{"id":300,"date":"2008-09-03T20:47:33","date_gmt":"2008-09-04T02:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.JFanjoy.com\/blog\/?p=300"},"modified":"2008-09-12T22:34:33","modified_gmt":"2008-09-13T04:34:33","slug":"mayan-languages-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/mayan-languages-101\/","title":{"rendered":"Mayan Languages 101"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We are about 10 hours into our Q&#8217;anjob&#8217;al lessons. It&#8217;s fun, but hard. We have a private tutor, and are spending a lot of time up front learning how to make the five or six sounds that don&#8217;t exist in either Spanish or English. I never imagined I&#8217;d be trilingual, but I guess that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re working towards.<\/p>\n<p>Being an ancient Mayan language, Q&#8217;anjob&#8217;al has some peculiarities that are worth sharing. Today we talked about articles&#8230; you know, &#8220;the&#8221;. In English, there is just one: <em>the<\/em>. Spanish is trickier: <em>el<\/em> is for male things, <em>la<\/em> is for female things. German is worse, because they have things that are male, female, or neuter: <em>der, die, das<\/em> all mean &#8220;the&#8221;. Q&#8217;anjob&#8217;al outstrips all of these languages, having more than a half dozen ways to say &#8220;the&#8221;. And instead of being based on an arbitrary idea of things being male or female (in Spanish, a table is female, a lime is male, etc. Go figure.) the nouns are grouped by what they are made from. They say &#8220;the&#8221; differently for the following groups of things:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>things that come from plants (bannana, leaf, etc.)<\/li>\n<li>things that come from trees (wood, house, etc. Not to be confused with the previous group)<\/li>\n<li>things that come from or are animals (dog, meat, bone, cow, leather)<\/li>\n<li>things that are made of stone or metal (rock, hatchet. Also applies to technology, such as cars and radios)<\/li>\n<li>things made of earth (mud, adobe, clay, earthenware)<\/li>\n<li>things made from corn (tortilla, mosh, cornstalks, field corn, etc.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s kindof quaint, but really gives insight into how the culture operates, and has for thousands of years. Their universe is made up of these basic groups. What&#8217;s interesting is when their ancient language collided with modernity, starting a few hundred years ago. Cars and airplanes and radios, for which they usually adopt the Spanish noun, often get a &#8220;the&#8221; that goes with &#8220;things made form rock.&#8221; Likewise, it&#8217;s interesting to see that &#8220;things made from corn&#8221; are SO important that they get their own article; corn is revered here in a way that makes Nebraskans hang their heads in shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We are about 10 hours into our Q&#8217;anjob&#8217;al lessons. It&#8217;s fun, but hard. We have a private tutor, and are spending a lot of time up front learning how to make the five or six sounds that don&#8217;t exist in either Spanish or English. I never imagined I&#8217;d be trilingual, but I guess that&#8217;s what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jims-guatemala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":390,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300\/revisions\/390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jfanjoy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}