Maya Morphology and Phonetics

he majority of Maya sub families use a VOS fixed word order, but some branches of Maya also allow for VSO.  Maya language is also considered agglutinating.

In Tzotzil Maya, a subfamily of the language found primarily in Chiapas, a compound use of prefixes and suffixes make words long and complex.  Summer Institute of Linguistics gives an example:

For example, ‘the teacher’ in Tzotzil is li jchanubtasvaneje; this expression consists of the following pieces: li ‘the’, j ‘human agent’, chan ‘learn’, ub ‘become’, tas ‘causative’, van ‘habitually’, ej ‘nominalizer’ and e ‘end of phrase’. So, the meaning of this word is literally ‘one who habitually causes (someone) to learn something’.

Another interesting aspect of Maya phonetics is the use of glottalized constants indicated by an apostrophe after the constant.

For example, there are three glottalized consonants in the Tzeltal phrase c'ux c'ajc'al, which means ‘it’s hot out’, or literally, ‘the sun/day hurts’.

Maya language does not have voiced and voiceless stops like in English, but instead have plain an ejective (glottalized) stops which are spoken with a vocal pop of the voice.

Maya languages also have numerical classifiers in which certain shaped objects will have a different numerical classifier (such as flat objects versus round objects).
Tense in Maya is fairly simple as most Mayan languages use only two tenses (present/past or future/non-future).  Aspect seems to be much more important in Mayan languages as there have been seven identified aspects: incompletive, progressive, completive/punctual, imperative, potential/future, optative, and perfective.

For example, "kinach'ayo "You are hitting me"" can be broken down into:

k-tense/present; in-1st person DO; a-2nd person agent; ch'ay-to hit; o-incompletive.

Modern day Mayan Family

Any interesting fact about Yucatec Maya is its indigenous sign language found to be used in at least one Yucatan community.
Here are some examples of Yucatec Maya words and their translation in Spanish and English:

English (Español)

Yucatec Maya

One (Uno)

Hun

Two (Dos)

Ka'a

Three (Tres)

Óox

Four (Quatro)

Kan

Five (Cinco)

Ho

Man (Hombre)

Xiib

Woman (Mujer)

Ch'up

Dog (Perro)

Peek'

Sun (Sol)

K'iin

Moon (Luna)

Uh

Water (Agua)

Ha'

White (Blanco)

Sak

Yellow (Amarillo)

K'an

Red (Rojo)

Chak

Black (Negro)

Boox

Eat (Comer)

Hanal

See (Ver)

Il

Hear (Oír)

U'uy

Sing (Cantar)

K'aay