K'ekchi Grammar: An Introduction

K'ekchi Grammar: An Introduction  By George Max

K‘EQCHÎ GRAMMAR – An Introduction aims to put together a simple yet concise and precise grammar for the K’eqchî Mayan Language of Guatemala (hereinafter KC.) It formally introduces the grammatical rules of a language that had remained only spoken for a yet undetermined period of time. Hence, the main emphasis of this book is on writing correct KC phrases and sentences.
Firstly, it begins with a brief presentation of subject pronouns and an introduction to the main verb forms. This is followed by sections presenting the main tenses and other that characterize this natural language. Then, a good portion of the book covers the organization of the parts of speech inherent to KC. Lastly, sections on building questions, spelling, and combining and writing sentences can be found at the end.

Overview of KC’s grammar:

▪ The main grammatical tenses are the Present, Past, Preterite and Future. These are followed by the Continuous and Progressive aspects and then the Pseudo-Perfect, Modals and Imperatives.
▪ The Passive Voice constitutes the third grammatical construction in KC after the active and antipassive voices.
▪ The main parts of speech include Pronouns, Nouns, Articles, Prepositions, and Adjectives.
▪ Two main types of questions are defined in KC: Yes/No and Information questions.
▪ The main rules to derive the different verb forms used in the three grammatical constructions of KC; namely, the active, passive and antipassive voices, are defined under Spelling.
▪ Combining Sentences and Writing Good Sentences provide guidelines to build phrases and sentences following the proper KC syntax.

The organization of this grammar guide allows an overall study of the structure of the K’eqchî Mayan Language. Only basic information is provided in each section in order to keep the introductory character of this book. Nevertheless, there are conjugation sets, classification tables, sentence structures and plenty of examples that successively illustrate different aspects of the language as much as possible. The definition of the spelling framework and the provision of methods on combining sentences are also important parts in the constitution of this gram-mar book. Lastly, an Appendix contains a selected list of transitive and intransitive verbs along with other derived verb forms as a reference for the study of KC grammar.