Hopkins. Dictionary of the Chuj (Mayan) Language.pdf

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A DICTIONARY OF THE CHUJ (MAYAN) LANGUAGE

As Spoken in San Mateo Ixtatán, Huehuetenango, Guatemala

ca. 1964-65

CHUJ – ENGLISH

WITH SOME SPANISH GLOSSES

Nicholas A. Hopkins, Ph. D.

3007 Windy Hill Lane

Tallahassee, Florida 32308

JaguarTours@nettally.com

A DICTIONARY OF THE CHUJ (MAYAN) LANGUAGE:

INTRODUCTION

Nicholas A. Hopkins

The lexical data reported in this Chuj-English dictionary were gathered during my

dissertation field work in 1964-65. My first exposure to the Chuj language was in 1962, when I

went to Huehuetenango with Norman A. McQuown and Brent Berlin to gather data on the

languages of the Cuchumatanes (Berlin et al. 1969). At the time I was a graduate student at the

University of Texas, employed as a research assistant on the University of Chicago's Chiapas

Study Projects, directed by McQuown (McQuown and Pitt-Rivers 1970). Working through the

Maryknoll priests who were then the Catholic clergy in the indigenous areas of Huehuetenango

and elsewhere in Guatemala, we recorded material, usually in the form of 100-word Swadesh

lists (for glottochronology), from several languages. The sample included two speakers of the

Chuj variety of San Mateo Ixtatán (including the man who was later to become my major

informant).

In the Spring of 1962, as field work for the project wound down, I returned to Austin to

finish drafting my Master's thesis, and then went on to Chicago to begin graduate studies in

Anthropology at the University of Chicago, with McQuown as my major professor. I continued

to work on Chiapas project materials in McQuown's archives, and in 1963 he assigned me the

Chuj language as the topic of my upcoming doctoral dissertation. Over the next academic year I

transcribed and analyzed the Chuj materials we had collected and prepared preliminary analyses

of the phonology and morphology of the language.

At the end of the Summer of 1964, with support from a National Defense Education Act

Foreign Language Fellowship, I went to Huehuetenango to begin field work on Chuj. By the end

of August I had contracted an informant (Francisco Santizo Andrés) and rented a house in

Huehuetenango, and we began work in earnest. From then until September of 1965 we worked

an eight-hour day, six days a week, with occasional breaks when Francisco would go home and I

would go to San Cristóbal de Las Casas, where Berlin and other anthropologists and linguists

were working on their own projects.

We began by reviewing my preliminary analyses and correcting my errors of

transcription, as well as my phonemic analysis. At the same time Francisco learned to transcribe

Chuj in the technical orthography that we used at the time (using ¢ for the alveolar affricate, c

with hachek for the alveopalatal affricate, x for the velar fricative, etc.). Over time I elicited

Terry Kaufman's

Mayan Vocabulary Survey

list (a more or less 1400-item questionnaire

covering basic vocabulary for Mesoamerican languages), and a

Monosyllable Dictionary.

The

latter, apparently designed by Kaufman for the Chicago projects, took advantage of the CVC

shape of most Mayan roots, and involved generating the list of possible CVC combinations and

attempting to elicit vocabulary based on each. One advantage of this technique is that it elicits

vocabulary that would otherwise not occur to either the informant or the investigator, including

onomatopoetic forms as well as rarely heard lexical iterms. We also began to record

narratives.

Francisco would dictate a text to the tape recorder, operated by me, and then transcribe the tape

(see Hopkins 1980b). I would go over the transcriptions and ask questions about the grammar

and lexicon. All the lexical material gathered by these techniques was put on 3 x 5 slips and filed

in the

lexical file

that is the basis for the present dictionary.

In February of 1965, the botanist Dennis E. Breedlove, who was working in Chiapas with

Brent Berlin on Tzeltal ethnobotany (see Berlin, Breedlove and Raven 1974, Breedlove 1981),

came to Huehuetenango to collect plants in the Cuchumatanes, including especially the Chuj-

speaking region, where there was extensive cloud forest. We collected for two days near San

Juan Ixcoy and the Captzin rocks, and then went on to San Mateo Ixtatán for four more days.

