[Aztlan] Astronomical Thinking

[nhopkins at mailer.fsu.edu]

RE Hal Green's posting, Kathryn Josserand and I searched through a lot 
of Mayan dictionaries looking for words for the directions, for a 
presentation at Penn`s Maya Weekend and later as part of a paper that 
is slouching its way to publication (I hope) in a Festschrift for Terry 
Kaufman ("Directions and Partitions in Maya Worldview"--?--the article 
is called something like that, I`m not at home to look it up).

For most Mayan langages, there are simply no words registered for 
"north" and "south," even when "east" and "west" are in the dictionary. 
  When there are words, they may refer to climatological phenomena, as 
in a Chol dictionary where "norte" refers to a winter storm, not to a 
direction.  Other languages (e.g., Tzotzil) may use terms like "right 
side" or "left side" (of the sun's path), but it varies from language 
to language which of these means "north" and which means "south" (i.e., 
whether the reference point is the Sun, presumably looking west, or a 
person, looking east towards the Sun).        The implication of this 
pattern is that "north" and "south" are not concepts of the same order 
as "east" and "west."  And when the meanings of these latter terms are 
explored, they terms refer to the broad expanses of horizon between the 
solstices, not to cardinal points (altho in some cases there is 
acculturation to Hispanic usage).  Likewise, many of the terms for 
"east" and "west" are based on the verbs "to exit" and "to enter", plus 
the name for the Sun.  Specifically, we and Terry figured out that the 
origin of the Classic terms (still used in places) were most likely 
/*'el-ab' k'in/ and /*'och-ib' k'in/, where the "exit" ('el) and 
"enter" ('och) verbs are suffixed with instrumental suffixes that turn 
them into nouns, i.e., "exit place of the Sun" and "entrance place of 
the Sun," literally, "where the sun comes out" (of his house) and 
"where the sun goes in" (to his house).  /'elab'/ is a term for the 
space in front of one's door, where one comes out of the house, and 
/'ochib'/ is a term for a doorway, where one goes into a house.

Our hypothesis is that these descriptive terms suffered natural process 
of reduction over the years (before the Classic), so that the consonant 
/b'/ was lost in the clusters /b'-k'/, and the initial glottal stops 
and vowels /'e-/ and /'o-/ were lost, i.e., /*'elab'k'in/ became 
/lak'in/ and /*'ochib'kin/ became /chik'in/.  These are not unusual 
changes.

By the Classic these reductions had already taken place, so that the 
words could be written with the initial syllable signs /la/ and /chi/, 
i.e., /la-K'IN/ and /chi-K'IN/, respectively.

Nick Hopkins



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