Paleographic trends and linguistic processes in Classic Ch’olti’an:

a spatiotemporal distributional analysis

Nicholas Poole Carter

Research paper in partial fulfillment of the M.A. degree requirements of the Department of

Anthropology, Brown University

Advisor: Stephen D. Houston

Date accepted: 18 December, 2009

Other readers:

Paja Faudree

Thomas Garrison

Background

In a 2000 article, Stephen Houston, John Robertson, and David Stuart demonstrated on

morphological and phonological grounds that the language recorded in most Classic Maya

hieroglyphic inscriptions must belong to the Ch’olan linguistic subfamily of Mayan (Houston et

al. 2000). Specifically, they showed that the Classic Mayan language, which they dubbed

Classic Ch’olti’an, was likely ancestral to two languages frequently grouped together as Eastern

Ch’olan: Colonial Ch’olti’ and modern Ch’orti’. Classic Ch’olti’an functioned as the prestige

language of ancient Maya courts even in regions where local populations spoke different

languages—whether Western Ch’olan or non-Ch’olan Mayan languages. This type of diglossia

finds parallels, for example, in the position of Latin relative to the vernacular languages of

medieval Europe, or of Sumerian relative to Akkadian (and later Akkadian relative to Aramaic)

in the Near East (Houston et al. 2000: 336).

Yet not all hieroglyphic texts were written in Classic Ch’olti’an, nor was Classic Ch’olti’an

itself ever completely standardized across its zone of use. Houston et al. (2000: 334-335) point

out the existence of probable Yucatecan forms like keej for “deer” (instead of Classic Ch’olti’an

chij) at Yulá in northern Yucatan, roughly contemporaneous with Ch’olan lexemes including ti’,

“mouth, edge,” and otoot, “dwelling,” instead of chíi’ and otooch, at the nearby major site of

Chichén Itzá. Alfonso Lacadena and Søren Wichmann (2000: 32) identify the Yucatecan

causative suffix -kun, again at Yulá, and Lacadena (2009) notes that the Yucatecan passivizing

suffix -ab’ appears at Chichén Itzá, with its vowel elided, in the construction joch’b’iiy, “it was

drilled.” Yucatecan grammatical constructions may also appear in inscriptions from Ek’ Balam

and Itzimte (Lacadena 2009) and—intermingled with Ch’olan forms—in the Madrid and

Dresden codices (Lacadena 1997, 2009; Vail et al. 2003: S108; Wald 2004). Tzeltalan and non-

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Ch’olti’an Ch’olan1 grammatical features, most notably positional affixes2, appear in inscriptions

in the western Lowlands during the Late Classic, with some forms subsequently spreading to the

eastern Lowlands (Lacadena and Wichmann 2005; Hruby and Child 2004). Finally, Dmitri

Beliaev (2006, cited in Lacadena 2009) has proposed that a group of polychrome ceramic vessels

from the sites of Nebaj and Chama bear inscriptions in a Highland Mayan language.

From a historical-linguistic perspective, the synchronic, Saussurean langue, in the sense of a

lexicon and body of grammatical rules equally accessible to all its speakers and put into practice

by them in specific instances of parole which do not affect its rules or the meanings of its

lexemes, does not exist, although as an abstraction it is a useful intellectual tool in the pursuit of

certain aims (Vološinov 1986: 65, 98; cf. Saussure 1959: 9-20). The Classic Ch’olti’an of the

inscriptions is a case in point. Highly conservative at many sites in its grammar and phonology,

laden with sacral and political meanings, it certainly constituted an official language, in a

Bourdieuean sense, at each of the sites at which it was used. That is, Classic Ch’olti’an courtly

languages were codes including lexical items and grammatical rules, but also rules for their use

in practice in particular situations associated with the exercise of ritual and political power;

though occasionally incorporating elements of vernacular substrates, these codes were defined to

a large extent by contrast with less prestigious, local languages (Bourdieu 1991: 44-48). Their

acquisition during childhood by a segment of the population, and especially the acquisition of the

1 Robertson questions the categories, employed by epigraphers including Wichmann and Lacadena, of “Eastern Ch’olan” and “Western Ch’olan” for the Ch’olan languages spoken and/or written during the Classic, arguing that the differences between Ch’ol and Acalán Chontal are sufficiently great that grouping them together as “Western Ch’olan” is not useful (Houston et al. 2000). In dealing with the Ch’olan languages this paper will use “Classic Ch’olti’an” or “Classic Mayan,” “Chontal,” and “Ch’ol” in place of the Eastern-Western division. 2 Lacadena and Wichmann (2000: 35-38) point to the use of *-h-…-aj and *-h-…-j-iiy in intransitive positional constructions at Tonina as evidence of a local Tzeltalan vernacular. The present-day distribution of Tzeltalan languages (Tzeltal and Tzotzil) lends support to their argument, but Robertson (personal communication to A. Lacadena, cited in Lacadena 2004: 169) proposes that in at least some Classic texts, such as the Early Classic Hombre de Tikal, *-h-…-aj reflects the grammar of a language immediately ancestral to Classic Ch’olti’an. The question of whether positional suffixation at Tonina indicates Tzeltalan influence or extreme grammatical conservatism thus remains problematic.

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complex writing system used to record them, required a substantial investment of time and

resources and helped to reproduce structures of political and economic inequality from one

generation to the next. Mastery of the linguistic and poetic forms of Classic Ch’olti’an would

have differentiated an educated ruling class from the majority populations of each Lowland

polity, legitimizing their dominant position and fostering translocal cultural solidarity among

elites even at sites bitterly opposed to one another in the geopolitical sphere. Classic Ch’olti’an

thus appears as an ideologically charged language: iconic of noble status and identity, defined in

opposition to the lower-status languages of commoner life, and used exclusively in the surviving

texts to discuss religious matters and the activities of elites (see Irvine and Gal 2000: 37-39).

Given that the Classic inscriptions record elite, official discourse, how can variation in the

orthography and word choice exhibited in those inscriptions be explained? Much previous work

on this kind of variation has rested on one or both of two assumptions. The first is that novel

choices in spelling and grammar at Classic Maya sites corresponded, at least initially, to features

of the vernacular languages spoken at those sites, even if they later became well-established

features of Classic Ch’olti’an. The second is that the selection of one of a set of orthographic or

grammatical alternatives was in part motivated by a desire on the part of the scribes and elites

responsible for the production of a text to establish or express political connections or cultural

identities of which those alternatives were indexical. Thus, Grube (2004), citing Houston et al.

(2000) and Lacadena and Wichmann (2000), posits that Classic-era inconsistencies in the use of

spirant-initial syllabograms across the Maya world likely derived from regional dialects, while

Hruby and Child (2004) suggest a model for the distribution of positional suffixes in the Late and

Terminal Classic in which -wan appeared first in the northwestern Lowlands as a deliberate

index of something like a Chontal ethnic identity, then spread to other sites because of—or as a

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way of strengthening—military and political ties between those sites and centers in the

northwest.

Inextricably related to these issues is the question of how fully spoken language was

represented in Classic and Postclassic writing. Even in the Eastern Lowlands, courtly speech

likely differed in important respects from the languages of quotidian life among Classic Maya

commoners, for example including older lexical forms and grammatical constructions—but was

the script itself perhaps doubly conservative during some periods, preserving spellings which

corresponded to pronunciations no longer in use even in elite speech? To put it another way,

were Classic Maya scribes more concerned with spelling words according to specific

conventions, or with recording sound according to universal rules which dictated new spellings

for new pronunciations? How this question is answered shapes possible interpretations of the

distributional data for glyphic spellings.

For example, Houston et al. (2004: 97) suggest that the transition from disharmonic to

synharmonic spellings near the end of the Classic period (discussed below) may have

corresponded to a shift in a specific dialect zone of Classic Ch’olti’an from a ten-vowel to a five-

vowel system. In this model, spelling changes would have followed close on the heels of a

change in the spoken language, as existing spelling rules were applied to a changing

phonological situation. Lacadena and Wichmann’s (2004) very different interpretation of the

consequences of disharmonic spellings rests even more explicitly on the premise of unchanging

spelling rules applied to shifting phonologies. Yet Houston et al. (2004) raise the alternative

possibility that innovative, synharmonic spellings represent deliberate spelling reform and might

have lagged significantly behind the collapse of vowel complexity in actual speech; the

distribution of synharmonic spellings may in that case have corresponded to networks of political

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connections and communication among scribal schools, rather than to the geographical limits of

a distinctive dialect. Indeed, the examples of other written languages suggest that written forms

often change at a much slower pace than their spoken counterparts, particularly when the written

language is also a prestige language (Houston et al. 2000: 335).

Bourdieu’s (1979) metaphor of cultural capital may prove useful in considering these kinds

of questions. Applied to ancient Maya writing, this model would treat courtly literary practice as

competition by scribal schools, and by scribes within those schools, in a cultural market with

known rules, but also as the constant negotation of the rules of that market. The Maya literary

tradition would thus not be expected to reflect an official, universally shared Classic Mayan

language, but the most presigious literary and linguistic practices of specific courts and scribal

ateliers. The choice of alternatives in orthography and vocabulary would have been in part a

strategic one, with professional scribes producing texts for at least two audiences—fellow scribes

and the broader, literate, probably elite, “public”—on both local and translocal scales. They

would have angled for distinction both by mastering established technical, grammatical,

discursive, and lexical canons and by establishing as prestigious their own innovations to those

canons. At the same time, scribes’ work can by no means have been separable from political and

military competition among the elites they served, nor, perhaps, from local, territorial identities

inclusive of elites and non-elites alike.

