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When visiting Mayan ruins outside of Tulum, Mexico the guide told me his father still lives in the Yucatán forest and his primary language being Maya (and unrel
by rhcom2 8y ago
When visiting Mayan ruins outside of Tulum, Mexico the guide told me his father still lives in the Yucatán forest and his primary language being Maya (and unrelated, smokes a lot of pot apparently). I ignorantly assumed these languages disappeared with their civilizations.
- schoen 8y agoThe Mayan languages stopped being written, but not spoken, by their language community as a result of the Spanish conquest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_languages#Writing_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_languages#Writing_system... In particular, this was an effort to suppress Maya religion that led to an almost complete loss of knowledge of the original writing system. Later on Maya started being written with Latin characters, but there are still lots of native speakers who are functionally literate in Spanish but not in Maya.