Francisco and Dennis collected the specimens and Dennis recorded the botanical information,

including the locality, altitude, etc. and remarks on the plants. Francisco and I recorded the Chuj

names of the

plants and their ethnobotanical classification

(in terms of the categories 'anh,

te',

ch'anh,

and 'ixim). According to my field notes we collected 1328 specimens in that field session

(Br 8465-9793). These data went into my lexical slip files, and the results of this and other

collecting trips were later published (Breedlove and Hopkins 1970-71). The botanical IDs from

that publication are incorporated in this dictionary.

In May of 1965 Francisco and I carried out a two-week

dialect survey

of the area in

which San Mateo Ixtatán Chuj was spoken, in the municipios of San Mateo Ixtatán and Nentón,

collecting material from 17 aldeas and the town center, a total of 27 questionnaires. Several texts

were recorded during this field season, and as usual, the transcribed material was incorporated

into my lexical files. At the end of this dialect survey Francisco and I collected more plant

specimens (H 0001-0038).

The collection of plant names inspired me to collect

animal names

as well, and to take

iii

notes on their native classification. Absent field work on the project, we consulted reference

books, including Ibarra's

Mamíferos de Guatemala,

Alvarez del Toro's

Reptiles de Chiapas,

and

Peterson's

Field Guides

to the birds. Many of the names had been collected through the Mayan

Vocabulary Survey elicitation or the Monosyllable Dictionary. In the process of recording this

information, I began to uncover the Chuj system of gender markers that partitioned the animals

into coherent classes, and Francisco went through the lexical files and added the gender markers

to the slips. The results of this investigation were published in the ill-fated

Journal of Mayan

Linguistics

(Hopkins 1980a).

In Guatemala City I had acquired the topographical maps for the region of

Huehuetenango (Dirección General de Cartografía, 1963; see Field Notes, 6-12 September,

1964) and Francisco and I pored over the maps place by place as I recorded the Chuj names,

most of which were garbled in the Spanish versions (the locative

yich,

'base of', for instance, was

almost inevitably transcribed Ix-). I ultimately delivered to the Instituto Nacional de Geografía

and to the Instituto Indigenista Nacional a corrected list, for what that was worth. My analysis of

the formation of Chuj place names was later publshed (Hopkins 1972), and all the

place names

were added to my lexical files. The Spanish place names reported here are the official names, as

registered in the

Diccionario geográfico de Guatemala

(Dirección General de Cartografía 1961-

62).

A graduate student in Geology from LSU was living in Huehuetenango in 1964-65, and

he identified some of the rocks and minerals we had names for. For the results of his study and

related work in the Cuchumatanes by him and his colleagues, see Blount 1967 and Anderson et

al. 1973.

In August of 1965, Dennis Breedlove and Brent Berlin came to Guatemala to collect

plants and discuss further projects. With Francisco's help, they collected near Antigua and then

again in the Chuj area, all together another 292 specimens (Br 11397-11689). Brent and I met

with Chris Day, another Chicago graduate student (in the field working on Jacaltec while I was

working on Chuj, see Day 1973), about a comparative study of

numeral classifiers

in the three

languages, Tzeltal, Jacaltec and Chuj. Over the next few years we collaborated in a preliminary

project, but never brought it to fruition. The plan was for Chris to compile and compare the

vocabularies, Brent to write up the semantics (as in his 1964 and 1968 monographs), and for me

to analyze the grammars. Only the grammatical analysis reached publication (Hopkins 1970).

However, all the information I had generated about the Chuj numeral classifiers went into my

slip files.

I returned to Chicago in September, 1965, to finish my graduate work and my doctoral

Hopkins. Dictionary of the Chuj (Mayan) Language.pdf

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