This post just hit 5,000 notes! Apparently, Tumblrites DO like Maya (and poems by 6 year olds). I am happy.

Also, I think my Maya stoplight meme poem is even better. It hasn’t gone viral and has 55 notes. This is a perfectly reasonable amount of notes! But some people might like the pretty colours?

skykid-nadir

Is there a pronunciation guide for this? I’d love to hear it spoken!

First off:

Classical Maya’s pronunciation is reconstructed. We’ve never actually heard it pronounced, because no one now living was alive when it was being spoken. We’re using a mixture of how words were spelled and how they are pronounced in modern descendent languages to guess at period pronunciation.

There are also still disagreements between experts about how to read certain aspects of the glyphs. Many Maya languages have long vowels, glottal stops, and glottal fricatives (‘h’s) inside words. We assume Classical Maya did, as well, but we’re not sure how often they’re shown in the writing. Maybe the vowel at the end of words tells us what’s happening inside the word. Perhaps it tells us what suffixes the word has. Perhaps it does either, or neither!

So I can’t give you an actual “how to pronounce this”. But I can give you a guess. If you know IPA, here’s my best attempt:

ʔu-χomow ʔu-ɓɑːknɑl
ʔu-ɓɑlɑhm
ʃ̩t
ʃ̩t
χojoj ʔu-ɓɑlɑhm
ʔu-ts'iɓɑːl ɑχ-nɑʔel ɑχ-wɑk-hɑɓij

Classical Maya is not particularly similar to English. And pronunciation respelling systems, like some dictionaries use, have a lot of weaknesses, and only really work for people who speak something close to General American English. (They also make my skin crawl.) But I horrifically butchered the Maya to give a very vague idea of the pronunciation for non-linguists.

(The 'b’s are implosive, and the 'ts’ is ejective. 'Kh’ is the sound that ends 'loch’. And English doesn’t distinguish the length of vowels, OR actually pronounce any 'h’s that aren’t starting syllables, so those just aren’t shown at all.)

oo-khoh-moh oo-b'ahk-nahl
oo-b'ah-lahm
sht
sht
khoh-yoy oo-b'ah-lahm
oo-ts'ee-b'ahl ahkh-nah-el akh-wahk-hah-b'ee

#this is the coolest shit OP#how did you learn to write classical Maya?? - via @tattedpetticoats

The ‘normal’ way! While I still had access to my university’s library, I downloaded about 100 articles on Classical Maya. I followed online blogs. I downloaded multiple dictionaries - both of words and glyphs.

I appreciate Classical Maya and Angkorian Khmer because they don’t have case, or any other way of changing the base forms of their verbs and nouns. Which is REALLY helpful when dealing with a dead language. I don’t have to spend all of my time guessing if a word is regular or if I’m conjugating it like the total amateur I am. This makes my 'find the word in a dictionary, find the sentence structure in a grammar, hope this is close enough’ system much less stressful.

(In the Stoplight Poem, I do have to worry about second person (almost all Classical Maya was written in third person) and about tense. Those were challenging.) And I tried translating Spiders Georg, but … I need to know more about Maya first.)

#wanted to look this up bc i didn’t believe that a writing system could have characters this detailed for syllables#(they seem super complex for frequent use)#but yeah it’s real. holy shit#and it’s syllabic AND logographic that’s so fucking cool (you can see the character for jaguar (balam?) used twice)#now i know#linguistics - via @tungle-scant-sequels

The writing style for the poem is based of the Fancy carved versions used for royal monuments. Kinda equivalent to extra-formal calligraphy. There ARE simpler ways to write!

This vase shows simplified forms of the ‘ʔu’, 'bi’, 'jo’, 'wa’, and 'ya’ characters from the poem.

The labels/names on this mural are very simplified - I can only recognize 'ma’ from the poem.

This final vase has 'ʔu’, 'la’, 'ʔAJ’, 'ma’, and probably 'ya’, from the poem.

This codex (book) is from quite a bit later than the other examples. It’s even MORE simplified, but I’m not sure how much is a more casual style, and how much is characters changing form over time. 'Ma’, 'yi’ and 'wa’ are the only characters I can immediately recognize from the poem.

I’ve also seen an example of someone doing math on a cave wall that’s really simplified and sketchy, but I couldn’t find the image.

-

So, Maya writing CAN be this complex and beautiful. It can be even MORE complex! But it can also be simple and sketchy, written to convey meaning, rather than beauty.

#oh fantastic#i wonder why NAL on the top right is one syllabe and not two! it kinda looks like two symbols when compared to the rest…#languages#cool cool cool - via @horizonproblems

The NAL glyph depicts a stylized ear of maize/corn.

The curly bits on the top are the silk, and probably the tops of the husk. The square shows kernels inside the rest of the husk.

The various shapes have shifted to match the visual language of the rest of the characters over time. That’s probably why the ‘husk’ goes all the way around the square - borders are a common element with a set look.

If there wasn’t enough space, I also could have dropped the entire square part, and just used the top part to say 'NAL’. Many characters have a simplified form like that.

(My favourite is 'HIX’, which depicts the head of a wild cat that’s smaller than a jaguar - possibly an ocelot or margay. It’s simplified form is just a square with 3 circles, representing it’s spots!)

LOVE this! Here’s my Sumerian version:

Urshub
Azlabi ibgul
Heam
Heam
Urshub bar dab

And in cuneiform:

𒌨𒍤𒂠
𒄑𒊍𒇲𒁉 𒌈𒄢
𒃶𒀀𒀭
𒃶𒀀𒀭
𒌨𒍤𒂠 𒁇 𒆪

Thrilled to get to use bar dab here for “be out, escape”, literally “to seize the outside”.

Awesome♥️♥️♥️!

So good!!

I’ll throw in some Middle Egyptian:

transliteration:

mꜣj
ptpt.n.f ḫnrt
twj
twj
mꜣj rwtj
zẖꜣw nyl(ꜣ) sjsw rnptw

literal translation:

The lion [standing in for a tiger here]
He has trampled his restraining house
Yes!
Yes!
The lion is outside
Writings of Nyl, 6 of years

While there was eventually a stand-in glyph (𓃭) for the “L” sound in the Ptolemaic period, Middle Egyptian scribes tended to use 𓈖 or 𓄿 to stand in for that sound and I chose 𓄿 because I like it more.

@liminalbeauty

We already have Sumerian, AND Middle Egyptian! No Akkadian, though.