Such a model would account both for the general linguistic conservatism of Classic

Ch’olti’an texts and for the appearance and spread of a few innovative forms, but it has the

serious disadvantage that the motivations of long-dead Maya scribes are now quite unknowable.

A search for patterns in the glyphs faces the further problem of distinguishing between sites

where a given form was simply prestigious among the elites irrespective of the presence or

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absence of any similar form in the local vernacular, and sites where a form’s prestige derived in

some way from that vernacular. Nevertheless, the present work aims to detect just such patterns,

with the provision that, should they be found, their causes cannot be assumed a priori. This

study tracks the distribution across time and space of scribal choices with respect to two

questions of orthography (synharmonic as opposed to disharmonic syllabic spellings and the

presence or absence of a distinction between velar and glottal spirants) and two of word choice

(the use of the all-purpose prepositions ta or ti and of the positional constructions *h-…-aj, -l-aj,

-Vl, and -wan-i). A fifth set of alternatives, between three versions of an expression used in

counts of days, is included by way of comparison to the other four.

Prepositions

Most Lowland Mayan languages, including Classic Ch’olti’an, use a single lexeme as a

locative preposition with meanings including “in,” “on,” “at,” “to,” and “from” (e.g. Aulie and

Aulie 2009; Bricker et al. 1998; Ciudad Real 2001; Pérez Gonzalez 1998; Pérez Martinez 1994).

These lexemes typically take the form ti or ta, with some phonological variations depending on

the historical development and phonological rules of each language. Often, but not always, both

versions of the lexeme are present in normal vocabulary, although sometimes one version is

restricted to particular verbal constructions. Yucatec presents a sort of “false positive” for this

pattern: although tí’ and ta both appear in Yucatec, as Wald (2004) points out, only the former is

a single morpheme. Ta must be analyzed as t[i’] [’]a—a contraction of the preposition and the

second person singular ergative pronoun, analogous to tu from ti’ plus the third person ergative

pronoun ’u—and so does not constitute a second preposition in that language.

Ch’ol uses tyi in most circumstances, but tyä in the expressions tyä noj, “on the right,” and tyä

tz’ej, “on the left” (Josserand and Hopkins 1998, cited in Wald 2004: 34). Ta and ti both appear

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in the Ch’orti’ vocabularies compiled by Wisdom (1950) and Hull (2005), and neither researcher

notes a specialized sphere of use for either preposition; Pérez Martinez (1994: 82, 91), on the

other hand, claims that ti is restricted to certain conventional phrases, while novel

constructions—at least in contemporary Ch’orti’—use ta. Morán’s Ch’olti’ vocabulary (Boot

2004: 21) glosses ti as “en,” but another preposition, tama, with the specific meaning “entre” or

“inside of,” may be compounded from ta and another word. As Law (2006) points out, ta as a

preposition was certainly present in Colonial Ch’olti’, although ti was by far more common.

The seventeenth-century Paxbolon-Maldonado manuscript, written in Acalán Chontal, makes

use of both ti and ta, and Smailus (1975) writes that they are fully interchangeable in Acalán.

Yet Macri (1991: 266-268) argues that ta functions in Acalán as the locative preposition, while ti

is a nonlocative preposition and a complementizer—a situation analogous to that of Tzotzil, in

which ta is a preposition and ti a complementizer. Contemporary Chontal lacks a

complementizer and has only one locative preposition, tä (Pérez Gonzalez 1998). Likewise,

Tzeltal uses only the preposition ta. Macri (1991: 268-271) proposes that at least some local

variants of Classic Mayan distinguished, like Colonial Chontal, between a locative preposition ta

and a complementizer and/or nonlocative preposition ti, but the free substitution of the two for

one another in otherwise identical constructions suggests that they had precisely the same

grammatical function in Classic Ch’olti’an (Law 2006: 55-56). Yet a look at their distribution in

time and space suggests that ta and ti were not perfectly interchangeable in Classic texts—not

because they had different grammatical roles, but in the sense that scribes in some times and

places favored one form over, even to the exclusion of, the other. Beyond Macri’s synchronic

consideration of preposition use at 16 Classic Maya sites, the question of preposition distribution

has largely been neglected, an omission which I have attempted to correct. Although some

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inscriptions feature apparent prepositional particles other than ta and ti (e.g., the Cancuen Looted

Panel, which employs an undeciphered sign reminiscent of T260 ’o (Houston 2009)) or use other

lexemes which ordinarily do not function as prepositions in order to indicate position in space

(e.g., tahn, “center,” for “in the middle of”), such cases are few and far between, and I

catalogued only instances of ti and ta (see Figure 1).

Positional suffixes

Like other Mayan languages, Classic Ch’olti’an uses a special class of verbs to describe the

motion or position of bodies in space. These positional verbs take certain affixes, which vary

from one language to another and within a language depending on the tense and transitivity of

the verb. In the Classic and Postclassic inscriptions, several such constructions are spelled with

syllabic and morphosyllabic characters. The Ch’olan transitive positional suffixes -bu and -ba

are attested in the inscriptions, but intransitive constructions are far more common. The oldest of

these involve a T181 -AJ suffix, probably reflecting a CVhC-aj form in which either infixed -h-

is a positional marker and -aj an absolutizing suffix, or *h-…-aj is a single morpheme, originally

an intransitive positional marker but later a passive marker (Robertson 1997, cited in Lacadena

2004: 169). In the late fourth century A.D. a new construction is first attested in the glyphs,

although it was probably innovated in the period before before the Classic inscriptions

(Robertson and Houston 1997, cited in Hruby and Child 2004: 16). This construction is spelled

-la-AJ in the present tense and and -la-ji-ya in the past tense, cueing the forms CVC-l-aj and

CVC-l-aj-iiy, with -l- likely derived from a V1l positional suffix. This -l-aj form appears to have

been the standard intransitive positional suffix at most sites throughout the Classic, although

previous distributional studies have noted exceptions. The first of these is the conservation of

CVhC-aj at Tonina into the Late Classic, a pattern Lacadena and Wichmann (2005: 35-36)

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suggest reveals the influence of a Tzeltalan substrate. The second, discussed in some detail by

Hruby and Child (2004), is the introduction and spread during the Late Classic of an intransitive

positional suffix apparently derived from Chontal: -wa-ni, for present tense CVC-wan-i, and -

wa-ni-ya, for past-tense CVC-wan-[i]-iiy. In these constructions, -wan is the intransitive

positional suffix, while -i may well be a separate morpheme, a single argument predicate marker

also employed throughout the whole history of the script in the third person of root intransitive

verbs in the present tense: tal-i, hul-i, etc. Contemporaneous with -wan, though with a much

more limited range, is another intransitive positional form, spelled -li-ya in the past tense, and

probably representing CVC-[V1]-l-[i]-iiy. Here, the positional component of the construction

remains the old -V1l-, but the single argument predicate marker -i may still be conceptually

present, even if elided in past-tense constructions.

Given the variability of intransitive positional affixes across Mayan languages, a

distributional analysis of their use in the inscriptions might be expected to reveal something

about the vernacular linguistic geography of the Lowlands during the Classic and Postclassic

eras. Yet Hruby and Child (2004) make a persuasive case that, at least at some sites, the choice

of positional suffixes was connected to, if not necessarily dependent on, political connections

with other polities. Complicating the picture is the fact that some inscriptions, for instance the

Cancuen Looted Panel, employ both -wa-ni and -la-AJ spellings with the very same positional

verbs. Too, some verbs—a case in point being k’al, “fasten” or “wrap”—take positional affixes

in certain inscriptions, while in others they behave like nonpositional transitive or intransitive

verbs. A detailed explanation of positional suffix change must take both geography and politics

into account, and consider how both might have shaped a third, less easily accessible factor: the

prestige value of one form compared to the alternatives. My database includes all instances

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known to me of intransitive positional suffixation in both the past and present tenses: CVC-wan-i

or CVC-wan-[i]-iiy, CVC-l-aj or CVC-l-aj-iiy, CV1C-[V1]l-i or CV1C-[V1]-l-i-iiy, and CVhC-aj

or CVhC-[a]j-iiy (Figure 2).

Spirants

Grube (2004) demonstrates the existence of a contrast between a glottal spirant (h in

contemporary epigraphic orthography) and a velar spirant (j) at most Lowland centers during the

Classic era. Each spirant is represented in the inscriptions by a set of consonant-vowel syllabic

signs (see Figure 3), some of which can function as morphosyllables in certain grammatical

situations (e.g. T181 ja/-AJ), and between which distinctions were scrupulously maintained until

the Late Classic. According to Grube (2004: 79), the distinction first begins to weaken at

Naranjo during the thirteenth k’atun of the ninth bak’tun, with the substitution of ji for hi in the

spelling of an ’u-baah-Ø (“it is his image”) expression at Naranjo, and disappears throughout the

eastern Lowlands over the next fifty years. J-initial and h-initial syllabograms begin to substitute

for one another at Copan and in the Usumacinta River Valley—especially at Yaxchilan—during

the fifteenth k’atun, although the contrast is preserved farther to the northwest, at Palenque, for

the duration of the known hieroglyphic record at that site. Likewise, Grube (2004: 80) remarks

that the j/h distinction persists in inscriptions from the Yucatan Peninsula well into the

Postclassic, and that it is represented in some—but not all—sections of the Dresden Codex.

