Introduction

This chaper deals with two topics that have been amply researched by Lyle Campbell: the application of philology to address matters of interest in the historical linguistics of American Indian languages, including Mayan hieroglyphic writing (Campbell 1984, 1990); and the scrutiny of loanwords in order to assess relative chronologies of culture historical and linguistic developments, including evidence of past contacts between different ethnolinguistic groups (Campbell 1970, 1972, 1986, 2000; Campbell and Kaufman 1976; Justeson et al. 1985). More specifically, this chapter addresses the question of the *k(’) > *ch(’) shift in the Mayan languages, focusing on the problem of its chronology and attestations in Epigraphic Mayan, and the nature of scribal practices and their connection to linguistic ideologies.

This question has recently resurfaced: Law et al. (2014) have put forth a proposal for a late application of this shift among already differentiated Ch’olan and Tzeltalan languages, which they argue is attested in real time primarily from the beginning of Late Classic (600–900 ce) period. Their proposal would revise the previous model, based on both comparative linguistic and epigraphic evidence, that called for the application of the shift among speakers of a largely undifferentiated community of Greater Tzeltalan speakers, by the first half of the Late Preclassic (400 bce–250 ce) period, possibly by c.200–100 bce (Kaufman 1976; Kaufman and Norman 1984; Justeson et al. 1985; Justeson and Fox 1989; Kaufman and Justeson 2007), and more conservatively no later than c. 250-400 ce, roughly corresponding to the first half of the Early Classic period (c.200-600 ce), when spellings of ka-ka-wa for proto-Ch’olan (pCh’) *käkäw “cacao,” a loanword from Mixe-Zoquean, are first attested. That etymon presents the right conditions to have experienced the shift, and yet, as Campbell (2000: 5) has noted, it did not, demonstrating that the shift must have occurred prior to its earliest occurrences. Law et al.'s (2014) proposal would revise the timing of shift to between c.600 and 900 ce, and would require that we accept that scribes ignored three phonemic contrasts (*q vs. *k, *q’ vs. *k, and *nh vs. n).

This chapter assesses and critiques Law et al.'s (2014) proposal.