Page:The Annals of the Cakchiquels.djvu/57

Rh common letter, and separated by a short pause from the preceding or following vowel."

The late Dr. Berendt illustrated the phonetic value of such "cut " letters, by the example of two English words where the same letter terminates one word and begins the next, and each is clearly but rapidly pronounced, thus, the ꜫ is pronounced like two gutteral ks in "break kettle;" the ꜭ like the two cs in "magic candle," etc.

There would appear to have been other "cut" letters in the old dialects of Cakchiquel, as in Guzman we find the pp and thth, as in the Maya, but later writers dropped them.

I may dispense with a discussion of the literature of the Cakchiquel language, having treated that subject so lately as last year, in the introduction to the Grammar of the Cakchiquel, which I then translated and edited for the American Philosophical Society. As will be seen by reference to that work, it is quite extensive, and much of it has been preserved. I have examined seven dictionaries of the tongue, all quite comprehensive; manuscript copies of all are in the United States. None of these, however, has been published; and we must look forward to the dictionary now preparing by Dr. Stoll, of Zurich, as probably the first to see the light.

The Maya race, in nearly all its branches, showed its intellectual superiority by the eagerness with which it turned to literary pursuits, as soon as some of its members had learned the alphabet. I have brought forward some striking testimony