The linguistic parallels to this orthographic phenomenon are interesting, and suggest that the

differential retention of the distinction may have been influenced by local spoken languages,

whether vernacular or elite. Yucatec preserved the j/h contrast well into the nineteenth century,

and it is attested in sixteenth-century dictionaries of Tzotzil and Tzeltal. A good prima facie

case can be made, then, for the idea that the contrast between the two sets of spirant-initial

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syllabic signs persisted in the Yucatan Peninsula because the spoken Classic Ch’olti’an acrolects

of its courts, perhaps influenced by a Yucatec substrate, retained a corresponding phonological

contrast. Its preservation at Palenque, however, is more difficult to explain, since a Ch’ol or

Chontal substrate would be expected for the area. Both of those languages, along with Ch’olti’,

appear to have lost the contrast by Colonial times, nor is it preserved in contemporary Ch’orti’

(Pérez Martinez 1994: 19). Since we cannot prove the presence or absence of the j/h contrast in

the Palencano vernacular, its preservation in texts at Palenque could correspond to its

preservation in the spoken prestige language, but could equally well represent an orthographic

conservatism disconnected from elite pronunciation.

In an attempt to investigate this phenomenon, I have catalogued instances in which the j/h

contrast is observed in phonetic spellings, instances when it is not observed (i.e., in which h-

initial syllabograms are used to spell what would previously have been distinguished as a velar

spirant, or vice versa), and instances in which a spirant known to have been present in early

Classic Ch’olti’an is not spelled at all. Especially when the original spirant was j, this last type

of spelling may reflect the collapse of both spirants into a sound closer to “soft”—and thus more

easily dropped—h than to “hard” j. It is important to note that, while spellings of Classic Mayan

prepositions and positional suffixes are relatively linguistically transparent, one cannot assume a

priori that the spirant contrast existed in the spoken languages even of courts whose scribes

preserved a distinction between the h- and j-series of syllabograms. To a far greater degree than

was true for the two topics previously discussed, then, the data I collected must be interpreted

first and foremost as data about orthography, and only secondarily as data about language.

Vowel complexity

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A general consensus exists among most epigraphers that spoken Classic Ch’olti’an, at least

early in its history, featured both short and complex—that is, long, aspirated, or glottalized

vowels—and that the quality of the central vowels in CVC roots could be indicated in the script

through fully phonetic spellings or optional phonetic complementation with consonant-vowel

syllabograms. Houston et al. (2004) argue that disharmonic spellings, in which the vowel of the

syllabic sign differs from the vowel of the root, are “marked,” indicating that the root vowel is

complex in some way: ba-ki for baak, “bone,” or HU’N-na for hu’n, “paper” (see Figure 4).

Only syllabic signs ending in -a, -i, or -u are attested as phonetic complements in disharmonic

spellings. Synharmonic spellings, in which the unpronounced final vowel echoes the root vowel,

are “unmarked,” default spellings capable of representing either short or complex vowels:

CHAN-na for chan, “sky,” but also TAHN-na or ta-na for tahn, “center,” which is written

synharmonically throughout the whole history of the script. In this model, in other words, all

disharmonic spellings cue complex root vowels, but not all complex root vowels are spelled

disharmonically.

While concurring with Houston et al. that synharmonic spellings cue simple root vowels,

Lacadena and Wichmann argue that preconsonantal h is never represented in the script, either

through disharmonic or synharmonic spellings. Further, they suggest rules by which different

combinations of root vowels with disharmonic, unpronounced vowels represent specific qualities

of the root. These spelling rules3 are derived from reconstructed Classic Mayan forms for a

relatively large number of lexemes, combined with widely attested spellings for those lexemes in

3 As listed in Lacadena and Wichmann (2004), these are: 1. CV1(C)-CV1 → CV1C 2a. CV(C)-Ci → CVVC, where V = a, e, o, or u 2b. Ci(C)-Ca → CiiC 3a. CV(C)-Cu → CV’(V)C, where V = a or i 3b. CV(C)-Ca → CV’(V)C, where V = e, o, or u

Carter 13

the inscriptions. The authors rely on etymological reconstructions by Brown and Wichmann

(2003), according to which proto-Mayan included, not two, but three contrasting vowel lengths:

short, long, and “special” (VS), which last they suggest to have been of intermediate length.

Proto-Mayan consonant-vowel-consonant roots would thus have included the following twelve

forms for each vowel: CVC, CVSC, CVVC, CVhC, CVShC, CVVhC, CV’C, CVS’C, CVV’C,

CV’hC, CVS’hC, and CVV’hC. In the Classic language, VS and VV are proposed to have

collapsed into a single form VV, but since Lacadena and Wichmann argue for a contrast between

V’ and V’V, the number of vowel nuclei in their model of Classic Mayan remains at sixty

(twelve permutations of five vowels).

According to Robertson et al. (2007), many of Brown and Wichmann’s (2003)

reconstructions of proto-Mayan vowel nuclei, and many of Lacadena and Wichmann’s (2004)

reconstructions for Classic Mayan, are unsupported by the etymological data. Rather, Robertson

et al. (2007) favor a much simpler vowel system for Classic Ch’olti’an, in which vowel nuclei

can either be simple (CVC) or exhibit one, and only one, type of complexity: CVVC, CVhC, or

CV’C. The authors reiterate their earlier position (Houston et al. 2004) that “marked,”

disharmonic spellings cue only complex vowels, while “unmarked,” synharmonic spellings can

cue simple or complex vowel nuclei, but refine their model by suggesting certain certain broad

restrictions: first, that roots of the forms CVVC cannot take a -Cu phonetic complement, and

second, that roots of the forms Ce’C, Co’C, and Cu’C cannot take -Ci or -Cu complements. As

in the original proposal, synharmonic spellings can still cue simple or complex vowel nuclei, and

-Ce and -Co syllabograms cannot be used in phonetic complementation.

The present study is based on the premise of the relatively simple “marked” versus

“unmarked” contrast suggested by Houston et al. (2004) and Robertson et al. (2007). Crucially,

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this model allows for a significant disconnection between orthography and speech: synharmonic

complementation can represent complex root vowels, principally aspirated ones, and it is not

possible to deduce what a complex vowel nucleus must have been (as opposed to what it must

not have been) based on whether the disharmonic complement takes the form -Ca, -Ci, or -Cu.

Furthermore, as was true for the question of the spirant contrast, it cannot be assumed a priori

that changes in orthography were the inevitable and rapid consequence of changes in the spoken

language, nor that orthographic stasis can only have resulted from phonological conservatism.

My database catalogues synharmonic and disharmonic spellings, not simple and complex

vowels.

For this category, I collected attestations of lexemes spelled with (1) expected disharmonic

complementation, given linguistic reconstructions of Classic Ch’olti’an vocabulary and the

established scribal practices of the Early Classic; (2) unexpected disharmonic complementation;

and (3) unexpected synharmonic complementation. Included in this last category, irrespective of

the presence of syllabic signs, are instances of logograms which would ordinarily be transcribed

with complex vowels, but which are used in such a way that it is clear that a simple vowel was

intended.

“Days later” expressions

As Marc Zender and Stephen Houston, working independently, have proposed, distance

numbers in Classic inscriptions sometimes include a poorly understood term spelled syllabically

as he, he-na, or he-wa, or else with a still-undeciphered logogram which depicts a deer’s head

with crossed bones over its eye and which may be complemented with either a -na or -wa

syllabogram (Figure 5) (Houston 2009). This expression substitutes for the K’IN logogram and

is exclusively restricted to distance numbers; it never appears as the word for “day” in other

Carter 15

contexts, including in Long Count dates. Nor does the deer’s-head character subsitute for he in

any other context of which I am aware, confirming that it is a logogram rather than a syllabic

sign. Since the logogram does not require complementation at sites where such

complementation is usually present, and since scribes at some sites (e.g. Machaquila) seem to

have preferred a simple syllabic he spelling, it is doubtful whether the addition of -na or -wa

adds any grammatical information to the expression4. Rather, what we seem to have is a choice

between two or three equivalent terms, something like he or hee, heen, and heew, all meaning

“days later.”

Lacadena and Wichmann (2005: 33) collected all attestations known to them of each

spelling, treating the he spelling as an underspelling of heew rather than a separate form. Their

analysis showed a broad distribution for heew throughout the whole Classic period, while heen

was restricted temporally to the Late Classic and spatially mainly to the eastern Lowlands and to

Tonina. They interpret heew as an early Classic Ch’olti’an (that is, Eastern Ch’olan) form whose

early and widespread distribution in the texts derives from that language’s prestigious status, and

heen as a Late Classic innovation in Eastern Ch’olan. Presumably, the closer relationship

between the language of the script and vernacular Eastern Ch’olan would have been responsible

for the new form’s entry into the inscriptions; paradoxically, Lacadena and Wichmann’s model

implies that linguistic conservatism with respect to Classic Ch’olti’an might have been greater in

the west, where a more substantial disconnection between the spoken and written languages was

already long established.

4 Nevertheless, Lacadena and Wichmann (2000) suggest that the initial h of the construction is a separate morpheme, perhaps a cognate of the proto-Ch’olan suffix *-ij “days later.” In that case, -een and -eew (or -e’n and -e’n) might serve to shift the point of reference backwards in time. As they note, however, the sign used in these constructions is consistently he, not je, at a time when the distinction between the velar and glottal spirants was strictly maintained in the script. I use the forms heen and heew here for the sake of simplicity.

Carter 16

The data presented here for “days later” expressions are taken from Lacadena and Wichmann

(2005), although my methodological constraints (see below) excluded some of the spellings they

had collected. As mentioned, it is unclear how he should be read in the context of distance

numbers. Whether they be interpreted as underspellings of heew or as full spellings of a third

lexical alternative, their distribution is nevertheless relevant to this study, and I treated he

spellings as a separate category for purposes of this study.

