christian Maya farmers.
		Like some of the other Mesoamerican deities, the Itzamn·s were associated with the points of the compass and their colours (east, red; north, white; west, fl; and south, yellow).
	www.crystalinks.com /mayangods.html (4879 words)

	A Kemi-Mesoamerican Language
		Because of the fact that the ancient Egyptian culture is generally considered to be much older, than the Mesoamerican cultures that spoke maya or nahuatl, it may be thought that any linguistic correspondence among these languages would mean that maya and nahuatl came from the ancient kemi language.
		These three very obvious facts of linguistic relationships among three languages suggest a development in direction whereby the letter "L" may be considered to be dropped as a natural development of linguistic construction.
		One may visualize these two languages as having been created almost by conscious design, and not simply as a spontaneous practice, either as generative construction of adding the letter "L", or as a degenerative construction of dropping the letter "L".
	www.earthmatrix.com /linguistic/kemi-mesoamerican.htm (1121 words)

	Bibliografia Mesoamericana
		There are no restrictions on language although the literature of Mesoamerican scholarhship has traditionally emphasized Western European languages, especially Spanish, English, German, and French.
		Bibliografia Mesoamericana is a joint project of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., Crystal River, Florida and the Library of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA.
		The compilation of data in Bibliografia Mesoamericana may not be reproduced, resold, or redistributed (in whole or in part) without prior written consent of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., and the Library of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, or its transferee of ownership of licensing authority.
	www.library.upenn.edu /eresources/BibliografiaMesoamericana.html (264 words)

	Anthropological Linguistics Vol. 45, no. 3
		Several languages in at least three different subgroups of Tupí-Guaraní have terms for a widespread nondomesticated species of cacao as well as for domesticated cacao that are superficially similar to reconstructed Mesoamerican terms for domesticated cacao.
		It is shown that the language shift affects the function not only of the shifting language, but also of the target language, as Fulfulde has intruded into more domains of life and functions among the different ethnic groups in the study area.
		While economic, social, political, religious, and contextual factors are identified as some of the causes for the shift, language spread, language endangerment or language decline, additive bilingualism, and code-switching are found to be some of the sociolinguistic implications of the shift.
	www.indiana.edu /~anthling/v45-3.html (736 words)

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