A Chol (Mayan) Vocabulary from 1789

The earliest known Chol (Mayan) vocabulary was recorded in Tila, Chiapas (Mexico), in 1789 (Fernández 1892). Chol is absent from the sixteenth- and seventeenth‐century Relaciones Geográficas (Harvey 1972), and there are no known catechisms, confessionaries, or grammars from the Colonial period. The next significant collection of Chol lexicon was made in the late nineteenth century (Stoll [1884] 1938). The 1789 list is thus the only extensive source of Colonial Chol vocabulary (Bright 1967 and Hellmuth 1970). Here, the 1789 word list is examined and interpreted, with notes on the orthography of the original text, typographical errors in the published version, and the phonology and morphology of eighteenth‐century Tila Chol. We compare all lexical items to modern Chol forms, noting obsolete or aberrant forms. While intelligibility with modern Chol is high, there is evidence of phonological, morphological, and semantic changes as well as lexical replacement over the past two centuries

Lexicology · Lexicon · Linguistics · Orthography · Phonology · Vocabulary · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

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