Communicate Co.

Language, Literature and Writing

Recent studies reveal that there are around 25 languages split into ten groups and spoken by approximately 2,500,000 people in Mexico and Guatemala.

Yucatec Mayan is still spoken throughout the Yucatan Peninsula. Outside the Maya territory, the descendents of the Huasteca culture in northern Veracruz and Tamaulipas (on the border with Texas) still speak a language that is related to the Mayan language.

Like our own language, languages in the ‘Maya’ family have three tenses: past, present and future.

Writing is based on syllables and a technique now exists to decipher a large part of it. The experts who decipher Maya inscriptions are known as epigraphists and they are true detectives in search of clues. With patience and a great deal of methodical and scientific work they achieve their goal.

One of the early epigraphists was Constantin Samuel Rafinesque Schmaltz (Constantinople, Turkey, 1783-1840, who deciphered the number glyphs in 1832. He was followed by Valery Valentinovich Knorosov (Kharkov, Ukraine, 1922-1999), a Russian academic who is famous for his ground-breaking research into deciphering Maya scripture. His work was a great influence on Maya studies and there are currently around 30 epigraphists in the world.

Thanks to the progress made by such researchers, we can read many of the inscriptions, for example, those carved on standing stones or steles. New light has been shed on political history of ancient cities with the identification of dates, years, events such as wars, accessions, births, deaths and marriages, the names of rulers and nobles and family ties.

Only four books written in Maya have survived the passage of time. They are called ‘codexes’ and are written on bark paper. They are the Dresden Codex, the Tro-Cortesian Codex, the Paris Codex and the Grolier Codex (recent studies declare that this is a fake...). These are found in Dresden, Madrid, Paris and Mexico City, respectively.

Other books were also written in Yucatec Mayan, Quiché Mayan and Cakchiquel Mayan. These used the Latin alphabet, which was introduced by the Spaniards at the time of the conquest. Examples of these publications include the Chilam Balam, Popol Vuh and the Cakchiquel Annals. However, it is difficult to know how much of the information contained in these books was altered by the Spanish.

The following are examples of a stele and syllabus, according to the epigraphists.

please note that Maya people used syllables and vowels.... that is you cannot see the consonant alone.