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Re: Mayan Writing

From:R. Nierse <rnierse@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 6, 1999, 10:17
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> Van: Barry Garcia <Barry_Garcia@...> > Aan: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...> > Onderwerp: Mayan Writing > Datum: woensdag 6 oktober 1999 11:50 > > rnierse@anwb.nl writes: > >I am very much intrigued by Maya hieroglyphs. They have about the same > >thing: symbols (for syllables) are placed together to form a block. I > >wanted to make something like that: words existing of one form that has > >encoded all sounds of that word, but I never succeeded. Gladilatian has > >something like that (I have no URL) : one form per syllable. > > Well in reality Mayan is a lot more involved than that. For instance,
this
> quote from http://www.halfmoon.org/writing.html scratches the surface of > Mayan writing:
Yes I know the site. She really can explain it clearly (although it is not complete, but that's the result of being resumptive).
> > Mayan hieroglyphic writing is made up of symbols that represent whole > words (logographs) or syllables consisting of consonant-vowel pairs (CV) > or vowels (V).
Actually, it is (CV) and (?V) and (Vh). This last one is needed because a (Yucatec) Mayan words is not allowed to end with a vowel. It took me quite some time to find that out!
> > Anyway it's an interesting page. The whole domain has a lot of stuff on > Mayan culture. That page I quoted is a part of the pages on the writing > system. The author talks about how one can go about writing their name
out
> in Mayan (just off of the sounds, not how it would be done if you were > talking to a scribe). It really goes fairly deep into the writing system > without being stuffy and scholarly :) (i like that!).
I give lectures on Mayan writing sometimes, and indeed her site helped me a lot to get less scholarly! Fascinating writinghg system, isn't it?