Methodology

I began my research by constructing a database in FileMaker Pro in which each entry

corresponded to a specific spelling relevant to one of the five topics discussed above. When a

single spelling pertained to more than one paleographic issue—as in cases like BAAH-hi for

baah, with a long vowel and a glottal spirant—it was treated as more than one item in the

database. Different lexemes spelled according to the same convention in a single inscription

each received their own entry, but the same lexeme written according to the same rule multiple

times in one text did not. Each entry included an epigraphic transcription of the spelling in

question and the translated lexeme to which that spelling corresponds. Entries were assigned to

sites, and their textual sources were noted. While it was possible in many cases to identify the

very day on which a given monument was dedicated, I could not assign a precise date to every

monument I examined. In order to balance the need for precision with that for a large data set, I

placed each entry within a one-k’atun period, excluding only those spellings for which a k’atun

could not be established.

I collected more than 1,300 entries according to this method, almost all from the southern,

eastern, and western Lowlands—Dzibanche being the northernmost site for which I collected

data—and of these, about 1,100 could be confidently assigned both dates and readings.

Carter 17

Although I plan to do so at a future stage of my research, I did not collect examples of month

names from the Maya solar calendar, both because their sheer abundance would have taken time

away from the collection of other data and because of the remarkable conservatism with which

they were spelled over time and space. Combining these data with site coordinates provided by

the Electronic Atlas of Ancient Maya Settlement (see Brown and Witschey 2009), I created 24

master shape files in ArcGIS, one for each k’atun between 8.19.0.0.0 and 10.2.0.0.0, containing

the location of each site and all database entries for a given k’atun. Additional shape files

representing each site with a pie chart showing the proportion of each option attested in each

k’atun for each paleographic question drew on the attribute tables of these master files. Using

these shape fields and elevation data provided by Thomas Garrison of Brown University, I was

able to map my data onto the Maya landscape, permitting me both to examine the development

over time of any one orthographic or lexical convention and to look for correlations between

different kinds of scribal choices at single sites.

Results

Prepositions

Examination of the data reveals a clear trend in scribes’ choice of prepositions: ta was the

preferred preposition throughout the Lowlands in the Early Classic, with distribution from

Tonina to Caracol and from Calakmul to Copan. Ti first appears in my data at Tikal, on the

famous Marcador, dating to k’atun 8.19, but its next attestations, at Dzibanche and Caracol, are

not until k’atuns 9.6 and 9.8. Even then, ta continued in use at Caracol and Tikal, as elsewhere

in the Lowlands. Undatable inscriptions from the eighth bak’tun, along with texts securely dated

to before the range of the present study, suggest that a similar pattern obtained in the very Early

Classic. Ti does appear in some of these texts, for example on Tikal Stela 4. Yet ta gives the

Carter 18

strong impression of having been more common, being attested on the Leiden Plaque, a jade celt

in the Dumbarton Oaks collection (see Schele and Miller 1986: 99, Plate 22A), and two celts at

the Museo de Jade Marco Fidel Tristán in Costa Rica (see Mora-Marín 2000, Figures 15 and 16),

among other inscriptions.

Ti achieved sudden, widespread distribution during the eleventh k’atun, featuring in texts

from Yaxchilan, Piedras Negras, and La Corona, and, over the course of the next eight k’atuns,

almost entirely replaced ta at most Maya centers. The switch appears to have been most

complete in the central Petén and the eastern Lowlands. Thus far, for the period between

9.11.0.0.0 and the Classic collapse, I have found no attestations of ta on securely datable

monuments from Calakmul, La Corona, Naranjo, Caracol, Copan, Quirigua, Pusilha,

Machaquila, or the Petexbatun sites of Dos Pilas, Seibal, and Aguateca. Ta appears once at Tikal

during that time: on Stela 5, dedicated in the fifteenth k’atun. Sites along the Usumacinta River

continued to use both prepositions interchangeably throughout the Late Classic, although ti is the

more abundant of the two at Piedras Negras as well as at Yaxchilan and its dependent polities.

The major exceptions to the pattern of preposition replacement are the western sites of

Palenque and Tonina, where ta remained the overwhelmingly preferred preposition for the entire

Classic period. Given that both sites, though located on the periphery of the Maya world,

participated fully in political and cultural interactions with other polities, their conservatism in

this respect calls for an explanation. Without positing that Tzeltalan was necessarily consistently

recorded in the inscriptions of Tonina, or that those inscriptions somehow use a Tzeltalan ta

rather than a Ch’olan one, it is quite possible that the contrast in a local Tzeltalan substrate

between a preposition *ta and a complementizer *ti influenced scribes’ decision to preserve the

older form when writing in Classic Ch’olti’an. While the linguistic picture at Palenque is less

Carter 19

clear, positional suffixation points to Chontal influence on the prestige language there. If Macri

(1991) is correct in her argument that ti functioned as a complementizer in Acalán Chontal, and

if a similar distinction existed between *ta and *ti in a Classic-era form of Chontal spoken in the

Palenque region, that vernacular language could have exerted a similar influence on the

Palencano prestige language as Tzeltalan may have done at Tonina. Although I had many fewer

monuments from Tortuguero at my disposal than from Palenque, this western site—which, as we

will see, may also have had a Chontal-speaking population—had one attestation of ta in k’atun

9.6, two in k’atun 9.12, and, to the best of my knowledge, no instances of ti.

It is more difficult to explain the sudden, widespread use of ti in the rest of the Lowlands. Its

early use on the Tikal Marcador is a point against a Yucatecan origin for the preposition—

although, since it focuses on the entrada of Sihyaj K’ahk’ in A.D. 378, there is no guarantee that

the artists who produced the text were local to Tikal. At least in that text, ta and ti are clearly

interchangeable, since both prepositions are used in identical semantic contexts to introduce

Calendar Round dates (see Figure 6). There is good reason, then, to believe that ta and ti

coexisted in the Ch’olti’an dialects spoken in the central and eastern Lowlands during the Early

Classic, including local courtly languages. Yet it is equally apparent that ta enjoyed the greater

prestige of the two, as measured by the frequency of its use in formal, ritual texts, until the

eleventh k’atun.

Although it may be coincidental, the shift to ti began in earnest during the reign of Yuknoom

Ch’e’n of Calakmul, who came to the throne on 9.10.3.5.10 and ruled into the twelfth k’atun.

Yuknoom Ch’e’n oversaw a major program of construction and monument production at

Calakmul and a campaign of conquest in the Petexbatun region, bringing Dos Pilas under his

control in 9.10.18. In the east, Calakmul dominated the sites of Caracol and Naranjo, wiping out

Carter 20

the ruling dynasty of the latter site after a war between the two centers in 9.12.7. Rulers of the

smaller sites of La Corona, to the west, and Cancuen, to the south, were essentially vassals of

Calakmul (Martin and Grube 2008: 108-109). At La Corona, Dos Pilas, and Caracol, ti replaced

ta during the eleventh and twelfth k’atuns, during Yuknoom Ch’e’n’s rule; while I have so far

found no instances of either preposition datable to that period from Naranjo or Cancuen, Naranjo

apparently began using ti exclusively after 9.13.0.0.0, and Cancuen after 9.18.0.0.0. Yuknoom

Ch’e’n may have visited Piedras Negras in 9.11.9 to coordinate a military campaign with its

ruler, and a king of Yaxchilan, Itzamnaaj Bahlam III—who ruled from 9.12.9.8.1 to

9.15.10.17.14—married a woman of the Calakmul royal house (Martin and Grube 2008: 125-

126, 144). Despite the bitter and long-standing rivalry between the two major polities of the

Usumacinta, then, both sites came under Calakmul’s political influence to some degree during

Yuknoom Ch’e’n’s reign or shortly therafter. Yet Tikal, Calakmul’s arch-rival throughout the

Late Classic, switched to ti in k’atun 9.14, during the rule of one of its own great kings, Jasaw

Chan K’awiil I, who had defeated Calakmul’s armies and captured the effigy of one of its patron

gods on 9.13.3.8.0 (Martin and Grube 2008: 44).

In their present state, my data suggest two linguistic processes at work with respect to Classic

Maya prepositions. Throughout most of the Lowlands, ta and ti coexisted in courtly and

vernacular languages alike, although ta was evidently considered more correct, at least for use in

elite inscriptions, during the Early Classic. The situation was reversed in the Late Classic,

possibly due to the increased cultural prestige of a scribal school or tradition connected to the

Kan dynasty based at Calakmul and, earlier, at Dzibanche (Martin 2005). This tradition’s

influence may have derived from Calakmul’s political and military successes, but it was not

limited to Calakmul’s subject polities or even to sites with which it maintained friendly relations.

Carter 21

At most sites, ti became a marker of formal discourse, but not of Calakmul identity or affiliation.

At Tonina, Palenque, and Tortugero, by contrast, local vernacular languages may have militated

against the adoption of ti as a preposition.

Positional affixes

Hruby and Child (2004) argue that positional affixation in the Lowlands underwent two

asmajor changes during the Classic period: a shift at most sites in the Early Classic from *h-…-aj

in the present tense and *h-…-j-iiy in the past tense5 to -l-aj and -l-aj-iiy, and in the Late Classic

the widespread introduction of the Chontal forms -wan-i and -wan-iiy—which, however, never

replaced -l-aj as completely as -l-aj had replaced the older *h-…-aj construction. My own

results closely conform to theirs, although the earliest example of -l-aj Hruby and Child (2004:

19) mention—a spelling at Tikal dated to 8.18.7.3.0—falls outside of this study’s temporal

range. Two additional examples of -l-aj from k’atun 9.0, a probable PAT-la-AJ spelling on

Calakmul Stela 114 and a damaged but legible CHUM-(mu?)-la-AJ spelling from La Sufricaya

Stela 5, help to fill the lacuna in their distributional analysis between the first Tikal spelling and

two -l-aj constructions from k’atun 9.5 at Yaxchilan and Caracol. The spelling from Calakmul

also indicates that this site was involved in the early stages of the shift.

