Thou teaches him.
Lay cambezic, He teaches him.
Here, however, I must note a difference of opinion between eminent
grammatical critics. Friedrich Mueller considers all such forms as--
Nac-en, I ascended,
to exhibit "the predicative power of the true verb," basing his opinion
on the analogy of such expressions as--
Ten batab en, I (am) a chief.[31-1]
M. Lucien Adam, on the other hand, says:--"The intransitive preterit
_nac-en_ may seem morphologically the same as the Aryan _as-mi_; but
here again, _nac_ is a verbal noun, as is demonstrated by the plural of
the third person _nac-ob_, 'the ascenders.' _Nac-en_ comes to mean
'ascender [formerly] me.'"[31-2]
I am inclined to think that the French critic is right, and that, in
fact, there is no true verb in the Maya, but merely verbal nouns,
_nomina actionis_, to which the pronouns stand either in the possessive
or objective relations, or, more remotely, in the possessive relation to
another verbal noun in apposition, as _cah_, _cuchi_, etc. The
importance of this point in estimating the structure of the language
will be appreciated by those who have paid any attention to the science
of linguistics.
The objective form of the conjugation is composed of the simple personal
pronouns of both persons, together with the possessive of the agent and
the particle _ci_, which conveys the accessory notion of present action
towards. Thus, from _moc_, to tie:--
Ten c in moc ech, I tie thee,
literally, I my present tying thee.
These refinements of analysis have, of course, nothing to do with the
convenience of the language for practical purposes. As it has no dual,
no inclusive and exclusive plurals, no articles nor substantive verb, no
transitions, and few irregular verbs, its forms are quickly learned. It
is not polysynthetic, at any rate, not more so than French, and its
words undergo no such alteration by agglutination as in Aztec and
Algonkin. Syncopated forms are indeed common, but to no greater extent
than in colloquial English. The unit of the tongue remains the word, not
the sentence, and we find no immeasurable words, expressing in
themselves a whole paragraph, such as grammarians like to quote from the
Eskimo, Aztec, Qquichua and other highly synthetic languages.
The position of words in a sentence is not dissimilar from that in
English. The adjective precedes the noun it qualifies,
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