Deb, Tommy, Benjamin and I are traveling to Yucatan! We arrive in Valladolid on Feb 7th. We arrive in Mérida on Feb 7th and leave on Feb 19th. Yay! We have lots of time to meet with friends working on language revitalization, supporting modern Mayan languages, the Unicode standard, creating materials for introductory workshops on …
As we’ve discussed, modern Maya languages use sounds that were not used in ancient Maya languages. To write these modern words we need new glyphs. The new release includes a main and an affix glyph for “xe”. They were created by epigrapher Guillermo Kantun and are used with his permission. This release also includes calendar …
Durante los últimos 1500 años, los sonidos que utilizan los hablantes mayas han evolucionado. Las lenguas mayas modernas incluyen algunas sílabas que no se utilizaban en la antigüedad. Para escribir estos nuevos sonidos, tenemos que ampliar ligeramente el silabario antiguo. Estamos trabajando con el epigrafista maya Jesús Guillermo Kantún Rivera para apoyar la escritura del …
This is Tommy, reporting in on some exciting developments. Over the past few weeks I have been testing the reading portion of the Ancient Maya App on the Dresden Codex, as part of my long term goal to better understand and develop the syllabaries and images we use in the app. What I have found …
During the recent Workshop, the Ancient Maya App was installed on lots of different smart phones running various versions of their operating system. We discovered on some iPhone 11 devices the Read Filter selector that displays All, Phonetic and Logographic did not display any text at all. The new 2.5.8 release tries a couple different …
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 …