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53-588: The Central dialect is the most commonly used in media and education. Despite a low literacy rate, Kʼicheʼ is increasingly taught in schools and used on the radio. The most famous work in the Classical Kʼicheʼ language is the Popol Vuh ( Popol Wuʼuj in modern spelling). The second most important work is The Title of Totonicapán . Kaufman (1970) divides the Kʼicheʼ complex into the following five dialects, with

106-404: A supine -like usage), the valency of the verb (whether it is intransitive or transitive) and whether the verb is phrase-final or not. The tense-aspect prefixes are as follows: The vowels in parentheses appear only if the next morpheme begins in a consonant. The future form is not found in contemporary Kʼicheʼ. The personal agreement prefixes are as follows: w- before a vowel r- before

159-686: A demonstrative pronoun referring to the noun phrase is placed in the beginning of the clause, or when an adverbial modifier not referenced with the particle wi is. Altogether, the possible affixes in the chain are: (if transitive) k ( a ) - ch ( i ) - xk ( a ) - / xch ( i ) - Orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language , including norms of spelling , punctuation , word boundaries , capitalization , hyphenation , and emphasis . Most national and international languages have an established writing system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting less dialect variation than

212-489: A highly unusual sound change. The fricative [ ð ] is most common in the vicinity of the vowels /a(:)/ and /o(:)/. Complex onsets are very common in Kʼicheʼ, partially because of the active process of penultimate syncope. Complex codas are rare except when the first member of the complex coda is a phonemic glottal stop , which is written with an apostrophe. The sonorants /m, n, l, r/ may be syllabic . Historically, different orthographies have been used to transcribe

265-528: A noun that normally has no possessor can be transformed into an inalienable one by means of the suffix -Vl , which may also serve to emphasise the possession as in 'one's own N': u-chikop-il 'its animal(s)'. Certain inalienable nouns express spatial or abstract relations and thus function like prepositions: e.g. xeʼ 'root' – u-xeʼ N 'under N' (lit. 'its-root N'). Some others are more similar to adverbial modifiers. These are listed below: Adjectives are normally indeclinable. However, certain adjectives have

318-460: A number of detailed classifications have been proposed. Japanese is an example of a writing system that can be written using a combination of logographic kanji characters and syllabic hiragana and katakana characters; as with many non-alphabetic languages, alphabetic romaji characters may also be used as needed. Orthographies that use alphabets and syllabaries are based on the principle that written graphemes correspond to units of sound of

371-400: A particular style guide or spelling standard such as Oxford spelling . The English word orthography is first attested in the 15th century, ultimately from Ancient Greek : ὀρθός ( orthós 'correct') and γράφειν ( gráphein 'to write'). Orthography in phonetic writing systems is often concerned with matters of spelling , i.e. the correspondence between written graphemes and

424-486: A special attributive form that ends in the suffix -V ( nim-a cheʼ 'a big tree', in contrast to nim ri cheʼ 'the tree is big') and appears only before consonant-initial words (cf. nim aq 'a big pecari'). A few can also take a special plural suffix -aq : nim-aq juyubʼ 'the big mountains'. Adjectives can also be used adverbially: nim x-kikot 'he rejoiced greatly'. The free forms of the pronouns can be used only when in focus and are as follows: ( are ) Note: are

477-405: A ten-vowel system: five short and five long. Some dialects (such as Nahualá and Totonicapán) retain the ten-vowel system. Others (such as Cantel) have reduced it to a six-vowel system with no length distinctions: short /a/ has become /ə/ in these dialects, and the other short vowels have merged with their long counterparts. Different conventions for spelling the vowels have been proposed, including by

530-403: A type of abstraction , analogous to the phonemes of spoken languages; different physical forms of written symbols are considered to represent the same grapheme if the differences between them are not significant for meaning. Thus, a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all functionally equivalent. For example, in written English (or other languages using

583-407: A vowel r- before a vowel Some examples are u-bʼe 'his way', r-ochoch 'his house', a-chuch 'your (sg.) mother', nu-wach 'my face', qa-bʼiʼ 'our name'. The standard way of marking possession of a noun by another noun is by juxtaposing the possessed noun, marked with a 3rd person possessive prefix, and the possessor noun: u-kʼuʼx kaj 'the heart of heaven', lit. 'its heart, heaven'. This