According to Hruby and Child (2004: 19-20), -l-aj is the earliest intransitive positional

construction attested in the Classic glyphs. I disagree. Taking into account Robertson’s (1997)

account of the process by which *h-…-aj shifted from a role as an intransitive positional marker

to one as a passive marker, and considering two relevant spellings from Tikal—CHUM-AJ on

the “Hombre de Tikal” effigy (8.18.10.8.12) and PAT-AJ on Stela 31 (9.0.0.0.0) (Figure 7)—it

5 For a discussion of -iiy as a deictic marker indicating the past tense (originally completive aspect) of verbs relative to a “shifting now” in Classic Ch’olti’an written discourse, see Robertson et al. (2004).

Carter 22

seems clear that the beginning of the Early Classic actually saw a transition in scribal practice.

Previously, intransitive positional verbs in the present tense had been spelled with a final -AJ,

cueing the *h-…-aj, but the process of its replacement by -la-AJ spellings was already

considerably advanced by k’atun 8.18. As Hruby and Child (2004: 20) point out, the Leiden

Plaque, which dates to k’atun 8.14 and comes from somewhere in the vicinity of Tikal, bears a

clear CHUM-la-AJ construction (Figure 8). The turn-of-the-bak’tun -l-aj spellings from La

Sufricaya and Calakmul lend weight to the suggestion by Hruby and Child (2004: 19-20) that the

new construction first entered the script in the central Lowlands. For the first half of the ninth

bak’tun, -l-aj was virtually the only present-tense intransitive positional suffix written in the

Maya Lowlands.

A second intransitive positional construction, -wan-i, appears first at Tortuguero in k’atuns

9.10 and and 9.11, and subsequently at Palenque in inscriptions from the Cross Group and the

Temple of the Inscriptions, both dedicated in k’atun 9.12. Both sites lie in the historically

Chontal-speaking drainage of the Usumacinta, and there is every reason to believe that -wan-i

entered the prestige languages of those polities from a Chontal vernacular language (Hruby and

Child 2004: 21; Scholes and Roys 1948). Political relationships between the two sites may have

played a role as well, since at least one king of Tortuguero laid claim to the same k’uhul Baakal

ajaw title used by the rulers of Palenque (Martin and Grube 2008: 165). In any case, -wan-i

remained in common use at Palenque through 9.15, although -l-aj was never completely

replaced. The older form features in some of the same inscriptions as -wan-i, and the last

positional construction at Palenque in my data set—a “seating” expression on the Tablet of the

96 Glyphs, from 9.17.13.0.7—reads CHUM-(mu)-la-AJ.

Carter 23

Interestingly, however, the construction chum-wan-i first appears outside of the Chontal

heartland in an accession statement from a twelfth-k’atun stucco text from Structure B-16 at

Caracol (Grube and Martin 2004: II-40). Here, on the far side of the Maya world from the

Usumacinta River drainage, there can be no question of a Chontal substrate influencing elite

scribal practice. The new positional construction must have been introduced, directly or

indirectly, from the Chontal-speaking northwest, but the influence must have been exerted solely

by one literate group on another. For whatever reason, -wan-i, as a form sufficiently prestigious

for use in elite inscriptions, appears to have spread from its region of origin first to the extreme

east and only later to the central Petén and the upper Usumacinta River (cf. Hruby and Child

2004: 21). -Wan-i crops up during k’atun 9.13 at Naranjo (Hruby and Child 2004: 20) and Tikal,

and during 9.14 at Dos Pilas, Yaxchilan, and Copan; it continued in use at the latter two sites

until the sixteenth and nineteenth k’atuns, respectively. Its use in texts at Bonampak in 9.16 can

be explained in terms of that site’s client-patron relationship with Yaxchilan, which may have

sent scribes to subordinate courts; while -wan-i first appears at Quirigua in k’atun 9.17, after the

kingdom had broken away from Copan (Martin and Grube 2008: 205, 218-219), it may have

actually entered Quirigua scribal culture much earlier, either from Copan or some other source.

Both intransitive positional suffixes appear on Copan’s Hieroglyphic Stairway and in an

eighteenth-k’atun panel from Cancuen (Figure 9). Since the latter site was subordinate to

Calakmul throughout its known history, it is surprising that -wan-i is not attested at Calakmul

until 9.19.9.0.0 (Martin and Grube 2008: 109; Hruby and Child 2004: 20). The apparent delay

may simply be due to the poor preservation of most known monumental texts from Calakmul.

As at Palenque, the replacement of -l-aj by -wan-i in the rest of the Lowlands was rarely

total. The older suffix is attested at Pusilha in k’atun 9.10, at Copan and La Corona in 9.11, at

Carter 24

Bonampak in 9.13, at Yaxchilan and Pomona in 9.14, and at Calakmul in 9.15. -L-aj is the only

positional suffix attested at Tikal from the fifteenth through the seventeenth k’atun. At Copan,

by contrast, -wan-i was the preferred form until the collapse of royal authority and the end of

monument production, which may well account for the exclusive use of -wan-i in Colonial

Ch’olti’ and contemporary Ch’orti’ (Hruby and Child 2004: 25).

The major exception to these patterns of positional affix distribution and replacement is

Tonina, where nearly every intransitive positional construction I identified6 took the suffixes -AJ

or -ji-ya, almost certainly cueing *h-…-aj or *h-…-j-iiy. An extreme, idiosyncratic conservatism

might explain the persistence at Tonina of the oldest Ch’olti’an positional suffix attested in the

glyphs, and the continued use of ta through the Late Classic would be consistent with this

possibility. Yet Tonina scribes’ inconsistent adherence to vowel-disharmonic spelling rules

(discussed below), along with the historical linguistic geography of the Maya west, suggests a

more parsimonious explanation: that these spellings represent the influence of a local Tzeltalan

substrate. Like archaic Classic Ch’olti’an, modern Tzeltal forms intransitive positional verbs

with an *h-…-aj affix (Kaufman 1986: 214, cited in Lacadena and Wichmann 2005: 35). The

spelling CHUM-mu-ji-ya is attested on an undated, Late Classic fragment from Pomona, where

the vernacular language was more likely Ch’olan than Tzeltalan; another Pomona monument,

Stela 7, from k’atun 9.16, bears the spelling wa-WA’-ji-ya. Lacadena and Wichmann (2005: 36)

explain the first spelling by reference to political and family connections between the Tonina and

Pomona royal families, a hypothesis which could apply equally well to the second.

6 The sole exception in my data thus far, a stucco-covered throne dating to sometime in the late eighth century, bears a CHUM-(mu)-(la)-AJ spelling. The reference is to the accession of Tonina’s Ruler 8, but his accession date and the k’atun in which the throne was dedicated remain unknown (Martin and Grube 2008: 188; Stuart 1998: 381; Wagner 2000: 30).

Carter 25

Their explanation for the seemingly anomalous *h-…-aj constructions at Pomona may be

correct, but such constructions are by no means confined to the Tzeltalan linguistic zone or to

sites with close political relationships with Tonina. My research revealed other examples dating

to long after the introduction of -l-aj, including an i-PAT-ji-ya spelling at Piedras Negras in

k’atun 9.4; a CHUM-(mu)-ji-ya spelling from Caracol in 9.8; a CHUM-(mu)-AJ-ya

construction from the same site in 9.10; the spellings WA’-ji-ya (attested twice), WA’-AJ-ya,

and WA’-ji, all from Palenque in k’atun 9.12; WA’-ji-ji-ya, on Palenque’s fifteenth-k’atun

Temple XIX bench panel; and a WA’-AJ-ji-ya construction at Yaxchilan in 9.17. Despite their

wide geographic distribution, two common factors connect this set of spellings. The first is that

most of them involve one of two verbs: chum, “to sit,” or wa’, “to stand up.” While it is true that

not all verbs that sometimes receive positional affixation are always treated as positionals in the

Classic corpus, wa’ is construed positionally with such remarkable consistency7 using the more

usual -l-aj or -wan-i that one must suspect the presence of either the archaic or the Tzeltalan

intransitive positional *h-…-aj in the aforementioned cases, rather than a phonologically

identical Classic Ch’olti’an passive construction.

The second common thread is that most or all of the *h-…-aj forms I have found outside of

Tonina are in the past tense8. Similarly, the rare positional suffix -[V]l—a relic of Common

Mayan from which the -l- in -l-aj derives (Hruby and Child 2004: 16)—is attested at Palenque in

the twelfth and fourteenth k’atuns, but only in the past tense: ha-ma-li-ya on the Palace Tablet,

from 9.14, and CHUM-(mu)-li-ya in the long text from the Temple of the Inscriptions (Figure

7 E.g. wa-WA’-la-AJ on Copan Stela 9, from k’atun 9.6; WA’-la-AJ on Pusilha Stela D and u-WA’-la-AJ on Tortuguero Monument 1, both from k’atun 9.10; wa-WA’-wa-ni on the bench panel from Temple XXI at Palenque, from k’atun 9.15; WA’-la-AJ on Yaxchilan Stela 11, from k’atun 9.16; and WA’-la-AJ on Quirigua Stela K, from k’atun 9.18. 8 The spelling WA’-ji on the west sanctuary jamb of the Temple of the Foliated Cross, dedicated at Palenque near the end of the twelfth k’atun, could be interpreted as an underspelling for wa-h-’-aj-iiy or, less plausibly in my view, as present tense wa-h-’-aj.

