El arte De Lengua Cacchí para bien común y estudios Diacrónicos de la gramática Q’eqchi’.

Abstract

The colonial grammar titled Arte de Lengua Cacchí para Bien comun is one of the main sources for diachronic studies on the Q’eqchi’ language. Its origin, author and date of creation are unknown. One of the copies was made in 1875 by Hermann Berendt, a German anthropologist, and also contains his observations on the examples provided in the text, which he made with the help of a native Q’eqchi’ speaker. Therefore, this copy not only represents the state of the language spoken in the times when the manuscript was created, but also supplies information about the language of the second half of the XIX century. Considering as well the modern language data, the evolution of some fragments of the Q’eqchi’ grammar (pronouns, prepositions, verbal system, syntactic processes) is reconstructed, stage by stage, during four hundred years approximately.