Pokom Maya and Their Colonial Dictionaries

Friar Francisco Viana and his Dictionary

Friar Viana began a Poqom dictionary project which, continued by subsequent Dominican friars over a period extending through three centuries, provide a huge corpus of data equaled, among the Maya languages only by those dictionaries collected for Yucatec Maya. But unlike Yucatec Maya, the Poqom vocabularies have never been gathered together into a single publication.

This volume with its transcription of the Poqom - Spanish vocabularies and that of Acuna, with its transcription of the Spanish - Poqom vocabularies together will make this huge corpus of data available for all those interested in the language and the culture of the people who spoke it in the sixteenth and other colonial centuries. It is my hope that not only Cultural Anthropologists can mine this data for insights into the life of people of past centuries but that linguists can use it to create, together with other more recent works and studies of the modern language, a comprehensive and exhaustive dictionary of the Poqom language.

In this way the works of long dead Dominican friars can benefit not only scholars but serve the many speakers of the still very much living Poqom language.

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