When discussing a tradition in Yucatán, David Drew wrote that:
Many colourful legends surround the story of Cortés’ horse,
and different versions are still to be heard in communities around the shores
of the lake today. In the village of San José, where live the very last
surviving speakers of Itzá Mayan, they say that another statue toppled off a
canoe and still lurks somewhere beneath the waters. There is no doubt that
Cortés did leave his horse here. He says so himself. The most popular, if not
the most authoritative Spanish story, which tends to inflate the simple credibility
of the Itzá, relates that the people of Tayasal dutifully tried to care for it.
They fed it turkey and bunches of flowers and, not surprisingly, it soon died.
The statue was then fashioned in its honour and placed in the temple, where it
came to be venerated as a manifestation of the rain god Chak, known as ‘Tzimin Chak’
or ‘Horse of Thunder and Lightening’. (David Drew, The Lost Chronicles of
the Maya Kings [Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1999], 389-90)
Michael Coe also used tzimin
to translate, just “tapir” but also “horse”:
As English-speakers, we take
it for granted that one can speak of, say “four birds” or “twenty-five books,”
but this kind of numerical construction is impossible in the Mayan
languages—between the number and the thing counted there has to be a numerical classifier,
describing the class to which the object, animal, plant, or thing belongs. We
have a glimmering of this sort of construction when we talk of “two flocks of
geese” or “a pride of lions,” but this is pale stuff compared to the richness
of Mayan classifiers. Colonial Yucatec dictionaries list dozens of these, but
only a handful are still in use in today’s Yucatán, yet even these have to be
interpreted even when the number itself might be in Spanish. If I see three
horses in a pasture, I would count them as ox-tul tzimin (ox, three; -tul,
classifier for animate things; tzimin, “horse” or “tapir”). However, if
there were three stones lying in the same pasture, I would have to say ox-p’el
tunich (ox, three; -p’el, classifier for inanimate things; tunich,
“stone”). (Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code [3d ed.; London:
Thames & Hudson, 2012], 52-53)
