Túumben Chuunul is a project and website by Gloria Guadalupe Dzib Kumul. She is a primary school teacher in Kanxoc (near Valladolid). The website has lessons and virtual learning objects for teaching the Maya language to children. Gloria is also a Fellow at Cultural Survival.
Here’s how Túumben Chuunul introduces Mayan words for colors:
This is so fun and engaging! I could not resist using our app’s Write feature to write these color words in the ancient/traditional system. It works pretty well:
Blocks of the old glyphs are read two columns at a time, from left to right. Reading in that order, these are the words for green, yellow, read, black, blue and white. For even more fun, I used our app’s Read feature to decode the glyph block for white, sak in Mayan. Here’s the app (this time in Spaniish) showing the glyphs for “sa-ka” translate to “blanco, puro”.
Gloria Guadalupe Dzib Kumul’s project is incredible. If you know how I might contact her, please ping me! I’d love to learn more about her goals, her needs and talk about roles for technology in language revitalization.