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There are about 6,800 mutually unintelligible languages spoken in the world today. Since the beginning of Homo Sapiens, new languages have been constantly emerging while others vanish forever. This is why many linguists say that the total number of actual languages spoken in the world at a given time of human history is but an fragment of the infinite total of possible human languages.

It might seem as though the death of one language is not a particularly serious event but, in fact, each loss is a terrible tragedy. A language is a repository of riches containing highly specialized cultural experiences. When a language is lost, all of us lose the knowledge contained in that language's words and grammar, knowledge that can never be recovered if the language has not been studied or recorded.

Remembering that plants speak a language too and that their contributions offer alternative ways of viewing our existence and interconnectedness to all living things. Not all of this knowledge is of immediate practical benefit, of course, but all of it is vital in teaching us different ways of thinking about life, of approaching our day-to-day existence on planet earth.

Maya, the language of the great Maya civilization that flourished more than a thousand years ago, is still spoken in various forms by several million people in present-day Mexico, Guatemala, and British Honduras.

Maya proper, sometimes called Yucatec, is spoken by about 450,000 people on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

The Popul Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayas, is a informative account of Maya history and traditions, beginning with their creation story of the Mayan world. This sacred book is an important example of native American literature that has survived the passing of centuries, it was first translated into writing in the middle of the 16th century.

The Mayas possessed a fully developed system of writing, using symbols or hieroglyphs. They appear to be a combination of ideographs, phonetic signs, and also rebus writing, in which an ideograph is used to represent another word which happens to have the same pronunciation. For example, in English the sign for "eye" could be used to represent the pronoun "I".

The first signs to be deciphered were those dealing with the calendar and astronomy.

The natural wonders of the Yucatan are innumerable, some of the most important and unusual are the sink holes or caves.
The Maya called them dzonot (ZO-note), which the conquering Spaniards translated as cenote (say– NO–tay.)

Cenotes are magical, enigmatic and unique in the world and were once the only resource for fresh, sweet water for the local Yucatecans.
They were considered the sacred places of the Maya for that reason, but also because they represented the entrance to the underworld. Which adds to the mystery and beauty of this Mexican state.

I traveled to Uxmal, one of the Mayan sacred sites known for its wonders from the ancient world. Uxmal is located in the Yucatan region in Mexico. The name Uxmal ( pronounced: "osh mal" )means that which was built three times or place of abundant harvest.

The archaeological zone is surrounded by an ancient landscape of hills that creates a beautiful framework for a series of settlements. The quality of these sites is complimented by the geometric proportions of the buildings and their facades with ornate decorations,carved in a limestone filigree style. The intricate stonework is truly incredible.

The Mayan's channeled their social energy into their works of art by creating this fabulous site of Uxmal. The architecture in this region is distinct from other sites in the Yucatan and is known as the Puuc style.