Alphabet

Chʼol writers have agreed upon the following alphabet, based on the Latin alphabet, proposed and developed by Diaz Peñate in 1992.

Relationship with Mayan glyphs

The absence of glyphic material in Guatemala points that the calendar was a creation of the lowland Maya.^[3] Ch'ol has been considered one of the closer languages to several Mayan glyphs inscriptions.^[4] Lounsbury suggested that the ancient Palenqueños spoke a Proto-cholean language. A certain Palenque ruler has the glyph of a Quetzal head for his name and because the word for Quetzal in Chol is kuk, it is conjectured that his name was Lord Kuk.^[5] The affix Landa's I that occurs only with posterior date indicators retains resemblance with the idea of past time of Ch'ol, such in hobix 'five days hence,' hobixi 'five days ago.' As vocabularies of Ch'ol, Chontal, Chorti, and Tzotzil are far from complete, it is not possible to establish some cognates between these languages and Mayan glyphs.^[3]

An alternative hypothesis developed by Houston, Robertson, and Stuart proposed that Classic Maya inscriptions between A.D. 250 and 850 convey to Eastern Ch'olan languages, more related to Chorti language than Ch'ol language.^[6] However, there is no consensus around the topic.

Consonants

There are 21 consonantal segments in Chʼol. Below is the consonant inventory of Chʼol.^[7] Corresponding orthography is presented in the angle brackets next to the IPA symbols.

For the segments in the palatal column, [tʲ, tʲʼ] are palatalized alveolar consonants, and [tʃ, tʃʼ] are palato-alveolar affricates. Another property of the consonant inventory is that only the labial has a voiced segment [b], which corresponds to the voiced bilabial implosive [ɓ] in Proto-Mayan.^[8]

Alveolar sounds [n, t] are only heard as allophones of /ɲ, ts/.

Vowels

Chʼol has a six vowel system, as shown below in the vowel inventory.^[9]

The vowel ä is a distinctive segment in Chʼol, as in other Chʼolan languages. According to Kaufman and Norman (1984), long vowels in the Proto-Mayan language merged with their short counterparts in Chʼolan languages, except for *aa (long) and *a (short). These segments went under a sound change, in which *aa became a and *a became ä.^[10]

Syllable Structure

Chʼol can have CV, CVC, CVCC, CCVC, CCVCC as possible syllable structures. The most common ones are CV and CVC.^[11]

Like many other Mayan languages, Chʼol does not allow onsetless syllables, which means words that appear to start with vowel in fact have a glottal stop as the onset.

Although complex onsets and complex codas exist, the former only occur across morpheme boundaries, and the latter are limited to jC.^[12]

Stress

The main stress of a word typically falls on the ultima in Chʼol. This is true for most of the bisyllabic native words and polysyllabic loanwords. In the following examples, the stress is indicated by an acute accent on the nucleus.^[13]

Compound words also have the main stress on the ultima. A secondary stress, indicated by a grave accent, can be heard in the first part of a compound word. This weak stress usually goes on the ultima of the first part.^[14]

Affixation

Affixation is the main way of word formation in Chʼol. There are prefixes, infixes and suffixes. Suffixes are considerably more abundant than the other two.^[15]

Case marking

Like almost all other Mayan languages, Ch'ol has two sets of person markers: ergative and absolutive. The Mayan tradition is to label the former as Set A and the latter as Set B.^[18] Chʼol is a split ergative language: its morphosyntactic alignment varies according to aspect. With perfective aspect, ergative-absolutive alignment is used, whereas with imperfective aspect, we rather observe nominative-accusative.^[19]

Set A markers are generally considered as suffixes; however, Martínez Cruz (2007) and Arcos López (2009) categorized them as proclitics. These markers usually denote the agents of transitive verbs.

Note that all markers have phonologically conditioned allomorphs: 1st singular marker changes from k to j when it precedes another k, and 2nd singular and 3rd singular markers have glides inserted when they precede consonants.

Set B markers are suffixes. These markers usually denote the patients of transitive verbs or the core arguments of intransitive verbs.

There are three plural markers for plural case marking in Ch'ol – two clitics and one suffix. The two clitics can be attached either before the singular person markers or after the verbal roots.^[20]

The exclusive 1st plural marker has a shorter form loñ and a longer form lojoñ. Both are used interchangeably, except when it is attached before a singular marker, in which case only the shorter form is allowed. The plural suffix -ob is often realized as -o' in speech.

Verbal predicates

The basic word order is VOS. However, word order varies and VOS is not always grammatical: factors including animacy, definiteness, topicalization and focus contribute to determining which word order is appropriate.^[21] A Ch'ol simple transitive phrase is comprised minimally of a single transitive verb in the form of [ASP Set A + Verb + Set B]. In the case of non-agentive intransitive verbs, the cross-reference of the single argument is accomplished with either Set A or Set B depending on the aspect of the verb. Verbal predicates can have the following aspects: perfective, imperfective, progressive, inceptive, terminative, and potential.^[22]

Non-verbal predicates

This construction does not take aspect markers, in contrast to verbal predicates. It can be headed by nouns, adjectives, positionals, etc. The core argument only takes Set B markers.^[25]