Mayan Spelling Conventions: Late Preclassic through Late Classic

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Coffee, Clever T-Shirts, and Papers in Honor of John S. Justeson" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper deals with the topic that inspired me to study with John Justeson: it traces the major spelling practices of Mayan writing from the Late Preclassic through the Late Classic periods. It employs the evidence from Late Preclassic and Early Classic inscriptions, some of which I have documented myself, as well as the Maya Hieroglyphic Database (Looper and Macri 1991–2022) to evaluate the evolution of spellings strategies of major word classes (nouns and verbs). The paper proposes that the basic spelling principles evolved to satisfy the concerns of disambiguation (for the readers) and economy (for the writer). It is shown that logograms for nouns and verbs corresponded to abstract lexemes, not roots or stems, and that the basic spelling principles evolved not only to disambiguate between possible inflectional and derivational shapes, but also to minimize the number of graphemes needed in such task. It is also shown that word-closing phonographic spellings, whether synharmonic or disharmonic, were constrained by phonological conditions of consonants or whole syllables, or employed to indicate the presence or absence of suffixes, and not by the so-called complexity of vowels. Over time, such disambiguation became more systematic, but a tendency toward minimization was largely maintained.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Coffee, Clever T-Shirts, and Papers in Honor of John S. Justeson

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36045.0