The Popol Vuh, or “sacred book” of the Quiches of Guatemala was published by the Abbé Brasseur in 1861. The study ([51]) is an effort to analyze the names of the gods which it contains and to extract their symbolic significance.
The Chane-abal dialect of Chiapas ([52]) is a mixed jargon, the component elements of which I have endeavored to set forth from MS. material collected by Dr. Berendt.
Another language of Chiapas is the “Chapanecan.” In ([57]) and also in the introduction to ([45]) I have shown, from unpublished sources, its close relationship to the Mangue of Nicaragua.
The Mazatec language of Oaxaca, is examined for the first time in ([56]) from material supplied me by Mr. A. Pinart. It is shown to have relations with the Chapanecan and others with Costa Rican tongues.
The article on the Chinantec, ([56]) a little-known tongue of Oaxaca, is an analysis of its forms and a vocabulary from the Doctrina of Father Barreda and notes of Dr. Berendt.
The Cakchiquels occupied most of the soil of Guatemala at the period of the Conquest, and their tongue was that chosen to be the “Metropolitan” language of the diocess. In ([53]) I gave a translation of an unpublished grammar of it, the MS. being one in the archives of the American Philosophical Society. In some respects it is superior to the grammar of Flores.
The higher culture of the tribes of Central America and Mexico gives a special interest to the study of their languages, oral and written; for with some of them we find moderately well-developed methods of recording ideas.
Much of this culture was intimately connected with their astrological methods and these with their calendar. This remarkable artificial computation of time, based on the relations of the numerals 13 and 20 applied to various periods, was practically the same among the Mayas, Nahuas, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, Chapanecs, Otomis and Tarascos—seven different linguistic stocks—and unknown elsewhere on the globe. The study of it ([30]) is exclusively from its linguistic and symbolic side.
It is strange that nowhere in North America was any measure of weight known to the natives. Their lineal measures were drawn chiefly from the proportions of the human body. They are investigated in ([31]).
Under the names Chontalli and Popoluca, both Nahuatl words indicating “foreigners,” ethnographers have included tribes of wholly diverse lineage. In ([32]) I have shown that some are Tzentals, others Tequistlatecas, Ulvas, Mixes, Zapotecs, Nahuas, Lencas and Cakchiquels, thus doing away with the confusion introduced by these inappropriate ethnic terms.