How were the words formed?

Posted on 27 noviembre, 2013 Actualizado enn 27 noviembre, 2013

Historical data linking vocabulary with
the history of Yucatan

The predominant indigenous language in the region is the «Yucatecan Maya» or the «Mayan peninsular», and it belongs to one of the most important language groups in America. This language is spoken in a wide geographic area that also includes the states of Campeche, Quintana Roo and the southern part of Belize. The topography of the region is basically a plain that has allowed an easy communication between their speakers, which makes it a uniform living language and with few dialectal variations.
The Spanish spoken in Yucatan has been transformed with respect to the one that the conquerors and colonists who settled the new lands used to speak. We can also add the influence of the Mayan language has had on Spanish Yucatan, as theories of linguistic change point out, changes may be in a language not solely by internal issues but also because of the contact with another language.

Initially takes place in the time of the conquest of Yucatán. The first records to be found on bilingualism refer to the «Indian interpreters» who accompanied the conquistadors in their campaigns.

A second point that we can distinguish the contact of the Mayan ​​and Spanish is when, before the well completion of the conquest of Yucatan by Francisco de Montejo, came many Spanish friars to evangelize the inhabitants. Many of them were given the task of learning the native language, and created all kind of contracts, grammars, dictionaries and vocabularies with the intent for other religious to learn the language. We can even find find references of Yucatecan Creole friars who learned the language very well when the colony was well established, especially to serve as ministers of the new recruits.

The nineteenth century seems to have been the stage for the Yucatan Spanish, in addition to its own evolutionary path as a distinct dialect and other regions of Mexico and America, which has received all the influence of Maya that has become even more characteristic the way we talk. It is precisely at that time that the use of the Yucatecan Mayan language was widely made, both by the Mayan inhabitants as non-Mayan. Both segregation as the integrationist constricted the bearers of culture to the exercise of its cultural wealth in the very local level, without providing a broad cognitive exchange with the outside. Mayan writing loss resulted in one of the biggest disadvantages for those who remained as monolingual and bilingual, because it reinforced isolation and deterioration mechanisms of cultural survival. Forced Castilian version, incomplete in most of the cases, the Maya inhabitants stripped of much of its conceptual bases, but was also unable to fully provide the progress of universal knowledge.

References

Situación histórica y actual del pueblo maya. Diagnóstico del instituto para el desarrollo de la cultura maya del estado de Yucatán. (s.f)Recuperado de http://www.indemaya.gob.mx/descargas/archivos/diagnostico-del-pueblo-maya.pdf

Contacto lingüístico maya-español: calcos morfosintácticos y semánticos en el español yucateco. Colegio de México, Recuperado de: http://www.academia.edu/1723046/CONTACTO_LINGUISTICO_MAYA-ESPANOL_CALCOS_MORFOSINTACTICOS_Y_SEMANTICOS_EN_EL_ESPANOL_YUCATECO