'Lost' sacred language of the Maya is rediscovered (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

'Lost' sacred language of the Maya is rediscovered

By David Keys Archaeology Correspondent
07 December 2003
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=470833

Linguists have discovered a still-surviving version of the sacred
religious language of the ancient Maya - the great pyramid-building
civilisation that once dominated Central America.

For years some Maya hieroglyphic texts have defied interpretation - but
now archaeologists and linguists have identified a little-known native
Indian language as the descendant of the elite tongue spoken by rulers
and religious leaders of the ancient Maya.

The language, Ch'orti - spoken today by just a few thousand Guatemalan
Indians - will become a living "Rosetta Stone", a key to unravelling
those aspects of Maya hieroglyphic writings which have so far not been
properly understood. Over the next few years dozens of linguists and
anthropologists are expected to start "mining" Ch'orti language and
culture for words and expressions relating to everything from
blood-letting to fasting.

The Maya were one of the great civilisations of the ancient world - a
civilisation that lasted for 2,000 years, roughly from 550BC to AD1450.
Theyconstructed huge cities - some covering 100 square miles with
populations of up to 170,000. Their art, architecture and culture were
extremely sophisticated - and their elites studied astronomy and
mathematics. Their writing system was a complex script - systemically
similar to Chinese. And yet they remained technically a "stone age"
society with no metal tools, no draught animals and no wheeled
transport.

Up till now, scholars had thought that, in spoken form, the ancient
Maya elite sacred language was extinct.

But research by a team led by archaeologist Professor Steven Houston
and linguist Professor John Robertson of Brigham Young University,
Utah, has now shown that Ch'orti evolved directly out of that sacred
language.

The language that Ch'orti is descended from seems to have originally
been spoken through an area of what are now Guatemala, Belize, Honduras
and southern Mexico. Archaeological research has shown that as the
civilisation progressed and spread, other Central American Maya
languages came to be spoken. But because of its association with the
first Maya civilisation, successive generations of Maya elites
preserved proto-Ch'orti as a sacred language.
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