In the World: Murmurs of Mayan
Along with its stunningly accurate calendar and majestic pyramidal architecture, the Mayan civilization deserves recognition for another unique feature: its language. Mayan languages are a rich source of data for linguists aiming to develop a universal theory of language, but like many of the world’s tongues, their speakers are steadily dwindling in number. MIT undergraduate John Berman spent the past summer in a remote village in Mexico studying Chol — a Mayan language spoken in the southern state of Chiapas — in the hopes of capturing some important features of its grammar and vocabulary. Working first with a team of researchers led by Jessica Coon PhD ’10, and later for several weeks on his own, Berman immersed himself in a Chol-speaking community to document and understand some of the language’s unique attributes.“With Native American languages, they’re dying fairly quickly — whole families of languages, even,” Berman says. “It’s important to...