[Aztlan] Taking Liberties with Mexican Spellings??

[David Hixson]

In Mesoamerica, especially in the Maya area, this
movement is stemming from a NATIVE linguistic
movement, not a foreign movement, nor a governmental
movement.  So, Kim's criticism of foreign researchers
imposing these new spellings is not quite accurate.

A meeting of indigenous (and non-indigenous) linguists
and native speakers met in Guatemala (the Academia de
las Lenguas Mayas de Guatemala) to attempt to
standardize what were very diverse orthographic
conventions for the southern Maya area.  These were
codified into law by the Guatemalan government and are
becoming the standard spellings for native words in
the southern Maya area.  Representatives from 22 Mayan
languages ratified the accords, but Tzeltal, Tzotzil
and Yucatec Maya are not included in the documents.

Therefore, I agree with Kim and John that these
spellings should not be widely applied in Mexico, and
I personally believe they should never be applied to
proper nouns (especially governmental designations
like "Yukatan").  It is an over-application of a very
valid indigenous language convention ratified in
Guatemala.

For instance, I've been working on an illustration (a
Map of Mesoamerica showing the sites mentioned in the
text) for an upcoming edited volume.  The contributing
authors from Guatemala insist upon not using accents
on site names (since this practice stems from the
Spanish need for accents to sign when a word does not
have an accent on the penultimate syllable, not a
reflection of native Maya pronunciation).  Those
authors from Mexico are all insisting that I spell
their sites with the standard Spanish accents marked.

There is also a good discussion of this in the front
matter of "Ruins of the Past: The Use and Perception
of Abandoned Structures in the Maya Lowlands" edited
by Stanton and Magnoni, where they likewise found a
middle ground that differentiated between what
Guatemalan activists desired for spellings pertaining
to their own country and cultures, and those spellings
pertaining to Mexican-Mayan terms.

For some references and another synopsis, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_languages#Modern_orthography

-Dave


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