Carter 26

10). Another instance of the same suffix, this time in pat-l-iiy, appears on an undated inscription

from Tikal (Schele and Mathews 1998: 80). At the same time, the past-tense forms -l-aj-iiy and -

wan-iiy are widely attested during the Classic era, including at Copan, Dzibanche, Palenque,

Quirigua, Tikal, Tortuguero, and Yaxchilan.

These data suggest either that the ancient Ch’olti’an *h-…-aj intransitive positional affix was

never completely replaced by -l-aj (cf. Hruby and Child 2004) in some past-tense constructions,

or else that the paleographically indistinguishable Tzeltalan affix entered the courtly languages

of numerous Ch’olti’an-speaking polities throughout the Lowlands, where it was employed

exclusively in past-tense constructions. Given the antiquity of some of these spellings and the

difficulty of explaining how a single Tzeltalan form became so widely distributed across the

Ch’olan language zone before it was even recorded at Tonina, I prefer the former possibility.

Furthermore, some positional verbs—chum and wa’—were more likely than others to take *h-

…-aj affixation. While the parallels are not exact, this kind of irregular replacement of older

grammatical morphemes by newer ones is familiar from English (e.g., he gave it, he had given it

vs. he closed it, he had closed it). Perhaps especially in formal, public inscriptions, one would

expect to see some degree of tension between linguistic conservatism and innovation, with

different scribal workshops, and even individual scribes, regarding one or another positional

construction as more correct or prestigious than the alternatives. Nor is it surprising that the

“marked,” past tense should exhibit greater variation in this respect than the default, “unmarked,”

present. For most Maya sites, then, the persistence of intransitive positional *h-…-aj appears as

a local linguistic procss rather than an introduction from the west.

While the distinctive positional affixes employed at Tonina and at Tortuguero and Palenque

originated in local languages ancestral to Tzeltal and Chontal, respectively, their entry into the

Carter 27

written languages of those sites was probably not a “natural,” unconsidered process. Rather, as

Hruby and Child (2004) suggest for the case of Palenque, the choice to introduce these

vernacular forms to the courtly prestige languages, and then to record them on stone monuments,

points to the deliberate construction of local political and cultural identities. Hruby and Child

(2004: 22-25) propose that the spread of -wan-i to the upper Usumacinta River region, Copan,

and Tikal, was connected to a period of political turmoil and military conflict, and that rulers at

distant sites commissioned monuments employing that suffix in order to strengthen political ties

with the Chontal-speaking kingdoms of the northwest. While these kinds of political

connections may well have been involved in the adoption of -wan-i, a purely geopolitical model

for its spread ignores the potential role of the internal dynamics of a Classic Maya intellectual

class. Further distributional analyses of orthography and of artistic themes and styles may shed

some light on these processes.

Spirants

When I began collecting data about spirant representation in Classic texts, I had hypothesized

that there would have been a connection between the spelling of word-final spirants and the

preservation or loss of the distinction between j and h. My results, however, showed that the

correlation is far from exact. The text on a lidded vessel from Tikal, dated to k’atun 8.19,

includes a possessed form of the aj k’uhuun courtly title (see Jackson and Stuart 2001); although

the agentive pronoun aj ends with the “harder,” velar spirant and is ordinarily written with one of

two AJ logograms, the possessed y-aj k’uhuun is here spelled ya-K’UH-na (Figure 11). This

construction is probably best interpreted as an underspelling with no special implications for

phonology at Early Classic Tikal.

Carter 28

In some texts, however, omitted final spirants could be explained in terms of the j/h collapse.

A common example is the spelling ba for baah, attested on Nim Li Punit Stela 15, from k’atun

9.10; on Tonina Monument 154, from k’atun 9.13; on Copan Stela N, from k’atun 9.16; and in

several Late Classic inscriptions from Naranjo and Yaxchilan (see Figure 13). Yaxchilan’s Late

Classic texts are notable for the substitution of a for AJ even in non-possessed instances of the aj

agentive marker (see Figure 14). This orthographic practice appears from my data to have been

specific to Late Classic Yaxchilan and its affilated polities, and in those cases probably

constitutes one aspect of the j/h collapse in the upper Usumacinta.

While my results agreed to a considerable extent with Grube’s (2004) distributional study of

spirant collapse in the Maya Lowlands, there were some points of divergence. According to

Grube (2004: 79), “[t]he earliest evidence for the loss of the distinction is from Belize and the

eastern Peten and dates to 9.14.0.0.0-9.15.0.0.0,” but a tenth-k’atun ba-ji spelling from Pusilha

(Figure 15) indicates that the process was already underway in the southeast by the early Late

Classic. Several BAAJ-ji spellings from Copan—on Stela P, dedicated on 9.9.10.0.0 by K’ahk’

’U Ti’ Chan Yopaat, and on Stelae E and 10, erected by his heir K’ahk’ ’U Ti’ Witz’ K’awiil in

the next two k’atuns—push back the earliest date for the spirant collapse and seem to confirm a

key role for the Maya south in this orthographic, if not phonological, innovation.

In other respects, my distributional analysis closely matches Grube’s model. I found

instances in which the j/h distinction had been abandoned at Yaxchilan in the fourteenth through

eighteenth k’atuns, and at Yaxchilan’s junior ally, Bonampak, in 9.13. In the east, BAAJ-ji and

ba-ji spellings at Naranjo date to k’atuns 9.13 and 9.19, respectively; Caracol scribes appear to

have adopted the new spelling rules only in the Terminal Classic, with ch’a-ha and BAAJ-ji

spellings on Altar 12 (Figure 16). That the velar and glottal spirants seem from my data to fuse

Carter 29

in Quirigua’s inscriptions only in the Terminal Classic—k’atuns 9.17 and 9.18—may simply be

an artifact of that site’s long subordination to Copan. Two of the Quirigua monuments for which

the collapse is attested, Altar O’ and Stela E, were commissioned late in the reign of the king

who had rebelled against Copan and won his site’s independence; the third, Zoomorph P, dates

to the reign of his successor.

The few differences between Grube’s (2004) data set and my own may have significant

implications for Classic Ch’olti’an linguistic history. With the addition of early spellings in

which the spirant distinction was abandoned at Pusilha and especially at Copan, the “general

east-west direction of the collapse” Grube (2004: 79) discusses begins to look more like a spread

northwards from the south. If scribes at Copan—the first site at which the j/h distinction begins

to blur—were responsible for the innovation in spelling, the Copan kingdom’s cultural prestige

could have provided the impetus for its adoption by other sites nearby. Pusilha, the next site at

which the collapse is attested, was strongly influenced by Copan during the Late Classic,

although it may have maintained its territorial independence (Braswell et al. 2004: 228-232).

It is important to stress that the innnovation was purely orthographic, not phonemic: lexemes

including baah (“image, person”), ch’ahoom (a ritual title), ch’aaj (“droplets”), and taaj

(“obsidian”) continued to be spelled according to the old rules in some texts from Copan and

Quirigua, as well as at Yaxchilan and other kingdoms, until their collapse at the end of the

Terminal Classic. Unless we are to posit that the scribes responsible for those spellings spoke

and wrote in a different dialect of Classic Ch’olti’an than their colleagues—who, in some cases,

worked on the very same monuments—we can only conclude that the loss of the spirant

distinction had already occurred in the spoken, courtly languages of those sites where the

spelling change appears, and that variable spellings represent divergent scribal practices.

Carter 30

As Grube (2004: 79) notes, the j/h distinction was consistently preserved at Palenque for the

entire Classic period. My data from Tonina and Tortuguero indicate that this conservatism was

general to the northwest. Interestingly, I also found no instances in which the spirant distinction

had been ignored at Piedras Negras. This pattern may reflect influence from Palenque or other

northwestern sites, but enmity between Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan could also have been a

factor. Whether scribes at either site considered their adoption or rejection of the spirant collapse

a sign of local identity in contrast to their counterparts up- or downriver is unknowable, but with

the northern border of the Yaxchilan polity heavily militarized (see Golden and Scherer 2006),

there was probably little direct communication between them.

Throughout most of the Lowlands, then, decisions about whether to observe the division

between j- and h-initial syllabograms seem to have been made by individual scribes on the basis

of the perceived prestige of either option. When the orthographic shift occurred, it was in a

linguistic environment in which the phonemic distinction between velar and glottal spirants no

longer obtained. Resistance to the change at some sites may have been motivated by local

language ideologies in which linguistic and literary practices were seen as indices of political or

cultural identity. In the Yucatan Peninsula, the continued phonemic relevance of the j/h

distinction in Yucatec probably kept it alive even in Ch’olti’an courtly dialects, although some

passages in the Dresden Codex ignore it (Grube 2004: 80-81). Finally, in the far west, local

languages had never been Ch’olti’an, and the languages of the royal courts may simply have

been little influenced by developments in the vernacular Ch’olti’an dialects to the east.

Vowel harmony

Houston et al. (2004: 97) note that instances of innovatively synharmonic spellings are

confined to the Late and Terminal Classic, when they are attested mainly “in Copan or on the

Carter 31

western flanks of the Maya mountains, with extensions into the Pasión River drainage.” My

results largely confirm this observation. Houston et al. (2004: 97) suggest two possible

explanations for the geographical distribution of synharmony. The first is that the orthographic

change was roughly contemporaneous with a change in the pronunciation of Classic Ch’olti’an,

and that the area where that change is attested corresponds to an ancient dialect zone in which

vowel complexity ceased to be phonemic near the end of the Classic period. The second

possibility is that the orthographic innovation represents a deliberate reform of the script,

intended to make the written language more closely correspond to a spoken language which may

have long since ceased to distinguish between simple and compelx vowels. On balance, my data

seem to correspond better to the spelling-reform model.

