The Chüortiü language (sometimes also Chorti) is a Mayan language, spoken by the indigenous Maya people who are also known as the Chüortiü or Chüortiü Maya. Chüortiü is a direct descendant of the Classic Maya language in which many of the pre-Columbian inscriptions using the Maya script were written. Chüortiü is the modern version of the ancient Mayan language Chüolan (which was actively used and most popular between the years of AD 250 and 850).
Chüortiü can be called a living "Rosetta Stone" of Mayan languages. Chüortiü is an important tool for interpreting the contents of Maya glyphic writings, some of which are not yet fully understood. For several years, many linguists and anthropologists expected to grasp the Chüortiü culture and language by studying its words and expressions. Chüortiü is spoken mainly in and around Jocotán and Camotán, Chiquimula department, Guatemala, as well as in adjacent areas of parts of western Honduras near the Copán Ruins. Because the Classic Mayan language was ancestral to the modern Chüorti, it can be used to decipher the ancient language. Researchers realized that the ancient language's script was based more on phonetics than previously thought.
The name Chüortiü (with unglottalized ) means 'language of the corn farmers', a reference to the traditional agricultural activity of Chüortiü families. It is one of the three modern descendants of the Chüolan language, which constitute a sub-group of Mayan languages. The other two are Chontal and Chüol. These three descendants are still spoken today. Chüortiü and Chüolti are two sub-branches belonging to Eastern Chüolan; Chüolti is, however, already extinct.
There are some debates among scholars about how Chüolan should be classified. John Robertson considered the direct ancestor of colonial Chüoltiü to be the language of the Mayan script (also known as Mayan Glyphs). The language of the Mayan Glyphs is described as 'Classic Chüoltiüan' by John Robertson, David Stuart, and Stephen Houston. The language of the Mayan script is thus the ancestor of Chüortiü. The relationship is shown in the chart below.
The Chüortiü people are descendants of the people who lived in and around Copán, one of the cultural capitals of the ancient Maya area. This covers parts of modern-day Honduras and Guatemala. Chüorti is considered an endangered language as well as an endangered culture.
This region is the only region in the world that Chüorti speakers can be found. Although the area is completely shaded in, the majority of speakers reside in Guatemala, while the rest are sparsely distributed throughout the rest of the area.
The government of Honduras has been trying to promote a uniform national language of Spanish, and therefore discourages the use and teaching of native languages such as Chüorti. The Chüortiü people in Honduras face homogenization and have to assimilate to their surroundings. The government has been clashing with the Chüorti people over land disputes from the 1800s, which puts the people (and thus the language) at risk. In 1997, two prominent Chüorti leaders were assassinated. This assassination is just one example of many cases where Chüorti advocates have been harmed or killed. Every one of these killings reduces the number of Chüorti speakers. As of right now, there are only 10 remaining native speakers in Honduras.
The government of Guatemala has been more supportive of Chüorti speakers and has promoted programs that encourage the learning and teaching of Chüorti. The Chüorti's in Guatemala wear traditional clothing, unlike their counterparts in Honduras, who wear modern-day clothing. Currently there are about 55,250 Chüorti speakers in Guatemala. Even though Guatemala has established Spanish as its official language, it supports the teaching of these native languages.
The majority of Chüortiü live in the Chiquimula Department of Guatemala, approximately 52,000. The remaining 4,000 live in Copán, Honduras. The Küicheü Maya however, dominated the Chüortiü dating back to the early fifteenth century. Warfare as well as disease devastated much of the Chüortiü during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Much of their land was lost to the Guatemalan government in the nineteenth century as well. More recently, 25 percent of the Guatemalan Chüortiü went to the United States during the 1980s to escape political persecution.
The Chüortiü have their own standard way of writing their language. However, inaccurate ways to represent phonemes led to some variation among recent publications.
The consonants of Chüortiü include glottal stop [ü], b, bü, ch, chü, d, g, j, k, kü, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, tü, tz, tzü, w, x, y.
The and are semivowels.
The vowels consist of a, e, i, o, and u.
When two vowels are put together in Chüortiü, the second vowel always takes precedence and then is always followed by a glottal stop. Chüortiü does not have long vowels. According to historians, long vowels occur in Classical Mayan, but have been lost in modern Chüortiü.
In Chüortiü, aa or aê is used as aü or Aü; this pattern occurs with all vowel clusters including eü, Iü, oü and uü.
Some examples of words with vowel clusters areêÂÂ
Examples of inflected verbs from Isidro González's stories (John Fought, 1972):
Tak is plural for women and childrenü
These are the only instances encountered. It is worthy of notice that ixkaür "wife", chüurkabü "baby" and ar "offspring" take -ob'.
obü is a general plural. The suffix can be found in nouns, verbs, adjectives, and participials.
Examples on possessives:
The aspectual system of Chüortiü language changed to a tripartite pronominal system which comes with different morphemes used for the subject of transitive verbs, the object of transitive verbs and the subject of intransitive completive verbs, and a third set of pronouns only used for the subject of incompletive intransitive verbs.
Chüortiü tripartite pronominal system (data from Hull 2005)
In the Chüortiü language and other Mayan sentences it always starts with verbs but also there are agents or patients added and in which they are commonly represented by the acronym VOS, meaning verb-object-subject. The following rules apply VSO, SVO, SOV, OVS, OSV.
In most of the Chüortiü language there are phrases surrounding transitive verbs and they are order subject first (first-most) and it's followed by the verb then the object (SVO).
The adjective works together with the nouns as a modifier formed with a noun phrase that plays some syntactic role, object etc.
Predicative adjective indicate the size, color or state
Chüortiü has many other different forms, in the following sentence the words that appear to be bold is a preposition and underline one is a relational noun.
The following list contains examples of common words in the Chüortiü language:
According to "A Dictionary of Chüortiü Maya, Guatemala" by Kerry Hull, some words may be used as nouns (as shown above) or can double as a verb as well. For example "Witzir" can mean mountain as a noun, or 'to go uphill' as a verb.