Cakchiquel of Guatemala

The Etruscan's Gift to the Maya

Cameron Townsend, founder of SIL, discovered four different k phonemes in Cakchiquel, a Mayan language of Guatemala. He had to find four different ways of writing the k's while staying close to the Spanish alphabet.

Thanks to the Etruscans, the Spanish alphabet is well supplied with k letters. The Etruscans had used the Greek G (C), K, and Q for one K phoneme. This did not make a neat fit to their language, or to Latin, Spanish, or English. But for Cakchiquel it was convenient. The C and Q alternates for the same sound in Spanish provided Townsend with the four Cakchiquel k's: he represented two of them as C and Qu in regular type and two in italics.

(Below) Cameron and Elvira Townsend in their early days, among the Cakchiquel in Guatemala.