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636-424: A vowel The vowels in parentheses appear only if the next morpheme begins in a consonant, and the consonants in parentheses appear only if the next morpheme begins in a vowel. Some other final consonants may occasionally disappear in front of consonant-initial morphemes, too; e.g. in- occasionally appears as i- . Note that the absolutive prefixes are identical with the independent forms of the personal pronouns, and

689-431: A way different from both. Nouns have only the categories number, possession and alienability . The plural is marked only on nouns that designate persons, and even among them only some have the ability to take it. The suffix is -Vbʼ , with the vowel being lexically determined and unpredictable, although it is most commonly /a/ (e.g. ajaw-abʼ 'princes'). Possession is expressed by the following prefixes: w- before

742-687: Is movement : the prefix ul- in the movement slot indicates movement towards the speaker, and the prefix e- (or bʼe- in some varieties) indicates movement away from the speaker. The table below shows the inflectional template of a Kʼicheʼ verb. The last morpheme on a verb, the so-called "status suffix," is a portmanteau morpheme, the form of which is determined by a set of rules that includes factors such as: The examples above involve verbs with simple stems. Verb stems may also be morphologically complex. Complex stems may involve voice suffixes: Also, derivational suffixes may be included, many of which form verb stems from other parts of speech. For instance,

795-504: Is a head-marking construction typical of the Mesoamerican linguistic area . The marking of possession is incompatible with the marking of number; in other words, the possessive prefixes and the plural suffix may not co-occur. Nouns may be inalienable or alienable. Inalienable nouns must always have a prefix expressing their possessor. They are mostly designations of parts of the body and relatives, certain other possessions such as

848-461: Is a weak implosive , and the other glottalized consonants are ejectives . The pulmonic stops and affricates are typically aspirated . In West Quiche, the approximants /l/, /r/, /j/, and /w/ devoice and fricate to [ ɬ ] , [ r̥ ] , [ ç ] , and [ ʍ ] word-finally and often before voiceless consonants. In the dialect of Santa María Chiquimula , intervocalic /l/ alternates between [ l ] and [ ð ] ,

901-666: Is actually a demonstrative used instead of a personal pronoun. The polite pronoun is unique in that it has no corresponding possessive prefix; instead, the free form is just placed after the possessed noun: alibʼ la 'your daughter-in-law'. Otherwise, pronominal possession is expressed by the prefixes listed in the subsection Possession of the section on nouns. Demonstratives express not only distance, but also visibility. The following demonstratives are used: Adverbially, waral 'here' may be used. Other demonstrative adverbs are keje 'so' and ta , kʼate and kʼut , all three of which can be glossed as (and) then . The 'definite article'

954-559: Is discussed further at Phonemic orthography § Morphophonemic features . The syllabaries in the Japanese writing system ( hiragana and katakana ) are examples of almost perfectly shallow orthographies—the kana correspond with almost perfect consistency to the spoken syllables, although with a few exceptions where symbols reflect historical or morphophonemic features: notably the use of ぢ ji and づ zu (rather than じ ji and ず zu , their pronunciation in standard Tokyo dialect) when

1007-402: Is implosive instead. An inherited feature of Kʼicheʼ is phonemic vowel length, but today, some dialects do not preserve it and the orthography of Popol Vuh does not express it either. It is likely that, as in modern Kʼicheʼ dialects, liquids and semivowels were devoiced word-finally and before consonants and that plain stops were aspirated word-finally. Stress was always on the last syllable of

1060-430: Is not obligatory. The interrogative pronouns are naki 'what' and a(pa)chinaq 'who'. Other question words are a pa 'where' and jupacha 'how'. The basic scheme of the verb chain is as follows: (if transitive) The 'status suffix', also known as a 'modal suffix', expresses simultaneously three different grammatical distinctions: the contrast between indicative and imperative/optative mood (the latter having also

1113-576: Is placed between slashes ( /b/ , /bæk/ ), and from phonetic transcription , which is placed between square brackets ( [b] , [bæk] ). The writing systems on which orthographies are based can be divided into a number of types, depending on what type of unit each symbol serves to represent. The principal types are logographic (with symbols representing words or morphemes), syllabic (with symbols representing syllables), and alphabetic (with symbols roughly representing phonemes). Many writing systems combine features of more than one of these types, and

