OMG my friend told me about mayan hieroglyphics and they’re SO cute!!! They’re just a bunch of rounded squares ahhhhh it makes my heart warm
LOOK !!!!!
AWHHHH
I WANT TO HUG WHOEVER MADE THIS SYSTEM I LOVE IT
do you want to know more cute things about Mayan hieroglyphics
First off you don’t read them front to back or left to right or anything like that, you read them in paired columns. It’s a little like reading a PDF where you have two pages next to each other- you read the first two left to right, like in English, but then you read down the column, going down left to right.
Another cute thing is that the reason it took so long to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics (a couple hundred years!) was because the scribes liked to play around with how they wrote. The Mayan system had two different ways to write - they had logograms, which are like Chinese characters; and they had phonetic signs, which stood for a syllable of spoken speech- kind of like hiragana or katakana.
Sometimes the scribes picked one or the other to make the sentences make sense- when you’re writing with a lot of syllables sometimes you need to specify whether you’re talking about a stone or a turkey, or which word for “jaguar” you’re using.
But a lot of the time they’d just pick the one they thought looked prettiest. So you had people playing with words all over the place!
Another cute thing about Mayan hieroglyphics: the Mayan gods of scribes were twin brothers called the Monkey-Man scribes!
This is a statue of one of the Monkey-man scribes.
As far as we know, writing was sacred to the ancient Mayans, and calligraphy was a really important art.
OMG IT GOT BETTER !!!!
ok so Mayan logograms look a lot more complicated than Chinese characters, but if they combined both logograms + some kind of phonetic signs in writing, would that make it similar to Japanese then?? Just way more complex?
The system is indeed similar, but a lot more complex in the mayan one. It comes from the fact that the “phonetic signs” can be in any position and because there is no concept of “orthography” in mayan : you can write things the way you want :
All those glyphs mean “shield” pronounced pakal in classical mayan, but all of them are writen using different methods :
The first one is just the logogram PAKAL
The second is the phonetic decomposition of the word using syllabic glyphs : pa-ka-la. The last voyel is usually not pronounced in such a position.
The last one makes use of both the logogram PAKAL and the syllabic glyph la. It is the most common spread orthography, as the mayan liked to make sure that no ambiguity was possible.
The real complexity of the system comes from the fact that one glyph could be written in many different ways, according to its position in the block (on top, on the side..) and the skill of the carver or scribe. Contrary to the chinese characters, a glyph had no fixed form : as long as its main attributes were presents, the scribe could draw or carve the glyph the way he wanted. Add to this the fact that most of the logograms had at least an anthropomorphic form and a more abstract one, and you get a pretty complex system. As an example, all those glyphs mean “sun” and are pronounced k’in :
Here are a few useful links to learn more :
The FAMSI website, where you can use a dictionnary to find glyphs and also read this great study guide.
The Corpus of Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions, where you can admire the beauty of the script when carved of rock .
Mayavase.com, if you want to take a look at mayan calligraphy on ceramics.
Maya decipherment, the best research blog on the subject.
Mayan teacher teaching his student mathematics (you can see numbers coming out of his mouth, and an open book, or “codex” in front of him)
wuqs
