The Maya Chronicles | Page 6

you ascend. Nacal u cah ob, they ascend.
When this form is analyzed, we discover that in, á, ú, c, a-ex, u-ob, are personal possessive pronouns, my, thy, his, our, your, their; and that nacal and cah are in fact verbal nouns standing in apposition. Cah, which is the sign of the present tense, means the doing, making, being occupied or busy at something. Hence nacal in cah, I ascend, is literally "the ascent, my being occupied with." The imperfect tense is merely the present with the additional verbal noun cuchi added, as--
Nacal in cah cuchi, I was ascending. Nacal á cah cuchi, Thou wast ascending. etc.
Cuchi means carrying on, bearing along, and the imperfect may thus be rendered:--
"The ascent, my being occupied with, carrying on."
This is what has been called by Friedrich Müller the "possessive conjugation," the pronoun used being not in the nominative but in the possessive form.
The aorist presents a different mode of formation:--
Nac-en, (i.e. Naci-en) I ascended. Nac-ech, Thou ascended. Naci, He ascended. Nac-on, We ascended. Nac-ex, You ascended. Nac-ob, They ascended.
Here en, ech, on, ex, are apparently the simple personal pronouns I, thou, we, you, and are used predicatively. The future is also conjugated in this form by the use of the verbal bin, binel, to go:
Bin nacac en, I am going to ascend. Bin nacac ech, Thou art going to ascend. etc.
The present of all the active verbs uses this predicative form, while their aorists and futures employ possessive forms. Thus:--
Ten cambezic, I teach him. Tech cambezic, Thou teaches him. Lay cambezic, He teaches him.
Here, however, I must note a difference of opinion between eminent grammatical critics. Friedrich Müller considers all such forms as--
Nac-en, I ascended,
to exhibit "the predicative power of the true verb," basing his opinion on the analogy of such expressions as--
Ten batab en, I (am) a chief.[31-1]
M. Lucien Adam, on the other hand, says:--"The intransitive preterit nac-en may seem morphologically the same as the Aryan ás-mi; but here again, nac is a verbal noun, as is demonstrated by the plural of the third person nac-ob, 'the ascenders.' Nac-en comes to mean 'ascender [formerly] me.'"[31-2]
I am inclined to think that the French critic is right, and that, in fact, there is no true verb in the Maya, but merely verbal nouns, nomina actionis, to which the pronouns stand either in the possessive or objective relations, or, more remotely, in the possessive relation to another verbal noun in apposition, as cah, cuchi, etc. The importance of this point in estimating the structure of the language will be appreciated by those who have paid any attention to the science of linguistics.
The objective form of the conjugation is composed of the simple personal pronouns of both persons, together with the possessive of the agent and the particle ci, which conveys the accessory notion of present action towards. Thus, from moc, to tie:--
Ten c in moc ech, I tie thee, literally, I my present tying thee.
These refinements of analysis have, of course, nothing to do with the convenience of the language for practical purposes. As it has no dual, no inclusive and exclusive plurals, no articles nor substantive verb, no transitions, and few irregular verbs, its forms are quickly learned. It is not polysynthetic, at any rate, not more so than French, and its words undergo no such alteration by agglutination as in Aztec and Algonkin. Syncopated forms are indeed common, but to no greater extent than in colloquial English. The unit of the tongue remains the word, not the sentence, and we find no immeasurable words, expressing in themselves a whole paragraph, such as grammarians like to quote from the Eskimo, Aztec, Qquichua and other highly synthetic languages.
The position of words in a sentence is not dissimilar from that in English. The adjective precedes the noun it qualifies, and sentences usually follow the formula, subject--verbal--object. Thus:--
Hemac cu yacuntic Diose, utz uinic. He who loves God, [is] good man.
But transposition is allowable, as--
Taachili u tzicic u yum uinic. Generally obeys his father, a man.
As shown in this last example, the genitive relation is indicated by the possessive pronoun, as it sometimes was in English, "John, his book;" but the Maya is "his book John," u huun Juan.
Another method which is used for indicating the genitive and ablative relations is the termination il. This is called "the determinative ending," and denotes whose is the object named, or of what. It is occasionally varied to al and el, to correspond to the last preceding vowel, but this "vocalic echo" is not common in Maya. While it denotes use, it does not convey the idea of ownership. Thus, u c[=h]een in yum, my father's well, means the well that belongs to my father; but c[=h]enel in yum, my father's well, means the well from which he obtains water, but in