El paralelismo, una forma retórica común a muchas tradiciones orales en el mundo, ha sido objeto de numerosos estudios antropológicos y lingüísticos. Las estructuras paralelas parecen como marcadores discursivos fundamentales de géneros rituales, y ornamentos estilísticos insertados en otros géneros de las tradiciones orales mayas. La extensión del fenómeno, tanto en el espacio del mundo maya y mesoamericano, como en el tiempo desde las inscripciones glíficas hasta ahora, la permanencia y a la vez la variedad de las estructuras composicionales, llevan a pensar que se trata también de un procedimiento cognoscitivo: corresponde a una percepción, interpretación y memorización del mundo. La descripción detallada de las formas y usos del paralelismo permite matizar la rudimentaria evaluación “dual” del fenómeno, poniendo en relieve la multiplicidad de asociaciones, construcciones e invenciones que se manifiestan en la lengua y en la cultura.

Les populations de langues cholanes ont eu longtemps une situation centrale, tant géographiquement que culturellement, au sein de l’aire maya. Le paysage actuel présente une situation bien différente : avec une répartition géographique devenue périphérique et une démographie réduite, deux des trois langues cholanes « survivantes » sont déjà classées parmi les langues en danger par l’Unesco. L’objectif de cet article est de rendre compte des principales phases dans l’évolution des frontières spatiales des populations cholanes à travers leurs histoires et de donner quelques clefs pour comprendre leurs mouvements. Une telle étude aurait certes pu se contenter de données historiques, mais des considérations d’ordres ethnologique et linguistique permettent d’affiner les paramètres nécessaires à la caractérisation de ces frontières et d’apprécier les interrelations de ces populations entre elles et avec l’« extérieur ».

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The writing-image association is one of the fundamental characteristics of art in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. This combination was particularly developed and used by the Maya for almost 20 centuries. Far from constituting only an artistic process, the joint use of these two modes of visual communication allowed the transcription of a very complex symbolic thought and was one of the main tools of the propaganda of the (political) power of the Maya elites. In this article, the main principles that govern the pre-Hispanic Maya scriptural and iconological systems will be exposed, especially insisting on the continuum comprised by text and image in their artistic expressions. Here will be particularly examined and discussed the swinging and mixing games between iconic or non-iconic figurativeness and symbolism in the construction of the signs used to generate meanings with which they entertain relationships of different kinds, often metaphorical, based on cultural conventions, rich of teachings for our understanding of the ancient Maya.

Over the years, research in ethno-linguistics contributed to gather corpora in a wide range of languages, cultures and topics. In the present work, we are investigating ritual speech in Yucatec Maya. The ritual discourse tends to have a cyclic structure with repetitive patterns and various types of parallelisms between speech sections. Previous studies have revealed an intricate connexion between a speech's structure and vocal productions, in particular through temporal aspects including rhythm, pauses and durations of different speech sections. To further investigate our findings by relying more strongly on the acoustic recordings, automatic speech recognition tools may become of great help, in particular to test various linguistic and ethnolinguistic hypotheses. Unfortunately, Yucatec Maya, with less than one million native speakers, is an under-resourced language with respect to digital resources. As a total, 24 minutes of ritual speech from three performances were manually transcribed by expert linguists in Yucatec and a basic pronunciation dictionary for Yucatec was created accordingly. The transcribed acoustic recordings were then automatically time-aligned on a phonetic and lexical basis. Automatic segmentations were used to measure tempo changes, durations of breath units as well as to examine their link with the structure of the ritual text.