In search of authority: Designating the act of writing in Maya Yucatec language (Sixteenth Century)

Abstract

This text aims to analyze the words that were used to designate the act of writing and the written documents in Maya Yucatec language during the second half of the sixteenth century. We consider that semantic history can help grasp the political revendications related to the use of the alphabetic writing on behalf of the indigenous people in Spanish America. Our corpus contains a series of text written in Maya Yucatec by the autochthonous authorities of different villages of the province between 1550 and 1580, as well as the first Maya-Castilian dictionary that was produced around 1580. We will show that the words chosen to designate the act of writing and the written documents reveal the search for granting the documents an authority through the evocation of the recording devices that were used to register the data.