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1166-524: Is the Título de Totonicapán . The details of the phonology of Classical Kʼicheʼ are uncertain, since the Spanish-based writing system expressed it poorly, and one needs to use the most archaic modern dialects to reconstruct the likely pronunciation. A probable phonemic inventory as preserved in archaic Kʼicheʼ dialects is: Note that most of the glottalised stops are ejectives , but the labial one

1219-650: The Latin alphabet ), there are two different physical representations (glyphs) of the lowercase Latin letter a : ⟨a⟩ and ⟨ɑ⟩ . Since the substitution of either of them for the other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, which can be written | a | . The italic and boldface forms are also allographic. Graphemes or sequences of them are sometimes placed between angle brackets, as in | b | or | back | . This distinguishes them from phonemic transcription, which

1272-791: The Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín , the Summer Institute of Linguistics , and the Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala . This table shows the two vowel systems and several of the spelling systems that have been proposed: Vowels typically undergo syncope in penultimate syllables , which allows for a wide array of complex onsets. Diphthongs are found in recent loanwords. Kʼicheʼ has pulmonic stops and affricates, /p/, /t/, /ts/, /tʃ/, /k/, and /q/, and glottalized counterparts /ɓ/, /tʼ/, /tsʼ/, /tʃʼ/, /kʼ/, and /qʼ/. The glottalized /ɓ/

1325-700: The caron on the letters | š | and | č | , which represent those same sounds in Czech ), or the addition of completely new symbols (as some languages have introduced the letter | w | to the Latin alphabet) or of symbols from another alphabet, such as the rune | þ | in Icelandic. After the classical period, Greek developed a lowercase letter system with diacritics to enable foreigners to learn pronunciation and grammatical features. As pronunciation of letters changed over time,

1378-436: The phonemes found in speech. Other elements that may be considered part of orthography include hyphenation , capitalization , word boundaries , emphasis , and punctuation . Thus, orthography describes or defines the symbols used in writing, and the conventions that regulate their use. Most natural languages developed as oral languages and writing systems have usually been crafted or adapted as ways of representing

1431-776: The Kʼicheʼ languages. The classical orthography of Father Ximénez, who wrote down the Popol Vuh , is based on Spanish orthography and has been replaced by a new standardized orthography, defined by the ALMG ( Academia de Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala ). The ethnohistorian and Mayanist Dennis Tedlock uses his own transliteration system, which is completely different from any of the established orthographies. Like other Mayan languages , Kʼicheʼ uses two sets of agreement markers, known to Mayanists as "Set A" and "Set B" markers, which can appear on both nouns and verbs. "Set A" markers are used on nouns to mark possessor agreement and on verbs to agree with

1484-485: The Spanish (and other Latin-based) orthographies of the time, the letter pairs i and j , u and v were treated as equivalent with respect to sound – both members could express either a vowel (/i/, /u/) or a semivowel (/j/, /w/), depending on context. As indicated in the table, many of the special Kʼicheʼ phonemes, notably the ejectives, did have dedicated signs. These were introduced by Father Francisco de la Parra in

1537-467: The character is a voicing of an underlying ち or つ (see rendaku ), and the use of は, を, and へ to represent the sounds わ, お, and え, as relics of historical kana usage . Korean hangul and Tibetan scripts were also originally extremely shallow orthographies, but as a representation of the modern language those frequently also reflect morphophonemic features. An orthography based on a correspondence to phonemes may sometimes lack characters to represent all

1590-430: The correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are highly complex or inconsistent is called a deep orthography (or less formally, the language is said to have irregular spelling ). An orthography with relatively simple and consistent correspondences is called shallow (and the language has regular spelling ). One of the main reasons why spelling and pronunciation diverge is that sound changes taking place in

1643-401: The default VSO word order and the preservation of indigenous rather than borrowed Spanish forms for the higher numerals. Like modern Kʼicheʼ dialects, Classical Kʼicheʼ has ergative-absolutive alignment , i.e. it normally uses the same grammatical marking for the subject of an intransitive verb and the direct object of a transitive verb , whereas the subject of a transitive verb is marked in

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1696-411: The ergative prefixes are identical with the nominal possessive prefixes meaning 'my', 'your' etc. The status suffixes are: (class 1) -u after roots containing /u/ -o or -u after roots containing /o/ or /u/ (class 2 transitive verb) Besides the absolute final position, the final forms may are also commonly used in front of complex or coordinated noun phrases, as well as in cases when

