IMAYA HIEROGLYPHS — WHORF 497 



be regarded as a prefix or a separate word always occurring immedi- 

 ately before nonpronominal stems. Owing wholly to the grammatical 

 patterns of English (and other European languages), it must be 

 translated as Tie {she, it, they) if the following stem is translated as 

 an English verb, but as his {her, its, tJieir) if that stem is translated 

 as an English noun. From the Maya standpoint it denotes the same 

 relationship at all times; Maya stems are neither nouns nor verbs 

 in the English sense, but a single class delimited on a quite different 

 basis from our parts of speech. Tlie stem with which this u is in 

 construction is what is written as to-kak in the rest of the cluster. 



The writing to-kak however is only approximately phonetic, as 

 with Maya writing in general; it suggests only in rough outline the 

 sound of the utterance, from which suggestion the reader is expected 

 to infer the right Maya word ; the Maya application of phonetics in 

 writing had progressed no farther than this, as we have already seen. 

 Now the word that is apparently indicated is not what a modern 

 Americanist phonetician understands by; the transcription tokak, 

 but rather what he would transcribe as to ;kk'' ak\ This is a compound 

 word, to k-W ak\ consisting of the stems to k "burn, burning, ignition" 

 {o denotes long o) and k^ ak"" "fire." The Motul gives these as Hooc (i. 

 e., to 'h) : quemar, abrazar, y cosa quemada" and '■''kak (i. e., k'' ak'') : 

 fuego, o lumbre." Note that the Maya way of writing to ■ kW ak'''' 

 does not distinguish the glottalized palatal stop k'' at the end of k'' ak'' 

 from the corresponding unglottalized stop k at the end of to • k, nor 

 does it distinguish the sequence of the two, kk'' from either one singly 

 nor the long vowel o from a short o. This is all part and parcel of the 

 approximate and outlinelike character of the phoneticism, implicit 

 rather than clearly conscious phoneticism, which Maya scribes em- 

 ployed. There is a phonemic difference between the simple and the 

 glottalized stops in Maya but it is a minimal difference. The writing 

 used the same symbol for both a simple stop and the homorganic 

 glottalized stop ; instances of this are numerous. This does not mean 

 that these were not distinct sounds in the Maya dialect of the codices. 

 It is almost a certainty that they were distinct, just as they are in 

 all modern dialects of Maya. They were not distinguished in writing 

 probably in the same way that minimally-differing phonemes (e. g., 

 the long and short vowels of Latin) are often not distinguished in 

 a writing system, because the native reader can always tell from the 

 context which sound to supply. And this condition is no more than 

 we meet, to varying degree, in all systems of writing other than those 

 devised by linguistic scientists for the express purpose of an accuracy 

 going beyond the needs of simple communication. 



The expression u-to ' k-WaW may be translated "his burning fire," 

 or probably better "his kindling fire, his igniting of fire." It follows 



