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Author: Mary J. Holbrock
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826357245
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
At the turn of the millennium, Guatemala experienced a Mayan cultural renaissance often referred to as the Maya Movement. One aspect of this movement was the revitalization of indigenous Mayan languages for written purposes. The Mayan writing system is one of the oldest in the world; thus its reinvention includes a new standardized alphabetic system for each of the twenty-two Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala as well as the incorporation and continuation of some of its ancient elements. This book represents a case study conducted in two Mayan villages in the Guatemalan highlands, and it investigates three main aspects of Mayan literacy: its availability in publications and media, its practice in the school system, and its use among Maya people. Through this investigation, the promises and pitfalls of a literacy-revitalization endeavor are detailed and our understanding of the concept of literacy is reexamined.
Author: Mary J. Holbrock
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826357245
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
At the turn of the millennium, Guatemala experienced a Mayan cultural renaissance often referred to as the Maya Movement. One aspect of this movement was the revitalization of indigenous Mayan languages for written purposes. The Mayan writing system is one of the oldest in the world; thus its reinvention includes a new standardized alphabetic system for each of the twenty-two Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala as well as the incorporation and continuation of some of its ancient elements. This book represents a case study conducted in two Mayan villages in the Guatemalan highlands, and it investigates three main aspects of Mayan literacy: its availability in publications and media, its practice in the school system, and its use among Maya people. Through this investigation, the promises and pitfalls of a literacy-revitalization endeavor are detailed and our understanding of the concept of literacy is reexamined.
Author: Mary Jo Holbrock
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Author: Wesley M. Collins
Publisher: SIL International
ISBN: 1556713975
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
Can a culture have a theme that unifies seemingly unrelated practices? In this volume, Collins suggests that Maya-Mam customs as different as constructing a house, staying healthy, seeking God, disciplining children, agreeing to a contract, or just speaking the language, all originate from the same concept- a search for the center. This is far more than mere balance, long recognized as a Mayan cultural value. Rather, center space is a place of physical and metaphysical peace, acceptance, meaning, health, happiness and "home." Collins also shows how cenderedness is deeply embedded in the grammar of Mam- its lexicon, morphology, syntax, and discourse structure. This relatedness of Mam culture and linguistics provides an unusually detailed contribution to the debate on linguistic relativity and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Collins combines historical accounts with firsthand ethnographic and linguistic methodology to explore the concept of centeredness. Detailed accounts of his personal interaction with the Mam illustrate and enrich the book's concepts. This volume will interest students of the relationship between language and culture generally, and specifically those interested in the study of Maya of Mexico and Guatemala.
Author: Susan Garzon
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292788991
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
The native Maya peoples of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize have been remarkably successful in maintaining their cultural identity during centuries of contact with and domination by outside groups. Yet change is occurring in all Mayan communities as contact with Spanish-speaking Ladino society increases. This book explores change and continuity in one of the most vital areas of Mayan culture—language use. The authors look specifically at Kaqchikel, one of the most commonly spoken Mayan languages. Following an examination of language contact situations among indigenous groups in the Americas, the authors proceed to a historical overview of the use of Kaqchikel in the Guatemalan Highlands. They then present case studies of three highland communities in which the balance is shifting between Kaqchikel and Spanish. Wuqu' Ajpub', a native Kaqchikel speaker, gives a personal account of growing up negotiating between the two languages and the different world views they encode. The authors conclude with a look at the Mayan language revitalization movement and offer a scenario in which Kaqchikel and other Mayan languages can continue to thrive.
Author: Eric Hoenes del Pinal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Guatemalan literature
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
My dissertation examines the revival of written Mayan language literature in Guatemala since 1980 - a literature created by Mayan authors who write in Mayan languages and also in Spanish. I explore the impact of socio-political context on the choice of literary language, and review how these bilingual authors express their world view and culture through their use of language-specific vocabulary, syntax and style in their literary texts. Bilanguaging in their texts in each language is an epistemological statement, and evidence of a dialogical and aesthetic communicative process of social transformation. In Guatemala, new written Mayan language literature has developed since the political conflicts of 1954-1996, and follows a long tradition of oral literature, pre-colonial glyph writing and early colonial alphabetic writing, with characteristic themes, genres and stylistic features. I describe the contemporary linguistic situation, the movement to preserve Mayan languages in writing and the corresponding need for Mayan-language literacy. I also discuss the need for translation into Spanish, as a lingua franca that both Ladino readers and speakers of different Mayan languages can access, and also as the only language that has been taught in schools. I evaluate recent transcriptions of Mayan oral literature and their translations into Spanish to show how their themes and styles form a foundation for written literature. I then analyze bilanguaging in the works of three authors: Humberto Ak'abal (K'iche'), Gaspar Pedro González (Q'anjob'al) and Victor Montejo (Jakaltek) who write in Mayan K'iche', Q'anjob'; al, and Popb'al Ti' and who themselves re-write/translate their works into Spanish. This process of writing in two languages itself reflects the dual world views the authors inhabit. I compare the Spanish and Mayan language texts to demonstrate lexical and syntactic asymmetry, and show how the Spanish text includes Mayan lexical borrowings, syntactic structures and stylistic features in order to foreground the Mayan voice in the Spanish text. I conclude by discussing the significance and the viability of this emerging literature as an expression of cultural linguistic rights and de-colonial epistemological transformation in the socio-political context of Guatemala.