By far the earliest instance of innovative synharmony in my database is a CH’EN-ne spelling

for “cave” on Copan Stela 12 (Figure 17), which dates to the beginning of the eleventh k’atun.

Synharmonic spellings continued to be carved at Copan throughout the Late Classic, although

disharmony was never totally abandoned: Stela 11, dated to k’atun 9.19, bears disharmonic

spellings including ta-ji taaj, “obsidian,” and AAT-ti aat, “penis” (Figure 18). By that time, of

course, vowel complexity was probably absent from spoken Classic Ch’olti’an roots at Copan, as

it is today from Ch’orti’. Outside of Copan, synharmonic spellings of previously

disharmonically spelled words are attested at Nim Li Punit in k’atun 9.14; Quirigua in k’atuns

9.17; Naranjo in 9.18 and 9.19; Machaquila in 9.15, 9.19 and 10.0; Caracol in 9.18, 9.19, and

10.1; and Seibal in 10.1. Although not included in my final data set, several painted texts from

Naj Tunich—a pilgrimage destination for elites from sites throughout the Maya Mountains,

including Caracol—include innovatively synharmonic spellings, including ya-xu-nu instead of

ya-xu-na for “cotinga” and ba-ka instead of ba-ki for “captive” (see Stone 1995).

Carter 32

Another interesting and anomalous spelling (Figure 19) comes from Tonina Monument 161,

dated to the fourteenth k’atun. The construction is PAT-ta-AJ, which it is clear from the context

must read pa-h-t-aj, “it is made or shaped.” The verbal root, pat, apparently had a short vowel

throughout the whole history of Classic Ch’olti’an, and so the phonetic complement ta is not

unexpected in the same way as innovatively synharmonic complements elsewhere. However,

this spelling uses, not the ordinary PAT logogram, but another sign depicting a hunched human

figure. This sign would normally be read PAAT, “back” or “burden,” but its interchangeability

with PAT indidcates that it must have been read with a short vowel in this instance. Despite this

evidence for some instability in vowel complexity at Late Classic Tonina, there are probably two

different orthographic phenomena at work here: in the southeast, a widespread and long-lasting

pattern of synharmonic complementation, and at outlying Tonina, an isolated instance of one

logogram substituting for another.

It may be significant that Copan Stela 12 forms part of an axis of three astronomically-

oriented monuments—the other two being Stelae 2 and 10—planted by K’ahk’ ’U Ti’ Witz’

K’awiil in celebration of the 9.11.0.0.0 period ending (Willson 1916, cited in Morley 1920;

Carter 2009). As observed above, Stela 10 bears one of the earliest examples of a j-initial

syllabogram replacing an h-initial one, although the very earliest example dates to the reign of

the previous ruler. It thus appears on present evidence that, like the abandonment of the spirant

distinction, innovative synharmony got its start at Copan around the middle of the ninth bak’tun

as part of a deliberate spelling reform initiated by scribes working at the courts of K’ahk’ ’U Ti’

Chan Yopaat and K’ahk’ ’U Ti’ Witz’ K’awiil. The distributional overlap between innovatively

synharmonic spellings and attestations of the spirant collapse is remarkable, suggesting that here

again, the distinction of Copan’s literary tradition—made possible by the military, political, and

Carter 33

economic power of its ruling dynasty—made the synharmonic innovation an attractive,

prestigious practice for scribes throughout the southern and eastern Lowlands, at sites both with

and without strong, historical, political connections to Copan.

At the same time, the inconsistency with which the new spellings occur even at Copan

suggests that many scribes continued to regard the older rules as more prestigious, and that the

reforms were neither mandated nor interdicted by its kings. A further implication is that the

innovative spellings did not result from consistent rules being used record to language change in

“real time.” While the shift away from vowel complexity must already have occurred in areas

where innovative synharmony fit well enough with local variants of Classic Ch’olti’an to be

adopted, the absence of such spellings in a given time or place does not necessarily prove the

persistence of the older vowel system in the spoken, courtly language. What the glyphic record

shows, then, looks less like a dialect region than a zone of Copanec cultural influence.

Correlations with “days later” expressions

Although an eroded compound on Piedras Negras Stela 25, dated to 9.8.15.0.0, may read he-

na, the first secure instances of heen appear at La Corona and Copan9 in k’atun 9.11, followed by

attestations at Tonina in k’atun 9.12, at Copan again in 9.13, and at Sacul in 9.16. Other possible

and confirmed he-na spellings are attested at Copan, Coba, and Aguateca, but are undated.

Three datable he spellings with no final consonant appear at Yaxchilan in k’atun 9.16 and at

Machaquila in k’atuns 9.19 and 10.0, and additional, undated examples are known from

Machaquila and Pusilha (Lacadena and Wichmann 2005: 41).

Many more “days later” expressions are spelled syllabically as he-wa or use the deer’s-head

logogram with a -wa phonetic complement. They appear at sites throughout the entire Maya

9 The text in question is Copan Stela 10, which Lacadena and Wichmann (2000: 41) date to 9.12.0.0.0. However, the latest date mentioned in the text is 9.11.0.0.0 12 Ajaw 8 Kej.

Carter 34

region, east and west, and over the entire Classic period. Nor does their distribution appear to

have been affected by intersite rivalries, since Tikal, Calakmul, and the Petexbatun polities,

Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras, and (after the rebellion of K’ahk’ Tiliw Chan Yopaat) Quirigua

and Copan all employ these spellings.

On the whole, the evidence for spatiotemporal trends in the distribution of alternate spellings

for a “days later” lexeme is less clear than that for some of the patterns considered above. It is

not possible, for example, to speak of one version having replaced the other at sites where both

heen and heew are attested: at Copan and Tonina, the two versions were roughly

contemporaneous, while instances of this lexeme from Piedras Negras are widely separated in

time (and, in the case of the possible he-na on Stela 25, too badly damaged to be clearly legible).

Nevertheless, as Lacadena and Wichmann (2005: 33) note, most he-na spellings come from the

eastern Maya region, as far south as Copan and as far north as Coba. Although they are best

attested at Copan and in the southeast, there are not enough well-dated examples of heen to

suggest when and where it was introduced to written Classic Ch’olti’an. La Corona has the

earliest securely dated and fully legible examples, but considering its subordinate status relative

to Calakmul, it would be surprising were the La Corona court to have been a center of scribal

innovation. Nor are the possible political and cultural connections among La Corona, Tonina,

Cobá, and the southeastern polities at all clear.

Nevertheless, a few tentative suggestions about the innovative he-na construction may be

appropriate here. First, although Lacadena and Wichmann (2005: 33) propose that its

distribution records “a language change starting to happen in Eastern Ch’olan,” we lack

sufficient evidence that the change was universal in the eastern Lowlands or that it was complete

in the regions where it did occur. Second, the examples of the other four orthographic trends

Carter 35

considered in this study make the entire notion of language changes’ having been quickly and

transparently recorded in the script problematic. Aside from a model in which spoken heen and

written he-na entered Classic Ch’olti’an together, one could propose at least two other scenarios:

one in which heen appeared in Classic Ch’olti’an first, possibly confined to less formal registers,

while he-wa remained the “correct” written form at most sites until much later in the script’s

history; and another in which the written form itself was the vector by which spoken heen

entered the prestige languages of far-flung sites where it had not previously been part of either

courtly or vernacular speech.

Given the spatiotemporal distribution of he-wa and he-na, it is possible that the latter

spelling was first introduced at least to the written language of Copan in the climate of scribal

innovation that produced changes to the representation of vowels and spirants. Yet the

appearance of he-na at sites like La Corona and Tonina, which did not adopt either of the other

novel spelling patterns, complicates this picture. So does the use of he at Pusilha and

Machaquila, which were suggested above to have participated in a regional scribal culture

heavily influenced by Copan. At present, the question is simply not answerable, but future

discoveries may help establish whether heen percolated up into the script at multiple sites or

spread through networks of scribal influence.

Conclusions and future research

This study has demonstrated that definite, detectable patterns exist in the spatiotemporal

distribution of alternative orthographic and linguistic forms in Classic Maya inscriptions for all

four of the paleographic topics I investigated. Furthermore, plausible explanations can be

offered for each of these patterns in terms of historical and linguistic-anthropological processes.

At Palenque, Tonina, and perhaps Tortuguero, local Chontal and Tzeltalan substrates may have

Carter 36

influenced scribes’ rejection of the preposition ti in favor of an older form, ta. A Chontal

vernacular language incontrovertibly contributed the intransitive positional suffix -wan-i to the

written language of the Palenque court. Tzeltalan influence at Tonina is also clear in the

prevalence of *h-…-aj intransitive positional constructions in that site’s inscriptions, although it

remains an open question whether spellings of the form CVC-AJ and CVC-ji-ya in Tonina texts

record a specifically Tzeltalan *h-…-aj form or the identical, ancient Classic Ch’olti’an

construction. The fact that this archaic form persisted across the Maya world and throughout the

Late Classic, but primarily in the past tense, presents an interesting case of greater linguistic

conservatism in a marked category than in an unmarked one.

The prestige of some courtly, scribal cultures apparently acted as a driving force behind the

spread of certain linguistic and orthographic innovations in written Classic Ch’olti’an. Although

-wan-i first appeared at Tortuguero, economic ties between Palenque and sites along the

Usumacinta and Pasión Rivers have been proposed to have contributed to its spread (Hruby and

Child 2004). An early example of -wan-i at Caracol, however, seems to hint at other avenues of

influence—networks of communication among members of a literate and literary class, shaped

by but not identical to structures of economic and political power. Scribes from Palenque, a

regionally dominant kingdom whose incised limestone texts testify to an unsurpassed

calligraphic tradition, seem to have powerfully shaped the Maya cultural marketplace.

