4 ms·

Yes - but note that there are about 30 Mayan languages, not just one.

• thaumasiotes 12y ago
  How is this measured? For calibration, how many English languages are there now?
  • XaspR8d 12y ago
    Well there isn't a nice and easy test, but in linguistics it tends to come down to some measure of mutual intelligibility. How much meaning can a speaker of Variety A garner from a speaker of Variety B? And vice versa. For tricky distinctions, throw in some historical and social analysis to taste. I don't know much about Mesoamerica but I believe the "30 languages" claim refers to the count of current languages descended from a single ancestor, not the languages of Classic Maya. (EDITED to avoid implying "Proto" and "Classic" Maya were one in the same--they were separated by millenia!) English is a particularly tricky issue because there are so many "standard" Englishes understood by many but natively spoken by none, and because lingua francas tend to become such a smooth continuum between their different lects. However for the purposes of the mutual intelligibility tests, the vast majority of world Englishes would still fall under one "language". Many that don't are already labelled distinctly, either as creoles/pidgins, or from historical divergence (e.g Scots, Frisian). English' divergence is little compared to that of, say, Arabic, and I suspect any two random English speakers in the world would understand each other much much more easily than any two Mayan speakers.
    • mchaver 12y ago
      I believe you are correct about the 30 (not 100% sure on the number) Mayan languages being ancestor of Proto-Maya. Classical Maya belongs to the Ch'ol branch and is mostly likely a written form of the parent language of Ch'olti' (extinct) and Ch'orti'. Here are some random facts about the Mayan languages and Maya people: Yucatec is the most spoken of the Mayan languages, located in the Yucatan peninsula. Interesting story about Korean immigration to Mexico (Spanish only, some early immigrants ended up in Yucatan and one lady mentions that many learned Yucateco before Spanish because the worked with they Mayas): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmDTrvddD_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmDTrvddD_8 Popul Wuj is written in K'iche'. Trippy videos about the Popul Wuj: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTeOYNsBHvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTeOYNsBHvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDt9rQrGp1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDt9rQrGp1I Lacondon people managed to escape Spanish control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nSb36zgGzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nSb36zgGzo