By accident really. I found a book called “Of Cabbages and Kings, Tales from Zinacantan”, and was able to decode a lot from both what little was explained in the book, and deducing from what I had learned from Cherokee. Then there was a web site called Sk’op Sotz’leb which went into more detail and had some pronunciations. After a few years I had gotten my hands on “The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantan” (And to this day it is my all time favorite translating dictionary. So much so that Robert M. Luaghlin is one of a very few people I revere).
It was kind of odd, as when I first started learning the language, I wasn’t that keen into it. Heck, I really didn’t like Cherokee all that well either. I found many Algonquian and Siouan languages to be far more prettier, but I actually found really good references for Tzotzil here…In this backward hillbilly hole in the ground, 😶 , and Cherokee through a mail order company. Anyway, the more I learned about the Tzotzil language, the more interesting it became, and the more I wanted to learn it.
Granted, I was never going to be fluent (just don’t live in that kind of area), but I did surprise the only person I ever talked with who knew the language. So I didn’t do all that bad. (The area I had the most difficulty with were the numbers, and that guy helped me to understand them. Actually, he helped me a lot. Tzotzil seems to count backwards after 20, but when you translate the words, it makes more sense. Jun scha’vinik = 21, but cha’vinik = 40. Which my mind always thought jun scha’vinik as 41, but once I learned to “translate” the numbers, jun scha’vinik : jun (one) s (3rd person possessive) cha’ (two) vinik (man). “One [digit] of the second man” thus 21, as 20 is all the digits of the first man, and now we’re counting the next digits of the next man).
Anyway, I can’t get too descriptive. 24 years of a bad marriage, chronic pains, and dealing with some really harsh health issues, my mind is pretty darn wrecked, but I am hoping I can at least pull off some feats before it gets worse, HAH!
Ok! What I have at the moment (for casual text).
And a line from “The Jaguar and the Jaguarundi” as written in “Of Cabbages and Kings, Tales from Zinacantan”.
Ivay la ta be ta yak’ol bik’it nich (He slept by the road above Little Flower).
(I’ll add more details about my ideas and opinions sometime later…But I will say, doing this makes me wonder how Hangul, Davangari, Dravidian, etc alphabets are written in a school setting. So I may need to make a few inquiries).