Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiché Maya - Mesoweb

oth glottalized forms. As a result, the single letter “c” may have four equally plausible
readings.
For example, the word cac might be read as kak (their gourd); kaq (red); kaq (their
peccary); kak' (their turkey); qak (our gourd); qak' (our turkey); qaq (our peccary); kaq'
(their tongues); qaq' (our tongues); k'ak' (new); k'aq (to throw); q'ak (flea); or q'aq' (fire).
Four other combinations are possible which have no known meaning in modern usage, but
which might have existed in the archaic language of the sixteenth century.
The glottalized forms of other consonants and vowels are also either ignored or used
inconsistently in the Ximénez manuscript. Thus there is often no difference between the
written form of che (toward him/her) and che' (tree). Imagine the difficulties for the reader
when the words tzaq (to thrown down) and tz'aq (to frame or build) appear with the same
spelling.
If this weren’t confusing enough, words which appear to be contextually the same may
appear with variant spellings. The Quiché authors who composed the text in the sixteenth
century were pioneers in the use of a foreign alphabet to represent their language in written
form. They did not have the luxury of officially recognized dictionaries with standardized
spellings, nor did they have computers to scan for errors. In light of the enormous difficulties
involved in its composition, the Popol Vuh manuscript is remarkably consistent, although
discrepancies in spelling inevitably appear in the text.
It is impossible to know how many variant spellings crept into the text as a result of
scribal errors made by Ximénez when he copied his version from the original manuscript. At
one point, Ximénez copied eleven lines of the same passage of text twice (folio 8r). He caught
his mistake and crossed out the repeated section. If no scribal errors were made, the two
transcriptions should be identical, yet Edmonson found an average of one discrepancy every
five lines in the duplicated section (Edmonson 1971, 46). Without the original document
composed by the Quichés, a perfect reading of the text is impossible to verify.
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