1749-459: The house (- ochoch ), as well as nouns expressing spatial relations ('top' as in 'on top of' etc.). Alienable nouns do not require a possessive prefix, and some of them (such as designations of wild animals and plants, natural phenomena) normally don't have one. To transform an inalienable noun into an alienable one, the suffix -Vxel is added to names of relatives, and the suffix -aj is added to names of body parts: gajol-axel 'sons'. Conversely,

1802-689: The language called Kʼichee, rather than Kʼicheʼ or Quiché. Kʼicheʼ has a rather conservative phonology. It has not developed many of the innovations found in neighboring languages, such as retroflex consonants or tone. Stress is not phonemic. It occurs on the final syllable and on every other syllable before the final in an iambic pattern. Unstressed vowels are frequently reduced (to [ ɨ ] or [ ə ] ) or elided altogether, which often produces consonant clusters even word-initially. For example, sibʼalaj "very" may be pronounced [siɓlaχ] and je na laʼ "thus" [χenðaʔ] . Kʼicheʼ dialects differ in their vowel systems. Historically, Kʼicheʼ had

1855-438: The middle of the 16th century and were based on inverted numbers: ɛ (inverted 3 ) for /qʼ/, g (actually an inverted 4 ) for /kʼ/, g, (inverted 4 with a comma) for /tsʼ/ and gh (inverted 4 with an h ) for /tʃʼ/. There was also a sign for /tʼ/, which may be rendered as ɧ , and /q/ could be expressed with k . However, the signs were used inconsistently or not at all in many manuscripts, and Father Francisco Ximénez, who

1908-410: The people INC-ABS.3.PL-build-FA the house "The people are the ones who build the house." jachi:n who x-0-paxi-n COM - ABS . 3 . SG -break- FA Classical K%CA%BCiche%CA%BC language Classical Kʼicheʼ was an ancestral form of today's Kʼicheʼ language ( Quiché in the older Spanish -based orthography ), which was spoken in the highland regions of Guatemala around

1961-539: The phonemic distinctions in the language. This is called a defective orthography . An example in English is the lack of any indication of stress . Another is the digraph | th | , which represents two different phonemes (as in then and thin ) and replaced the old letters | ð | and | þ | . A more systematic example is that of abjads like the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, in which

2014-557: The representative municipalities given as well (quoted in Par Sapón 2000:17): Guatemala: Mexico: Guatemala: Guatemala: Mexico: Guatemala: Guatemala: The Nahualá dialect of Kʼicheʼ shows some differences from other Kʼicheʼ dialects. It preserves an ancient Proto-Mayan distinction between five long vowels (aa, ee, ii, oo, uu) and five short vowels (a, e, i, o, u). It is for that conservative linguistic feature that Guatemalan and foreign linguists have actively sought to have

2067-552: The short vowels are normally left unwritten and must be inferred by the reader. When an alphabet is borrowed from its original language for use with a new language—as has been done with the Latin alphabet for many languages, or Japanese katakana for non-Japanese words—it often proves defective in representing the new language's phonemes. Sometimes this problem is addressed by the use of such devices as digraphs (such as | sh | and | ch | in English, where pairs of letters represent single sounds), diacritics (like

2120-438: The spoken language are not always reflected in the orthography, and hence spellings correspond to historical rather than present-day pronunciation. One consequence of this is that many spellings come to reflect a word's morphophonemic structure rather than its purely phonemic structure (for example, the English regular past tense morpheme is consistently spelled -ed in spite of its different pronunciations in various words). This

2173-592: The spoken language. These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g. would and should ); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen in Noah Webster 's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences between American and British spelling (e.g. honor and honour ). Orthographic norms develop through social and political influence at various levels, such as encounters with print in education,

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2226-440: The spoken language. The rules for doing this tend to become standardized for a given language, leading to the development of an orthography that is generally considered "correct". In linguistics , orthography often refers to any method of writing a language without judgement as to right and wrong, with a scientific understanding that orthographic standardization exists on a spectrum of strength of convention. The original sense of

2279-538: The spoken language: phonemes in the former case, and syllables in the latter. In virtually all cases, this correspondence is not exact. Different languages' orthographies offer different degrees of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. English , French , Danish , and Thai orthographies, for example, are highly irregular, whereas the orthographies of languages such as Russian , German , Spanish , Finnish , Turkish , and Serbo-Croatian represent pronunciation much more faithfully. An orthography in which