Author: Brigittine M. French
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816527679
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
In this valuable book, ethnographer and anthropologist Brigittine French mobilizes new critical-theoretical perspectives in linguistic anthropology, applying them to the politically charged context of contemporary Guatemala. Beginning with an examination of the Ònationalist projectÓ that has been ongoing since the end of the colonial period, French interrogates the ÒGuatemalan/indigenous binary.Ó In Guatemala, ÒLadinoÓ refers to the Spanish-speaking minority of the population, who are of mixed European, usually Spanish, and indigenous ancestry; ÒIndianÓ is understood to mean the majority of GuatemalaÕs population, who speak one of the twenty-one languages in the Maya linguistic groups of the country, although levels of bilingualism are very high among most Maya communities. As French shows, the Guatemalan state has actively promoted a racialized, essentialized notion of ÒIndiansÓ as an undifferentiated, inherently inferior group that has stood stubbornly in the way of national progress, unity, and developmentÑwhich are, implicitly, the goals of Òtrue GuatemalansÓ (that is, Ladinos). French shows, with useful examples, how constructions of language and collective identity are in fact strategies undertaken to serve the goals of institutions (including the government, the military, the educational system, and the church) and social actors (including linguists, scholars, and activists). But by incorporating in-depth fieldwork with groups that speak Kaqchikel and KÕicheÕ along with analyses of Spanish-language discourses, Maya Ethnolinguistic Identity also shows how some individuals in urban, bilingual Indian communities have disrupted the essentializing projects of multiculturalism. And by focusing on ideologies of language, the author is able to explicitly link linguistic forms and functions with larger issues of consciousness, gender politics, social positions, and the forging of hegemonic power relations.
Author: John Palmer Hawkins
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806137308
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Between 1995 and 1997, three groups of college students each spent two months in K’iche’ Maya villages in Guatemala. Led by Professors John P. Hawkins and Walter Randolph Adams, they participated in an ongoing field school designed to foster undergraduate research and documentation of K’iche’ Maya culture in Guatemala. In this enlightening book, Hawkins and Adams first describe their field-school method of involving undergraduate students in primary research and ethnographic writing, and then present the best of the student essays, which examine the effects of modernization on K’iche’ Maya religion, courtship, marriage, gender relations, education, and community development. The process of actively involving undergraduate students in research is one of the most effective methods of enhancing education. Indeed, there is growing interest in this idea—currently the Council on Undergraduate Research, a national organization, boasts members from more than 870 colleges and universities. For educators of all fields interested in learning how to organize a field school that fosters research and publication, Hawkins and Adams discuss the methods they used and the problems they encountered. Anthropologists and sociologists will find this demonstration of undergraduates’ achievements useful for introductory and field methods courses. Finally, the book’s portrayal of the K’iche’ Maya culture in transition will appeal to Mesoamericanists and Latinamericanists of any discipline.
Author: Danny Law
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027270473
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
This book offers a study of long-term, intensive language contact between more than a dozen Mayan languages spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Southern Mexico and Belize. It details the massive restructuring of syntactic and semantic organization, the calquing of grammatical patterns, and the direct borrowing of inflectional morphology, including, in some of these languages, the direct borrowing of even entire morphological paradigms. The in-depth analysis of contact among the genetically related Lowland Mayan languages presented in this volume serves as a highly relevant case for theoretical, historical, contact, typological, socio- and anthropological linguistics. This linguistically complex situation involves serious engagement with issues of methods for distinguishing contact-induced similarity from inherited similarity, the role of social and ideological variables in conditioning the outcomes of language contact, cross-linguistic tendencies in language contact, as well as the effect that inherited similarity can have on the processes and outcomes of language contact.
Author: Nicholas A. Hopkins
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 1646421302
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
The Chuj of northwestern Guatemala are among the least studied groups of the Mayan family, and their relative isolation has preserved a strong indigenous tradition of storytelling. In Chuj (Mayan) Narratives, Nicholas Hopkins analyzes six narratives that illustrate the breadth of the Chuj storytelling tradition, from ancient mythology to current events and from intimate tales of local affairs to borrowed stories, such as an adaptation of Oedipus Rex. The book illustrates the broad range of stories people tell each other, from mythological and legendary topics to procedural discussions and stories borrowed from European and African societies. Hopkins provides context for the narratives by introducing the reader to Chuj culture and history, conveying important events as described by indigenous participants. These events include customs and practices related to salt production as well as the beginnings of the disastrous civil war of the last century, which resulted in the destruction of several villages from which the narratives in this study originated. Hopkins also provides an analytical framework for the strategies of the storytellers and presents the narratives with Chuj text and English translation side-by-side. Chuj (Mayan) Narratives analyzes the strategies of storytelling in an innovative framework applicable to other corpora and includes sufficient grammatical information to function as an introduction to the Chuj language. The stories illustrate the persistence of Classic Maya themes in contemporary folk literature, making the book significant to Mesoamericanists and Mayanists and an essential resource for students and scholars of Maya linguistics and literary traditions, storytelling, and folklore.
