A Dictionary of Ch'orti' Maya, Guatemala

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Methodology and Project Results

The data represented in the final results of this project come from two years of fieldwork with the Ch'orti' and four years of on-and-off editing outside of Guatemala. For the current year-long project, two separate fieldwork sessions were conducted from January to late March of 2004 and from August to September in the same year. During this fieldwork, over 3,000 additional terms were added to a database of some 4,500 terms from data from previous projects. Much of the seven months of editing time of this project was spent organizing and analyzing data from previous fieldwork notes and analyzing and transcribing recordings of interviews and oral histories (Figure 3, shown above). The final fieldwork session allowed for a final check of the edited data to that point. Since September of 2004, the editing process has continued until the writing of this report in March of 2005.  The final results of the project are a database of just over 7,500 Ch'orti' terms and another 150 plant identifications where only Spanish names exist today. Since a sizeable portion of previous fieldwork was dedicated to working with Ch'orti' ritual specialists and healers, a hundred or so more esoteric terms relating to healing were also collected and analyzed, in as far as was possible. The final database has also undergone two independent checks by native Ch'orti' speakers in January of 2005.

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