Review: Historical Sociolinguistics of the Classic Maya Lowlands: The Generic Preposition Variable
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper applies a historical sociolinguistic framework to the study of Epigraphic Mayan (EMY), a logosyllabic writing system (ca. 400 BCE-CE 1700) innovated by speakers of the Ch’olan and Yucatecan (Mayan) languages. The focus is a morphological variable, the Generic Preposition, tä ~ ti. Following background information on Mayan historical linguistics and epigraphy, and a review of prior literature on the Generic Preposition, the paper describes the methodology, which involved the compilation of a comprehensive dataset by means of the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Looper and Macri 1991–2024). The dataset was used to study, by means of quantitative methods, the variable’s temporal and geographic distribution, on the one hand, and the influence of scriptal, linguistic, and social factors, on the other. Proxies for social factors had to be devised and implemented due to the paucity of explicit information about the ancient scribes. The results show that: 1) proto-Ch’olan likely exhibited *tä ~ *ti variation to start with; 2) that Epigraphic Mayan texts, during the Early Classic period, attests to the beginnings of this variation; 3) that the innovative variant, ti, likely spread from the Southeastern region (Copan, Quirigua) westward, and become the dominant variant overall during the Late Classic period; 4) that the West region appears to have resisted the innovative variant; 5) that the Northern region, likely the realm of Yucatecan inhabitants, witnessed a switch from ti variant, likely motivated by proto-Yucatecan *tiʔ, to Ch’olan-motivated ta (for tä) during the Terminal Classic period, likely as a result of influence of scribes from the West region, an influence supported in the rise in phonographic spellings of etyma exhibiting Ch’olan(-Tzeltalan) phonological innovations; and 6) that the proxies for social factors proved to be influential on the spread of the innovative variant ti, especially the presence references to diplomatic political strategies in the texts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".