Mayan being spoken

7 Responses to Mayan being spoken

1. Sid says:

   January 7, 2012 at 8:50 am

   What kind of skin tone did the Mayans have? I once knew a Mayan girl at my high school whose skin was far, far paler than mine (I look Swedish).

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   • jewamongyou says:

     January 7, 2012 at 10:49 am

     You can see, from the videos, that they are quite brown. Of course many of them, such as (probably) your childhood friend, are mixed.

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2. latte island says:

   January 7, 2012 at 10:24 pm

   I can almost believe the optimism of the tour guide. Maybe the little girl was better educated than most. For example, in the SF Bay Area, I routinely pass by groups of construction workers from Mexico, who absolutely are not speaking Spanish. The conventional wisdom around here is that most of those types are from Oaxaca and speak Mixtec. Which has nothing to do with the people in your vids, I’m just saying the native Mexican languages seem to be thriving among work crews.

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   • jewamongyou says:

     January 7, 2012 at 10:37 pm

     My brother, who has spent a lot of time in Meso-America, just told me basically the same thing today. It’s clear to me that Mayan is dying in Yucatan, but indigenous languages might still be thriving in other areas.

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3. bob sykes says:

   January 8, 2012 at 4:46 am

   The Mayans fluorished 1000 years ago, so it is almost certain that the modern version has substantial differences from the “original”. The largest changes would be in pronunciation, but the lexicon likely also changed. Semantic structure might have persisted. But you can argue that it’s still Mayan. It’s sort of like Beowulf. That’s English, isn’t it?
   The enduring mystery is, Why were the cities abandoned? There are hundreds of them large and small rotting in the jungles. But then there is Angkor Wat et al.

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   • The Mighty Tig says:

     January 11, 2012 at 10:04 pm

     The abandonment of their poleis are less of a mystery than how such an obviously decrepit people once studied the heavens, plotting the solar year with a high degree of accuracy and made fairly sophisticated mathematical computations. They sometimes performed calculations involving sums in the hundreds of millions. While the Maya did not invent any of these techniques, they fully developed them. Among other things, they came up with the concept of zero by the 1st century BCE. Pretty impressive, actually, especially when you contrast it with the cultures of Indians in North America.
     So how did a people who once did all this become what they are today? I’m not aware of any advancements in the sciences or technology being done today by anyone of Mayan ethnicity. I’ve read that as their culture declined their wars got pretty gruesome, sometimes involving wholesale slaughter of the aristocracy of conquered cities. Do you think this might have had an ultimately dysgenic effect on the population as a whole? Any thoughts?

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     • jewamongyou says:

       January 11, 2012 at 10:40 pm

       That’s a very good question. What you suggest may have been the case. It is also possible that the early Mayans were, overall, a more advanced people but, as they built their urban centers, surrounding tribes demographically overwhelmed them. The descendants of those primitive tribes would have ended up speaking Mayan and being indistinguishable, in our eyes, from the real Mayans. I doubt it is possible, at this point, to know the truth of what happened.
       There can be little doubt, however, that their accomplishments were the efforts of only a tiny elite – which I suppose is true of any civilization.

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