Back in March I started working on integrating a dictionary into the Ancient Maya App. In an earlier blog post we announced Harri Kettunen (from the University of Helsinki) and Christophe Helmke (from the University of Copenhagen) gave us permission to integrate material from their well known Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs. The initial integration is largely complete and it will be released in August. You can see a demo video on YouTube.
For those of you who don’t want to watch a video, here’s a couple screen shots showing the improvements to the Decode Glyph Block feature. In the first, the user has identified three glyphs for o, to and ti. They are displayed at the top of the screen. When the user identifies a glyph, the transliteration is updated the app automatically looks it up on the dictionary. If an entry is found it is displayed, in this case “house (home, dwelling)”. When the user clicks on the translation the full dictionary entry is displayed in a popup window, as show in the second screen shot.
The initial August release will only includes dictionary entries from Kettunen and Helmke’s A Thematic Classic Mayan-English Dictionary from page 88 to 122. It does not include material from pages 123 to 125, and not the section Concise Dictionary of Maya Logograms from page 79 to 87. I’ll start working on these tasks immediately.
This release also includes an update to the development environment. We now use Dart 3, Flutter 3 and uses the latest VSCode and Xcode. Thanks to all the efforts from those teams that made the upgrade easy.