Saturday, June 13, 2020
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ELIZABETH P. BENSON, Editor,
MESOAMERICAN WRITING SYSTEMS,
A Conference at Dumbarton Oaks, October 30th
and 31st 1971,
TRUSTEES FOR HARVARD UNIVERSITY – 1973
Practically fifty years after the conference, it is high time to
evaluate the distance that has been journeyed since 1971-1973. The conference
occurred at the very end of Sir Eric Thompson’s era and the book came out two
years before his death in Cambridge, United Kingdom. His grip on the subject is
quite clear in the conference though he did not commit anything for it and the
editor speaks of him as a landmark in the field. At the same time, Knorosov is
quoted by Elizabeth P. Benson and Michael D. Coe in their preface and quite a
few contributions show their resistance at Thompson’s domination by for example
never using the T-numbers that had been devised by Thompson himself to list the
various Maya glyphs. Yet on the other hand some like Tatiana Proskouriakoff are
mostly satisfied with the T-number of a glyph that is not given in its glyph
form, and not even in its transliteration, the “hand-grasping-fish glyph
(hand-fish for short).” (page 165) Tatiana Proskouriakoff is a
compromise with at times the T-numbers, at times the italicized English
identification, at times the transliteration, and at times a few actual reproductions
of the glyph itself. If I give here this example, it is because this hand-fish
glyph is typical. She identifies it as T714 under the image of it and she does
not see that Thompson was wrong there. The glyph is a composite glyph. The hand
can be found in other glyphs, holding or not holding other items and this hand-fish
is, in fact, T714.[203] for the hand “tza” T714 and the fish “ka” T203, and the
composite glyph is “tzak.” The word and the glyph are referring to blood
self-sacrifice and human sacrifice as the request from the Gods for them to
bring prosperity and stability. Only one rule: to submit.
The first study is by H.B. Nicholson on “Phoneticism in the Late
Pre-Hispanic Central Mexican Writing System.”
The second study is by Mary Elizabeth Smith and concerns “The
relationship between Mixtec Manuscript Painting and the Mixtec Language: A
Study of Some Personal Names in Codices Muro and Sánchez Solís.”
The third study by Floyd G. Lounsbury concerns “The Derivation and
Reading of the ‘Ben-Ich’ Prefix.”
The fourth paper is by George Kubler and deals with “The Clauses of
Classic Maya Inscriptions.”
The fifth article is that of Tatiana Proskouriakoff on “The
Hand-grasping-fish on Classic Maya Monuments.”
The sixth contribution is by David H. Kelley and K. Ann Kerr on “Maya
Astronomy and Astronomical Glyphs.”
The seventh and last contribution is by Bodo Spranz on “Late Classic
Figurines from Tlaxcala, Mexico, and Their Possible Relation to the Codex
Borgia Group.”
Conclusion
The conclusion about this book nearly fifty years
after its publishing is that we have tremendously improved our knowledge about
the Mayas and their language or languages. Yet we still have to do a lot of
research along two lines.
The first line is linguistics and particularly
syntactic linguistics, not of the present Maya languages but the Maya languages
behind the glyphic writing system.
The second line is the historical, social, and
linguistic phylogeny of this culture and it is important to understand that the
three dimensions have to be treated as autonomous and yet at the same to
understand that the three dimensions developed and develop phylogenetically and
both simultaneously and reciprocally.
By phylogeny, we have to understand the development
is brought by the past and that present creations or future creations use means
and dynamics that are contained in the history, society, and languages any
people inherit from their ancestors.
That means that the concept of revolution is in
many ways ideological and hardly representative of reality, even when we line
up industrial revolutions one after another. Every single revolution is only
the fruit of what exists at the time of this revolution, and the most
sustainable and durable revolutions develop very slowly in time over long
periods.
English took nearly five centuries to emerge in its
modern form at the time of Shakespeare after the conquest of England by the Normans
and the bringing face to face of two languages or two sets of languages, the
Anglo-Saxon multiple palette of dialects and sibling languages, on one hand,
and Norman Oil Language, on the other hand, meaning several Oil dialects and
even Oc dialects later on.
“Beef,” “mutton,” “veal,” “pork,” and a few more
meats were not invented from scratch, and they did not erase the old Anglo-Saxon
“cú,” “sceáp,” “cealf,” “swín.” Just as much as the Sumerian writing system was
the result of commerce and the clay tablet medium with the particular stylus
used to impress one basic character in the clay that could be vertical or
horizontal. Then the development of the writing system was only the
multiplication of these two characters and their association in clusters
standing for words mostly on the basis of some syllabic understanding of
Sumerian that was a synthetic Indo-European ancestral language within the
Indo-European migration from the Irani plateau to Europe. This writing system
was adopted by the Akkadians, the scribes of the Sumerians, for their own
Afro-Asiatic or Semitic consonantal-root language.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 3:35 PM 
