Combined Dictionary-Concordance of the Yucatecan Mayan Language

List of Publications Available on the Mayan Language of Yucatán, México

Of the various Mayan languages the Mayan language of Yucatán, often referred to as Yucatec Mayan, is the largest. In fact, the people of Yucatán are the only people of this linguistic group which refer to themselves as "Maya", and refer to their language as "Maya Than" (Mayan Language).

In Post-Conquest times Mayan scribes kept alive a Pre-Columbian custom of transcribing or renewing the sacred books in their charge. This custom, in fact, seems to have survived down to the present, if the reports from such towns as X-Cacal Guardia, Chan Cah, Chum Pom, and Dzitnup are true. As early as the latter part of the sixteenth century Mayan scribes, abandoning the general use of hieroglyphics, began transcribing their work in Latin script.

The books available from Labyrinthos are:

Post Conquest Mayan Literature is a collection of texts in Mayan which were based on pre-Columbian thought. The material compiled in this book is that portion of the various pieces of Yucatecan Mayan colonial literature that has a basis in hieroglyphs or Pre-Columbian oral narrative. There are problems of nonuniformity in orthography, punctuation, and word division, along with carelessness, ignorance (or both) on the part of the scribes.

It is fortunate that much of the material presented here comes from more than one of the extant Yucatecan Mayan colonial manuscripts, making it possible to compare parallel passages, and—even where the text is not clear—to be able to suggest an intelligible edited version. There is no translation in this book of the Mayan literature. Its principal purpose is to make available to researchers in a convenient format the various texts of this nature.

The Grammar deals principally with the language as spoken today. However, because of the development of the language over the time it has been recorded using Latin script (i.e. since the 1570’s) it was useful to refer to older grammatical forms, and thus the grammar part of the book includes a look at the language as spoken or written since the late 1500’s. Included in the grammar is an extensive anthology of Mayan literature, starting with a hieroglyphic text and concluding with material collected in the 1980’s.

The Book of Chilam Balam of Na, for which I was the translator of the Mayan texts, gives Mayan texts and their translations. Ruth Gubler’s principal interest is in the field of native medicines, and this particular book is mainly a collection of medical recipes. However, there is also other material, including calendrical material, in this book.

Beginning with the publication of the Bocabulario de Maya Than in 1993, I was involved in helping René Acuña of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México get important published colonial texts and unpublished manuscripts dealing with the Yucatecan Mayan language ready for publication by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. For people working on Mayan hieroglyphs and Mayan colonial history these works are quite valuable.

The following books are available from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México:

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