Comparative Xinkan Dictionary: Xinkan – Spanish – English
© 2023, Chris Rogers
Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge peers, colleagues, mentors, and students at both the University of Utah and Brigham Young University for a variety of roles in the compilation of this dictionary. They have served as sounding boards for ideas and analyses, and they have aided me in various ways in editing, data entry, and suggestions for improvement.
I also gratefully acknowledge the hardworking scholars and developers at SIL International. This dictionary would not have been a reality without Fieldworks Language Explorer. But I also received significant help with using the program from the online Google group from a variety of people, most notably Beth Bryson and Ken Zook. Thank you for your help.
I am grateful for the past and present Xinkas who taught me what was left to know about the Xinkan languages. The speakers recorded in Terry and Lyle’s field materials are Cipriano, Gómez Yermo, Francisco Marroquín, Alberto de López Vásquez, Guillermo López Martinez, Tomás García, Eugenio López, Teofila, Lucio Solís Pérez, Ciraco Santo, Manuel de Jesús Pérez, Santos López Villata, Encarnación de la Cruz Pérez, and Vicente Morales Gónzales. The speakers I worked with personally are Carlos Méndez, Juan Santos Benito, Nicolás Vásquez Hernández, Félix Hernández, Herlindo Pablo García, Pablo Esquite García, Raymundo Hernández Godínez, Ángel Vásquez, Ignacio Pérez Realejo and Jorge Pérez Gonzáles. I am also grateful to COPXIG (Consejo del Pueblo Xinka de Guatemala) and PAPXIG (Parlamento del Pueblo Xinka de Guatemala) for their interest in and support of my work.
Lastly, I’m grateful to be fortunate to have a supportive family who always cheers at my successes; and my dogs Soldier, Cookie, and Nova - they kept me company often while I worked on this dictionary.
This dictionary is the result of decades of study by various linguists and native speakers of each of the Xinkan languages. A Xinkan dictionary has been a goal since, at least, Manuel Maldonado de Matos wrote about the Xinkan languages for the first time (Maldonado de Matos 1770). Other linguists have also prepared dictionaries or vocabulary lists (Fernández 1938; Calderón 1908; Lehmann 1920; Schumann Galvez 1967; Sachse 2004). A comparative dictionary was started in the 1970s when Terrence Kaufman and Lyle Campbell conducted linguistic fieldwork on the Xinkan languages. At that time there were not many Xinkan speakers left, and languages (and identity) were being hidden due to the political agitation and the civil war in Guatemala. Nevertheless, Terry and Lyle found speakers of three of the Xinkan languages and began working with them and recording and documenting information in and about their languages. Specifically, they were able to record words, examples sentences, and stories in Guazacapan Xinka, Chiquimulilla Xinka, and Jumaytepeque Xinka. Their work resulted in boxes full of pages of paper and note cards with details about the grammatical and lexical systems of these languages.
Many years later, around 2006, Lyle Campbell – then working at the University of Utah in the USA – started a project to publish the Xinkan materials helped by various students in the linguistics department and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF grant 0605368). I came to the University of Utah in January 2007 and participated in the Xinkan documentation project which had three main goals: (1) publish a comparative dictionary, (2) publish a comparative grammar, and (3) publish a volume of Xinkan stories. These publications were planned as printed materials in conjunction with audio recordings being made available online. I wrote the comparative grammar as my PhD dissertation in 2010 and revised it and published it in 2016 in English. A Spanish version of the grammar was finished in 2019 but has not been published (but is available online as Rogers (2019). The comparative dictionary and the volume of stories were never finished during the Xinkan project at the University of Utah, but all of Terry’s and Lyle’s Xinkan materials were archived at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) at the University of Texas, Austin (Campbell n.d.).
After continual study of the Xinkan languages (Rogers 2014; Rogers 2020; Rogers 2022; Rogers 2018), sometime around 2016 I started working on a comprehensive database of lexical information in the Xinkan languages and decided to produce a comparative dictionary. The dictionary project at the University of Utah had many problems in the analyses of the Xinkan languages and in the software application used in making the dictionary (FileMaker Pro) and so I had to start from scratch with the creation of the lexical database that would serve as the foundation of a comparative dictionary. However, Instead of developing the database infrastructure from code (e.g., using SQL and Python), I opted to use Fieldworks Language Explorer which uses XML format for the organization of information as a robust out-of-the-box option for the database (SIL International 2023). This process resulted in a unique lexical analysis of the Xinkan languages compared to other Xinkan language projects (such as the one at the University of Utah). While I would not be able to present the current dictionary without the study and work we did at the University of Utah, in reality, the outcomes are different in analysis, format, and organization.
I hope that this dictionary will serve the Xinkan community, and, through it, they can recognize their linguistic and cultural uniqueness. I also hope that this dictionary is useful for all Guatemalans, linguists, and researchers of Mesoamerica.
Español-Xinkan
English-Xinkan