Our Maya Writing Workshop at the College of the Atlantic went wonderfully well. Forty students downloaded the Ancient Maya App, then enjoyed reading several simple glyph blocks. We demonstrated it takes only 20 minutes to learn the basics of Mayan writing and how to use the app. That is a big deal. Thanks to our …
We’re giving a talk on Friday Sept 20th at the College of the Atlantic!! Thanks so much for Professor Karla Peña for inviting us. The post for the talk is below.
Using the Read feature requires identifying individual glyphs. The glyphs and their categories were all defined in Tokovinine’s catalog. You must first pick a category based on what the glyph looks like (e.g., Affix, Hand, Bird, etc.) and then identify the correct glyph. Since there are 9 categories and over 600 glyphs, each category has …
The first thing you need to know about traditional Mayan writing is that it is phonetic. Symbols represent sounds. To write a word you group together the symbols for the word’s sounds. (Mayan inscriptions also used some logographic symbols perhaps for stylistic reasons. Here we focus on phonetic writing.) The second thing you need to …
In the Read function lets us display affix glyphs in any orientation (Top, Bottom, Left or Right). This release improves how glyphs Tokovinine’s are rotated and flipped. Also, Read’s dictionary lookup was improved. This is release 2.5.6. It is available in iOS and Android app stores
The table below contains Maya words that are very easy to read with the Ancient Maya App. I hope they are useful if you want to learn about the traditional Mayan writing system or are teaching it to others. Let me know if you have any issues or concerns about these glyph blocks. Glyph Block …
The Read feature helps you decode a glyph block. As you identify individual glyphs they are added to a clipboard. The app automatically checks if the syllables on the clipboard match words in Kettunen and Helmke’s dictionary. All matches are displayed and can be clicked on for additional details. Changes in this release support multiple …
It will take time to add app support for modern Mayan languages. There are lots of issues to understand and details to address. Rather than reporting this progress in a series of blog posts I set up a project page. The project page was last updated on Aug 4.