Kaufman Reconstructs a Family Tree for Thirty Living Languages

Mayan historical linguistics compares the more than thirty living Mayan languages spoken today across Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, establishing the regular sound correspondences between them needed to reconstruct their common ancestor, proto-Mayan, and to work out how and when the family split into its modern branches. The comparative method was applied systematically to the family from the 1960s, most influentially in Terrence Kaufman's reconstructions of proto-Mayan phonology and vocabulary, which gave the family a rigorous internal chronology comparable to what had long existed for Indo-European languages.

The discipline is the linguistic counterpart to Maya epigraphy, working from living speech rather than carved inscriptions, and the two are cross checked against each other constantly, since a proposed reading of a Classic period glyph has to be consistent with what comparative reconstruction says the language actually sounded like at that date. Mayan historical linguistics also documents a real continuity between the language of Classic Maya religious inscriptions and the languages living Maya communities still speak and pray in today, evidence the atlas relies on wherever it connects Classic period religious vocabulary to living Maya practice.