Cecilia Tuyuc Us: "What concepts of time, weather, seasons, and so on do you have in your language?"

Cecilia Tuyuc Us is a teacher and language activist from San Juan de Comalapa, Guatemala. She is a digital educator whose goal is to promote the revitalization and use of indigenous languages, especially Kaqchiquel, her first mother tongue, and one of the Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. ••• https://podcast.whoseknowledge.org/posts/ep9/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/cecilia-magal%C3%AD-tuyuc-us-a3586726b?trk=people_directory&originalSubdomain=gt https://rising.globalvoices.org/lenguas/author/ceciliatuyuc/ https://issuu.com/ajtzib/docs/primerasiembra_11-03_22/s/11901040 ••• "My name is Cecilia Tuyuc. I am an indigenous digital language activist. I am a teacher, and, for the most part, I teach the Maya-Kaqchiquel language, which is spoken in Guatemala. And, right now, I'm in San Juan Comalapa, which is located in Guatemala. And I'm pleased to be in this space, on Radio Aula Mundi, to share some of the information about what has been done about the revitalization of the Mayan languages, and especially Kaqchiquel." "What concepts of time, weather, seasons, and so on do you have in your language?" "Yes, it’s exactly the way you say. Take greetings, for example. I don’t know, in Spanish, it is ‘buenos días’, ‘buenas tardes’, ‘buenas noches’ (good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night). But in Kaqchiquel, for example, we say ‘it’s dawn already’, as if we notified the other person. So, it’s like ‘dawn has arrived, may it arrive well for you’. And it’s the same for the evening, or late afternoon. We would say ‘the sun has gone down’, or ‘it is dusk’. And for ‘good night’, we would say ‘it has gotten dark’. And so, we would use these phrases to indicate time. And, for the precise time, for the hour, we would use numbers and match them with those phrases. For example, right now, it is nine in the morning here, in Guatemala. And so, the way we would say it is ‘dawn has arrived, and it is nine’. So, in this case, we match a number with the time of the day; the morning, the afternoon, the evening… And, for the weather, we refer to the sun. And so, for summer, we would say ‘it is sunny’. And, for winter, we would say ‘it is raining hard’, because here, in Guatemala, we only have two seasons, summer or winter, or the sunny season and the rainy season. But then, there are also microclimates, which we also tend to match with these kinds of phrases." ••• Text and subtitles co-written with Messyna, an international student of English, Spanish, and Spanglish. ••• Interview conducted by Marco Rixecker https://www.amazon.com/author/marcorixecker ••• Radio Aula Mundi, April 2025 At the moment, Radio Aula Mundi is an evolving podcast station where no language and all languages are spoken… It’s a multilingual mix of music, poetry, lectures, languages, interviews, documentaries, recipes, and a lot more, co-produced with the students of the ‘Aula Mundi International Cultural Center’…••• Radio Aula MundiCentro Cultural & Turistico Aula MundiAula Mundi Cultural Travel Centerhttps://linktr.ee/radioaulamundi •••