in its purity in Yucatan, more in phonetic modifications than in grammatical structure or lexical roots. Such, however, is the fixedness of this linguistic family in its peculiarities, that a most competent student of the Cakchiquel has named the period of two thousand years as the shortest required to explain the difference between this tongue and the Maya.[1]
About the same length of time was that assigned since the arrival of this nation in Guatemala, by the local historian, Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzman, who wrote in the seventeenth century, from an examination of their most ancient traditions, written and verbal.[2]Indeed, none of these affined tribes claimed to be autochthonous. All pointed to some distant land as the home of their ancestors, and religiously preserved the legends, more or less mythical, of their early wanderings until they had reached their present seats. How strong the mythical element in them is, becomes evident when we find in them the story of the first four brothers as their four primitive rulers and leaders, a myth which I have elsewhere shown prevailed extensively over the American continent, and is distinctly traceable to the adoration of the four cardinal points, and the winds from them.[3]
- ↑ Dr. Otto Stoll, Zur Ethnographie der Republik Guatemala, p. 157 (Zurich, 1884), on the phonetic laws which have controlled the divergence of the two tongues, Cakchiquel and Maya. See the same writer in his "Supplementary Remarks on a Grammar of the Cakchiquel Language," translated by Dr. D. G. Brinton, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, for 1885.
- ↑ Recordacion Florida, Discurso Historial, Natural, Material, Militar y Politico del Reino de Goathemala. Lib. II, Chap. I.
- ↑ Myths of the New World, p. 181; American Hero-Myths, pp. 44, 73, 80, 162, etc.
