[Aztlan] Maya or Mayan

[Nick Hopkins]

While this thread is still alive I would like to add that years ago  
the Mexican linguist Benjamin Pérez, who did research on the  
varieties of Chontal, reported in an article (which I can't now  
locate) that the name of one particular dialect of Chontal was "yuka- 
t'an", the Yuca language, i.e., in Colonial orthography yuca-than,  
like the parallel terms campech-than and putun-than reported in Voss'  
article for other varieties of Chontal (good article--highly  
recommended if you read Spanish), in contrast to maya-than, the Maya  
language.  It has always been my guess that it was a canoe crewed by  
this variety of Chontals that Columbus met off the Honduras coast,  
and when he asked where they were from they replied "yuca-than" (Yuka- 
t'an), "we are Chontals" and he took that to be the name of the  
mainland to the west, where they were coming from (actually, they had  
come around the peninsula from the Tabasco/Campeche coast).

Nick Hopkins