Mayan Languages - Grammar

Grammar

The morphology of Mayan languages is simpler than that of other Mesoamerican languages, yet its morphology is still considered agglutinating and polysynthetic. Verbs are marked for aspect or tense, the person of the subject, the person of the object (in the case of transitive verbs), and for plurality of person. Possessed nouns are marked for person of possessor. There are no cases or genders in Mayan languages.

Read more about this topic:  Mayan Languages

Famous quotes containing the word grammar:

    The new grammar of race is constructed in a way that George Orwell would have appreciated, because its rules make some ideas impossible to express—unless, of course, one wants to be called a racist.
    Stephen Carter (b. 1954)

    Grammar is a tricky, inconsistent thing. Being the backbone of speech and writing, it should, we think, be eminently logical, make perfect sense, like the human skeleton. But, of course, the skeleton is arbitrary, too. Why twelve pairs of ribs rather than eleven or thirteen? Why thirty-two teeth? It has something to do with evolution and functionalism—but only sometimes, not always. So there are aspects of grammar that make good, logical sense, and others that do not.
    John Simon (b. 1925)

    Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.
    Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)