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.
The bug my friend Memo reported has been fixed. The app expected the glottal stop character to be either the single quote/apostrophe character or a back quote character. Unfortunately, the world isn’t that simple There are also smart quotes that can be easily entered via the keyboard or a cut and paste operation. The new …
This is the first of a series of posts about who might use the Ancient Maya App. Let’s start with by talking about students. Mostly this post envisions these students as school kids in the Yucatan, but it also applies to anthropology and archeology university students. There are several steps needed to read and write …
Since more people are learning about the Ancient Maya App it seems like a good time for posts about our history. This first post highlights features added to the Ancient Maya App over its three year history. Future history posts will be more personal. The Ancient Maya App first appeared in the app stores in …
With the Ancient Maya App’s Write Feature you can easily create glyph blocks. But if you create enough text, you’ll run into the “missing glyph” problem. There are a couple phonemes for which we don’t have ancient glyphs. In some cases it is for ancient phonemes where we haven’t identified ancient glyphs. In other cases …