Another major source of scribal innovation may have been Calakmul, a possible locus of

production for a tradition of “codex-style” ceramics painted with texts and figural scenes, the

finest examples of which rival anything at Palenque (Delvendahl n.d.; see also Martin 1997).

While its own monumental texts are by and large in poor condition, Calakmul’s “golden age” of

geopolitical influence under Yuknoom Ch’e’n and (until the latter’s defeat and capture by Tikal)

Carter 37

his heir Yuknoom Yich’aak K’ahk’ coincides with the rapid adoption of the preposition ti across

the entire Ch’olti’an-speaking Lowland region. Copan presents a much clearer case of a Maya

state’s power coinciding with the linguistic influence of its scribes: novel spellings of spirants

and root vowels first appeared at Copan during the middle of the ninth bak’tun, then spread to

sites, like Pusilha and Nim Li Punit, under Copan’s political influence, before diffusing

throughout the southeastern Lowlands and the rest of the Maya world. At some sites, adoption

or rejection of these innovations may have been integrated into local language ideologies,

distinguishing polities from their rivals and contributing to the construction of local identities.

The Copanec spelling reforms illustrate still another historical-linguistic process in Classic

Ch’olti’an: the decoupling of the spoken from the written language. The inconsistency with

which the new spellings were applied at the sites which adopted them proves that, while Maya

scribes actively thought about the rules according to which their writing system represented

sound, and while some scribes did seek to adjust spelling conventions to accommodate

phonological changes in spoken Classic Ch’olti’an, most scribes, in most times and places,

thought primarily in terms of rules for spelling particular words, not rules for recording actual

speech. Such disconnection between writing and speech finds parallels in other languages,

including English, whose standard orthographies are veritable museums of phonological change

and scribal tinkering. Indeed, like written English, hieroglyphic Classic Ch’olti’an is best

understood as a “partially independent system” (see Barron 1985: 372), not completely

separable from the spoken language, but influenced in its orthography and structural conventions

by concerns other than the presentation of phonetic or phonemic information.

Each of the foregoing paleographic analyses could benefit from an expanded data set.

Inscriptions from smaller, less well-documented sites could shed further light on regional trends

Carter 38

in and geopolitical influences on the development of the Classic script. The detection of real and

sometimes surprising patterns in the data considered thus far suggests that distributional analyses

of inscriptions from the northern, Yucatecan-speaking Yucatán Peninsula will prove equally

informative. Maya paleographic studies could benefit from distributional analyses of other

topics, among them the innovative use of existing logograms as syllabic signs, the choice of

alternate signs with identical phonetic or logographic values, and the distribution of k(’)- initial

versus ch(’)- initial syllabograms in spellings of lexemes for which a k(’) to ch(’) sound change

has been reconstructed in the Ch’olan languages. Lacadena and Wichmann’s (2005) discussion

of “days later” expressions and spellings of the names for the months Wo and Sip in Classic

inscriptions, along with Doyle’s (2009) analysis of stylistic variation in glyphs for day-names in

the tzolk’in calendar, point to the potential this kind of study has to improve our understanding of

the Classic hieroglyphs as a living script, and of Classic Ch’olti’an as a living language.

Carter 39

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Figure 1. Syllabic glyphs representing the prepositions ta and ti. (a), (b), and (c): ta; (d) and

(e): ti.

(a) (b) (c)

(d) (e) (f) (g) Figure 2. Examples of the Ch’olti’an intransitive positional constructions attested in the Classic

texts. (a) i-CHUM-AJ, i chu-h-m-aj, “and then he sits;” (b) WA’-ji-ya, wa-h-’-[a]j-iiy, “it

stands up;” (c) CHUM-(mu)-la-AJ, chum-l-aj, “he sits;” (d) CHUM-(mu)-la-ji-ya, chum-l-aj-

iiy, “he sat;” (e) CHUM-(mu)-wa-ni, chum-wan-i, “he sits;” (f) CHUM-(mu)-wa-ni-ya, chum-

wan-[i]-iiy, “he sat;” (g), CHUM-(mu)-li-ya, chum-l-iiy, “he sat.”

Carter 40

ha he hi ho hu

ja je ji ji jo ju

Figure 3. Examples of the glottal- and velar-spirant-initial syllabograms in written Classic

Ch’olti’an.

(a) (b)

Figure 4. Examples of vowel synharmony and disharmony: (a) disharmonic K’AWIIL-la; (b)

synharmonic ITZAMNAAJ?-K’AWIL-li.

Carter 41

(a) (b) (c) Figure 5. Examples of the “days later” expression: (a) 5-he-wa-20-ji-ya and (b) 18-?-wa, both

from Palenque’s Palace Tablet; (c) 19-he-na, from La Corona Panel 4.

(a) (b)

Figure 6. Prepositions used in identical semantic contexts in the inscription on the Tikal

Marcador: (a) ta-11-AJAW and (b) ti-10-AJAW.

(a) (b) Figure 7. Early CV-h-C-aj constructions from Tikal: (a) i-CHUM-AJ, i-chu-h-m-aj, “and then

he sits,” from the Hombre de Tikal; (b) PAT-AJ, pa-h-t-aj, “it is fashioned,” from Tikal Stela

31.

Carter 42

Figure 8. The construction CHUM-la-AJ, chum-l-aj, “he sits,” from the inscription on the

Leiden Plaque.

(a) (b) Figure 9. Different positional suffixes on the same verb, chum, “to sit,” in the inscription on

Cancuen Panel 1: (a) CHUM-(mu)-la-AJ, chum-l-aj, “he sits;” (b) CHUM-(mu)-wa-ni, chum-

wan-i, “he sits.”

Carter 43

(a) (b) (c)

(d) (e) Figure 10. Late Classic examples of the archaic Classic Ch’olti’an intransitive positional

construction CV-h-C-aj: (a) i-PAT-ji-ya, i pa-h-t-[a]j-iiy, “and then it was fashioned,” from

Piedras Negras Lintel 10; (b) CHUM-(mu)-AJ-ya, chu-h-m-[a]j-iiy, “he sat,” from Caracol

Altar 21; (c) WA’-ji-ya, wa-h-’-[a]j-iiy, “it stood up,” from the main panel of the Temple of the

Sun at Palenque; (d) WA’-ji-ji-ya, wa-h-’-[a]j-iiy, “it stood up,” from the inscribed bench at

Palenque Temple XIX; (e) WA’-AJ-ji-ya, wa-h-’-[a]j-iiy, “it stood up,” from Yaxchilan Lintel

30.

(a) (b) Figure 11. The archaic intransitive positional construction CVC-[V]l-iiy in inscriptions from

Palenque: (a) ha-ma-li-ya, ham-l-iiy, from the Palace Tablet; (b) CHUM-(mu)-li-ya, chum-l-iiy,

from the Temple of the Inscriptions.

Carter 44

Figure 12. The spelling ya-K’UH-na for y-aj k’uhuun, “his aj k’uhuun,” on an Early Classic

lidded vessel from Tikal.

(a) (b) (c)

Figure 13. The spelling ba for baah, “image, person, head, first,” in (a) 18-u-ba, waxaklajuun u

baah, “eighteen are his heads/images,” from Nim Li Punit Stela 15; (b) ba-to-k’a, baah took’,

“first flint,” from Tonina Monument 154; and (c) 18-u-ba, waxaklajuun u baah, “eighteen are

his heads/images,” from Naranjo Stela 32.

Figure 14. An underspelling of the agentive pronoun aj on Yaxchilan Lintel 46: a-K’AN-na u-

si-ja, aj k’an usiij, “He of Yellow Vulture.”

Carter 45

(a) (b) (c) (d)

Figure 15. Early examples of the spirant reform in Classic Ch’olti’an orthography: (a) ba-ji,

baaj, “image, person, head, first,” from Pusilha Stela D; (b) u-BAAJ-ji-CH’AB, u baaj u ch’ab,

“he is the offspring of [his father],” from Copan Stela P; (c) tu-BAAJ-ji, t-u baah, “to his

head/person,” from Copan Stela E; (d) u-BAAJ-ji-u-CH’AB, u baaj u ch’ab, “he is the

offspring of [his father],” from Copan Stela 10.

(a) (b)

Figure 16. Late examples of reformed orthography at Caracol: (a) ch’a-ha, ch’ah, “drops,” and

(b) u-BAAJ-ji, u baaj, “it is the image of,” from Caracol Altar 12.

Figure 17. An early example of vowel harmony reform at Copan: CH’EN-ne, ch’en, “cave,”

from Copan Stela 12.

Carter 46

(a) (b)

Figure 18. Late vowel-disharmonic spellings on Copan Stela 11: (a) ta-ji, taaj, “obsidian;” (b)

CHAN-na-YOPAAT-AAT-ti, chan yop aat, “Sky Leaf Penis” (part of a royal name).

(a) (b) Figure 19. The innovative use of the PAAT “back, burden, tribute” logogram for PAT, “to

fashion,” in a text from Tonina: (a) PAT-ta-AJ, pa-h-t-aj, “it is fashioned,” from Tonina

Monument 161; (b) PAT-wa-ni, pat-wan-i, “it is fashioned,” from Cancuen Panel 1.

Carter 47

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Appendix 1: Spatiotemporal distribution of the prepositions ti and ta

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Appendix 2: Spatiotemporal distribution of intransitive positional suffixes

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Appendix 3: Spatiotemporal distribution of spirant-initial syllabograms

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Appendix 4: Spatiotemporal distribution of synharmonic and disharmonic spellings

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Appendix 5: Spatiotemporal distribution of variants of the “days later” expression

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