Resumo

PETATILLO CHAN, Rodrigo. Toponymy in Yucatec Maya of (i)x K’o’opch’e’en, Quintana Roo. Estud. cult. maya [online]. 2024, vol.63, pp.221-250.  Epub 26-Ago-2024. ISSN 0185-2574.  https://doi.org/10.19130/iifl.ecm.63.2024/00171s0xw38.

The study and description of toponyms is one of the oldest topics in linguistics (Levinson, 2003) and philology. It is an area of study that explains the history of a region and describes topographical features of the landscape. Place names encode multiple pieces of information that a linguistic and anthropological analysis helps to reveal. The objective of this article is to describe the toponyms of the Yucatec Maya of Kopchen, Quintana Roo, focusing on their meanings through the description of their lexical-morphological and phonological properties. The ethnography of communication (Gumperz and Hymes 1964) is used here, employing semi-structured interviews for the elaboration of the corpus. This article shows that the morphemes that form the native Mayan toponyms reveal information directly related to the place, in contrast to the toponyms that come from Spanish. All toponyms are multimorphemic; lexical morphemes refer to different categories of words. The head of a toponym was crucial in determining endocentric constructions and exocentric constructions. Morphologically, only the feminine gender or individualizing mark (i)x and the suffix -il are observed in toponyms. However, at the clausal level there are more inflectional morphemes in toponyms. Phonologically, toponyms borrowed from Spanish adapt to the phonological rules of Yucatec Maya with vowel lengthening and then receiving tones. The loanwords become more and more complex according to the different productions of the speakers. This article reveals several points that help the literature in general to broaden its knowledge about toponymy.

Palavras-chave : Toponymy; Compound; Borrowing; Linguistic Adaptation; Yucatec Maya.

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