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 | Meaning | Transliteration | Notes |
 | Na Mother/Lady | na-a | Very simple glyph block. Glyphs easily found without any scrolling. Glyphs: Tokovinine_A_035, Tokovinine_A_444 |
 | Chit Father | chi-it | Main glyph first is important to see, obviously a hand glyph Affix glyph requires scrolling Glyphs: Tokovinine_A_293, Tokovinine_A_095 |
 | naal native | na-li | Easy glyphs, no scrolling, uses bird main Glyphs: Tokovinine_A_035, Tokovinine_A_430 |
 | sitz’ appetite | si-tz’i | Fun glyphs. Fun animal glyph requires scrolling Glyphs: Tokovinine_A_098, Tokovinine_A_516 |
 | nal young corn, north | na-la | Fun glyphs, main is other. Note that main glyphs do not rotate Tokovinine_A_035, Tokovinine_A_222 |
 | jan raptor bird | ja-na | Main glyph, another Other Glyphs: Tokovinine_A_092, Tokovinine_A_152 |
 | otoot Home | o-to-ti | Introduction to a three glyph word. Main glyph is Other Glyphs: Tokovinine_A_039, Tokovinine_A_188, Tokovinine_A_095 |
The above words all come from Kettunen and Helmke’s dictionary. The glyphs and their definitions are from Tokovinine. The arrangements of glyphs in a glyph block follows the Proposed Unicode Standard for Maya. The glyph block images were generated by the Write function of the Ancient Maya App. Real ancient glyph blocks tend to blend the individual glyphs together which creates a more artistically pleasing, unified block.
These examples might make you think reading ancient Mayan is easy. It isn’t. Even with the Ancient Maya App it isn’t. For many reasons. These examples were all nouns or adjectives. Verbs are harder because they are conjugated and the app doesn’t yet know how vowels change with tense or person. Reading individual words is easier than sentences where you have to understand Mayan sentence structure. Mayan inscriptions contains lots of dates, currently the app only helps with the initial long count date. Mayan writing varied over time and region, that makes identifying individual glyphs much harder. The app uses the dictionary from Kettunen and Helmke. It is a very nice dictionary but with only 600 entries it is small. Many words on the inscription will not be found in it. It’s true that our work is not yet done, but we have started. There’s a useful app and you can read a little bit of Mayan. It’s a good start and worth celebrating.
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