| author | Pedro Beltran de Santa Rosa |
|---|---|
| life | ca. 1690 - 1760 |
| title | Arte del idioma maya |
| ms. finished | 1742 |
| content | Morphology-centered grammar. Extensive sections on particles and lexical fields. |
| size | 210 pp. |
| comment | Divided in numbered articles and paragraphs. Written in the Convento Capitular de San Francisco, Mérida, Yuc. No ms. extant |
| editions |
Beltran de Santa Rosa, Pedro 1746, Arte del idioma maya, reducido a sucinctas reglas, y semilexicon yucateco. México D.F.: Viuda de d. J. Bernardo de Hogal. Beltrán de Santa Rosa María de Lima, Pedro 1859, Arte del idioma maya reducido a sucintas reglas y semilexicon yucateco. Mérida, Yuc.: J.D. Espinosa. (2nd edition). Some corrections made by the author to the first edition. Bolles, David 2001, Arte de el idioma maya reducido a succintas reglas, y semilexicon yucateco por el R. P. Fr. Pedro Beltrán. http://www.famsi.org/reports/96072/beltrangmr.htm Unchanged HTML copy of the ms.– There is also a downloadable, but not searchable pdf edition. Beltrán de Santa Rosa, Pedro 2002, Arte del idioma maya reducido a succinctas reglas y semilexicón yucateco. Edición anotada y crítica de René Acuña. México D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas (Fuentes para el estudio de la cultura maya, 17). Critical edition based on the first edition of 1746, on a copy manually emended by Beltrán himself, conserved in the John Carter Brown Library. Original pagination; Spanish orthography lightly modernized. |
| secondary | Edition by Acuña, pp. 15-26 |
Beltrán's biographical dates are unknown. He was born and lived in Yucatán and enjoyed a bilingual and bicultural education (possibly by a Spanish father and a Maya mother). He became a Francsican. From 1742 on, Beltrán was profesor de lengua maya in the college of Mérida. There is no trace of him after 1757.
Beltrán does not know Coronel. His grammar is explicitly based on San Buenaventura 1684, but often critical of it. Part of the differences is due to diachronic change. Occasionally, Beltrán is also critical of Latin-based descriptions of Maya, although in general he uses concepts of the Latin tradition.
For the lexical part of his book, Beltrán uses the Viena Bocabulario and the Calepino de Motul.
| article | page | title | content |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Abecedario | pronunciation of letters | |
| 1 | 5 | partes de la oración y, primero, del nombre | case, gender, number, comparison |
| 2 | 8 | pronombre | four paradigms of personal pronominal elements plus reflexive pronoun |
| 3 | 13 | verbo | general rules for conjugation; particular rules for each of the four conjugations |
| 4 | 32 | sinalefa y syncopa | apocope of word-final vowel; syncope of internal vowel |
| 5 | 32 | exemplares de las conjugaciones | |
| 41 | Conjugación primera | paradigms of intransitive verbs | |
| 45 | Conjugación segunda | paradigms of derived transitive verbs | |
| 50 | Conjugación tercera | paradigms of transitive root verbs | |
| 53 | Conjugación quarta | paradigms of transitivized verbs | |
| 6 | 56 | verbos irregulares | pronominal elements and verboids as predicates; irregular verbs |
| 7 | 75 | mutanzas de los verbos | dependent state conjugation |
| 8 | 78 | explicación de los tiempos | tense and aspect marking in different interclausal relations |
| 9 | 84 | verbos de las quatro conjugaciones con pretéritos y futuros | alphabetical lists of verbs of the four conjugations with their past and future forms |
| 10 | 125 | preposiciones, adverbios y conjunciones | alphabetical list of prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions with their use |
| 11 | 153 | los números, tabla de multiplicar, y partículas para contar | numerals, multiplication, numeral classifiers |
| 12 | 164 | partes del alma y del cuerpo, y sus enfermedades | lexical fields of body-part (Mayan lemmas), cognition, emotion and disease (Spanish lemmas) terminology |
| 13 | 172 | parentezcos y sus grados | kinship terminology (Spanish lemmas) |
| 14 | 176 | animales y aves | animals (Spanish lemmas) |
| 15 | 179 | cosas manuales de una casa | household items and other vocables (Spanish lemmas) |
| 187 | días festivos | holidays | |
| 188 | advertencia final | correction concerning Beltrán's predecessors |
Occasionally, Beltrán marks features of Mayan vowels by acute, grave and circumflex accents, but does not explain these symbols. They bear no simple relation to phonological features of modern Maya.
Some articles are highly original, among them #1, 4, 5 and 11. In article 5, Beltrán recognizes that several classes of verbs have a regular contrast between transitive and intransitive conjugation. #11 contains the first description and inventory of numeral classifiers.