2332-430: The time of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of Guatemala . Classical Kʼicheʼ has been preserved in a number of historical Mesoamerican documents , lineage histories, missionary texts, and dictionaries. Most famously, it is the language in which the renowned highland Maya mythological and historical narrative Popol Vuh (or Popol Wuj in modern orthography) is written. Another historical text of partly similar content

2385-460: The traditional verb-initial word order, but influence from Spanish (an SVO language) promotes a subject-initial order. The Focus Antipassive (FA) is used in K'iche' when the ergative subject of a transitive verb is in focus. This occurs in several contexts: e: are: FOC ri: the winaq people k-e:-wok-ow INC - ABS . 3 . PL -build- FA ri: the jah house {e: are:} ri: winaq k-e:-wok-ow ri: jah FOC

2438-730: The transitive subject ( ergative case ). "Set B" markers are used on verbs to agree with the transitive object or the intransitive subject ( absolutive case ). K'iche' also has two second person formal agreement markers: la (singular) and alaq (plural). Unlike the informal agreement markers, the formal agreement markers occur after the verb and verb particles. The formal agreement markers are used on nouns to mark possessor agreement and on both transitive and intransitive verbs for subject and object agreement. Kʼicheʼ distinguishes six pronouns classified by person and number. Gender and case are not marked on pronouns, which are often omitted since subject and object agreement are obligatorily marked on

2491-505: The verb. K'iche' has two formal second person pronouns: lal (singular) and alaq (plural). Kʼicheʼ verbs are morphologically complex and can take numerous prefixes and suffixes, which serve both inflectional and derivational purposes. Agreement follows an ergative/absolutive pattern : subjects of transitive verbs are indexed with Set A markers, while intransitive subjects and transitive objects are indexed with Set B markers. Aspect and mood are also indicated via verbal morphology, as

2544-539: The versive suffix -ir or -ar forms verb stems from adjectives: utz "good", -utz-ir- "get good"; nim "big", -nim-ar- "get big." Multiple suffixes can appear within a single stem: -nim-ar- "get big", -nim-ar-isa- "enlarge (something)", -nim-ar-isa-x- "be enlarged." As with all other Mayan languages , Kʼicheʼ has an ergative pattern of verb agreement and often uses verb-object-subject (VOS) word order. Most modern speakers use SOV, SVO, and VSO word orders interchangeably. Language purists have tried to preserve

2597-405: The vowel of the root; some of these suffixes are affected in this way by any root vowel, but others, containing /o/, are influenced only by a preceding /u/ in the root, and others also by a preceding /a/. The grammar of Classical Kʼicheʼ is fairly similar in most respects to that of the majority of modern Kʼicheʼ dialects. Some notable differences are the existence of special future tense prefixes,

2650-536: The word, though, implies a dichotomy of correct and incorrect, and the word is still most often used to refer specifically to a standardized prescriptive manner of writing. A distinction is made between emic and etic viewpoints, with the emic approach taking account of perceptions of correctness among language users, and the etic approach being purely descriptive, considering only the empirical qualities of any system as used. Orthographic units, such as letters of an alphabet , are conceptualized as graphemes . These are

2703-476: The word. The original Spanish-based orthography was variable and did not distinguish between some phonemes. In this article, the modern Guatemalan standard orthography is used. The following table shows the differences and some similarities between the ways in which Kʼicheʼ phonemes are expressed in these two systems. In other cases, the spelling coincides with the IPA sign. c (elsewhere) In addition, as common in

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2756-699: The workplace, and the state. Some nations have established language academies in an attempt to regulate aspects of the national language, including its orthography—such as the Académie Française in France and the Royal Spanish Academy in Spain. No such authority exists for most languages, including English. Some non-state organizations, such as newspapers of record and academic journals , choose greater orthographic homogeneity by enforcing

2809-522: Was responsible for the writing down of the Popol Vuj, apparently failed to realise that they expressed special sounds in Kʼicheʼ. Some common phonological alternations result from the coalescence of adjacent vowels ( chi - + - u > ch-u , V- + -on > - V-n ) and the elision of word-final consonants of particles and function words phrase-internally (but not finally): ( chik > chi ). The vowels of certain suffixes become completely identical to

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