DISTRIBUTION OF THE MAYANCE LINGUISTIC STOCK. 613 
are conjugated by the demonstrative pronouns, the latter by the possessive, since 
the action is regarded as becoming personal only when it affects some concrete 
object. In the Coronel Maya grammar of 1620 and in the San Buenaventura 
grammar of 1684 we find an exception to this rule, whereby the neuters in the 
present take a special form of the possessive conjugation, leaving the past and 
future in the demonstrative. In 1746 Beltran objected to this as unsystematic, 
and changed it, though he made the result more irregular than ever by changing 
the active present instead of the neuter. But in the Cholti we find this identical 
alleged “irregularity”? found in the Maya of 1620 and 1684, extending even to the 
use of the particle of “‘actuality”’ to define the present tense: ximbal in-cah, yual 
in-vixnel. Cholti also forms a neuter future stem in -ac the same as Maya, and in 
contrast to Quiché; though on the other hand it follows Quiché against Maya in 
using x as a future prefix. 
Finally, and most striking of all, the letter 7 is missing entirely in the Huasteca, 
Maya, [zental, Mame, and Cholti. It is present in the Pokom and Quiché groups, 
with /, being particularly frequent in the Quiché, and in both groups constantly 
replacing a Maya y, as in rax, car, for yax, cay, the words for green and fish in 
Quiché and Maya respectively. In Chorti the / disappears entirely, and all Cholti 
words with / are spelled with an r. This is without exception; all our mentioned 
Cholti sources having only /, and all the Chorti ones having only r._ The Stephens 
list from Zacapa, which we have already classed as Pokoman on the basis of the 
vocabulary, fails as Chorti on this test also, the / occurring three times, in holom, 
hal, akkal, for head, maize-ear, and earth respectively, the very words also being 
Pokoman, and the correct Chorti forms being hor, nar, tiht. The only possible 
conclusion here is that in a town actually Chorti, Stephens got hold of a Pokoman 
native, the border being very near by, and hence his mistake. This is a striking 
instance of how much error can result from such ignorantly gathered word-lists. 
This particular one misled Gallatin, Berendt, Brasseur de Bourbourg, and Stoll 
into placing the Copan dialect in the Pokom group, separating that city linguisti- 
cally from its proper place in the whole Chol region, reaching to: Palenque and 
Ocosingo, and creating thereby a tremendous breach between the linguistic and the 
archzologic evidence. 
This change from / to 7 is most interesting. When I was working out my 
material in 1912 from the Moran manuscript and Membreno, I took it to be a time 
change during the intervening 200 years, between 1695 and 1895, but with the 
evidence of the Galindo manuscript of 1834, discovered a short time ago, this seems 
a very radical change to have come about in only 140 years. But whether tem- 
poral or geographical, there is no possible doubt that the entire region from Copan 
to Palenque is linguistically one. 
The Canon Ordofiez y Aguiar possessed, besides the text of the Popol Vuh, 
of which he has left us a translation distinct from that of Ximénez, a Tzental 
manuscript, which he called the Provanza de Votan, and had this survived it would 
certainly be one of our half-dozen most important Mayance documents, ranking 
with the Popol Vuh, the Xahila Cakchiquel Annals, the Torres Quiché History, 
and the Maya Chumayel and Ritual of the Bacabs. Without going into questions 
of mythology and origins involved in what Ordofiez and Nunez de la Vega tell us 
of Votan and his people, the statement of the former that the Votanides ruled from 
their capital Na-chan, the House of the Serpents, or Palenque, over three other 
divisions of their empire—Yucatan, Tulha (Ocosingo), and Chiquimula—comes 
close enough to history to merit some respect.’ 

1The Canon Ordofiez y Aguiar’s work here referred to is his Historia de la Creacion, etc.” which is still in 
manuscript, though partly printed from an incomplete transcript by Léon. (See Léon, 1907.) The citation 
here made is on page 134, Chapter IX, note 57, page 53 of the manuscript. Brasseur de Bourbourg’s change of 
Yucatan to Mayapan here is gratuitous and misleading. 
