Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

 

Let Them Speak In Glyphs

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/let-them-speak-in-glyphs-865f9b61926b

The Mayas are more a cultural and historical mystery than a vast field of knowledge. We know less than we can even imagine about them. Where did they come from? What language did they speak before coming to Mesoamerica? What were their beliefs before arriving in Yucatan? They brought with them cacao, chocolate, writing, mathematics, extremely advanced calendars, phenomenal knowledge about stars, planets and the cosmos. They even brought with them a vigesimal counting system with the mathematics going along with it, including the equivalent of our zero (that we borrowed from the Arabs in the 17th century) that enabled them to count up to the infinite.

 

The most remarkable achievement is that they managed to merge phenomenal art with the glyphic writing system of theirs. We know the glyphs were works of art, for one, and a syllabary phonetic writing system, for two. For a very long time the second aspect was rejected, particularly by Sir Eric Thompson. Luckily this untruth was rejected after his death, with a little bit of disregard before his death. The glyphs were not flat symbolic of items and purely artistic, like some kind of secondary if not superfluous decoration. The colonizing Spaniards considered that decoration as diabolical and they burned and destroyed all the books and artifacts that carried such artistic representations of Maya reality and such glyphs that could only be the language of the devil.

 

Imagine how surprised I was when I discovered this catalogue of an exhibition at the MET Museum of Art in New York. They provide some images of the glyphs, and even some sentences written with them. But they systematically ignore the glyphs, transliterate the sentences and words into Latin-transliterated Maya, and simply work and speculate on these transliterations and their translations into English. They lose all the richness of meaning and beauty of the glyphs. In other words, they terminate, bring to a final end the destructive work of the Spaniards, the culturicide of the Mayas and the Maya culture and civilization. My full study (about 15,000 words, only in English) is available on Medium.com, at https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/let-them-speak-in-glyphs-865f9b61926b or as a PDF on Academia.edu at https://www.academia.edu/117876935/Let_Them_Speak_In_Glyphs.

 

My objective in this long study of mine is to show and evaluate with examples the tremendous loss this catalog, for one, and this exhibition, for two, assume and endorse irreversibly for the audience and the readers. It is very fine and dandy to know that the Maize God is called “Jun Nal Ye,” but the composite glyph that represents this name is a lot richer:

. Every single detail of the three syllabic phonetic elements in the composite glyph is meaningful, and most of these details are dropped by the transliteration. Some of them may be contradictory, and the meaning such contradictions carry tell us a lot about the very nature of this God who is born every spring and who dies every fall. This writing system is absolutely fascinating and the MET of New York just burry it without even giving some examples of this brilliant and awesome writing system.

 

Academia.edu Comment

Jacques Coulardeau uploaded a paper

The Mayas were colonized in the old days by the Spaniards. Their books were burned. Their temples were abandoned. Their writing was banned. A real culturicide along with European epidemics that destroyed more than half the population. What is being revived, resuscitated today?