A Tzeltal Maya Dictionary
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Research Year:  1995
Culture:  Maya
Chronology:  Classic
Location:  Chiapas, México
Site:  Tzeltal Maya Dictionary

The present report describes the activities carried out during the period January 1995-December 1996 under the project "A Tzeltal Maya Dictionary", funded by FAMSI.

As described in the grant application, the aim of this project was creating an extensive computerized lexical database on Tzeltal Maya. Tzeltal is the main Mayan language of Chiapas, México, closely related to the Cholan languages of the Classic Maya Lowlands, and quite possibly the language whose ancestor is recorded in the inscriptions of the Classic Maya site of Toniná, in Chiapas. Understanding the lexicon of this language, for which no full-scale description is so far available, is essential to the study of the Classic Maya script. The project was intended as the first stage of a longer-term research plan aimed at elaborating a comprehensive dictionary of Tzeltal. It consisted in assembling, systematically organizing, and computerizing the existing lexical materials on the Tenejapa dialect of Tzeltal Maya (the Tzeltal dialect with the most extensive documentation), as well as other linguistic and cultural information contained in ethnographies of Tenejapa Tzeltal communities, as the basis on which to build for the later extensive lexicographic research. Materials on other Tzeltal dialects were also to be entered for comparison and as aids to further research on Tenejapa Tzeltal.

The project was carried out by the PI (Maffi), then at University of California at Berkeley, in collaboration with Dr. Martha Macri of University of California at Davis. Dr. Macri freely contributed her Mayanist as well as computer database expertise in support of the project. She also provided some of the computer equipment used for the project, in particular a scanner. The project also employed two research assistants, Ms. Heidi Altman and Mr. John Whitmer, both Anthropology graduate students at UC Davis. Altman and Whitmer were involved in scanning part of the materials (see below), cleaning up the scanned files, and performing the conversion of these files to a computer database in the Panorama application for Macintosh. Additional tasks consisted in entering ethnographic information contained in the body of some of the texts listed below. The PI worked at 25% time over the 24 months of the project. She was based in Berkeley and paid monthly visits to Davis to work with the other collaborators.

The project elaborated on an initial database consisting in the electronic version of the ms. A Tenejapa Tzeltal Dictionary (Berlin and Kaufman 1963), computerized by Maffi (see Berlin and Kaufman 1988), and used for the present project by permission of the authors. The database, devised by Dr. Macri, organizes lexemes by root, while allowing for sorting of the data by lexical item; root and stem classes are indicated, followed by English and Spanish glosses, botanical or zoological scientific name (if appropriate), semantic domain, examples of the lexeme in context, comments (any additional linguistic and/or ethnographic information on the lexeme). The Berlin and Kaufman database included over 4,500 records.

To this database, the following materials were added during tenure of the FAMSI grant:

1. Glossary of Tenejapa Tzeltal medical terminology from Maffi’s doctoral research on Tzeltal ethnomedicine (Maffi 1994). About 1200 records are included in this set.

2. A list of Tenejapa Tzeltal illness names, also from Maffi (1994), consisting in almost 650 records.

3. Two glossaries of Tenejapa Tzeltal illnesses and theft definitions, again from Maffi (1994), for a total of over 380 items.

4. Two lists of Tenejapa Tzeltal anatomical terminology, from Stross (1976) and Berlin and Castro (1988), for a total of about 550 items.

5. A list of Tenejapa Tzeltal plant names, from Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven (1974). The data in the main index, including Tzeltal plant names and their botanical identifications, were scanned and converted to database format, yielding over 2,400 items.

6. A list of Tenejapa Tzeltal animal names, from Hunn (1977). The same procedure was followed as in the previous case, yielding about 1,000 items.

7. A list of Tenejapa Tzeltal numeral classifiers, from Berlin (1968), also scanned and converted, resulting in almost 530 items.

The sum of all these databases amounted to over 11,200 items including repetitions. However, no repeated forms were discarded, since glosses needed to be compared and cross-checked and dictionary entries had to be set up, synthesizing the appropriate information from the various sources. In addition, the extensive textual materials from Maffi (1994) were converted to word-by-word format, as sources of new lexical items and/or additional meanings. Once duplicates were eliminated, these texts yielded close to 1,730 items, bringing the total of entries in the database to 12,930. Each item in the database was coded as to source for easy retrieval of the original.

Separate databases were created for lexical items derived from existing glossaries of other dialects of Tzeltal (to be checked with Tenejapa Tzeltal speakers to assess their applicability to the Tenejapa dialect): for the Bachajón dialect, Slocum and Gerdel (1971), including almost 2,700 items; for the Oxchuc dialect, Sarles (ms. 1961), of about 1,200 items. These glossaries also required scanning and converting.

Data entry of this massive amount of materials and quality control on data entry accuracy took up most of the project’s time during the period funded by FAMSI. Each of the sources presented specific problems for conversion to database format. This was particularly the case with Berlin et al. (1974) and Hunn (1977), respectively the sources of Tenejapa Tzeltal ethnobotanical and ethnozoological terminology. The glossaries contained in these two volumes are structured in such a way as to reflect the native taxonomic organization of Tzeltal ethnobiological nomenclature (similar, although not identical to, Western systematic biological taxonomy). In other words, the information was structured along several increasingly inclusive levels of classification.

These glossaries also provide correspondences between named Tzeltal plant and animal species and equivalent Latin binomials according to systematic biological taxonomy. Such correspondences are rarely one-to-one, but most commonly one-to-many or many-to-one (one named Tzeltal species corresponding to more than one biological taxon, or several Tzeltal taxa corresponding to one biological species). It was essential to maintain as much of this information as possible in the dictionary database, as a part of the ethnographic information on the corresponding lexical entries. However, this presented special challenges in moving from the scanned texts to database conversion. This work was completed on the ethnozoological data, while it is still in progress on the more extensive and far more complex ethnobotanical data.

Control of data entry quality was completed on the other data sets. Maffi, Altman and Whitmer also updated the transcription of lexical items according to the current Tzeltal Maya orthography. Maffi began the task of initial checking of glosses and comparison of repeated lexical items from different sources. Macri undertook the task of cross-checking or identifying roots and root classes for the items in the database.

At this stage, Maffi and Macri are seeking some additional funding for a research assistant to complete the work on the ethnobotanical database. Subsequently, they plan to elaborate a research proposal to conduct the main body of research for the compilation of a comprehensive Tzeltal dictionary. This will require further analytical work on the existing database and further data entry from ethnographic sources, as well as fieldwork to check the existing data with Mayan collaborators and to collect additional data, especially in semantic domains not well covered in the available sources.

Note: See Tzeltal of Tenejapa: Dictionary Draft 11/97 and Tzeltal of Tenejapa: Published Vocabulary Hunn (1977) following sources cited.

Sources Cited

Submitted 10/01/1997 by:
Luisa Maffi
maffi@terralingua.org