The Iconographic Origin of the T533/AM1 ʔAJAW ‘Lord, Ruler’ Logogram

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill

2/20/2021

 

This note focuses on the origin and historical development of T533/AM1, seen in Figure 1. It is based on a more extensive manuscript written in 2005 (Mora-Marín 2005a) and circulated by email among a few scholars, some of whom offered valuable feedback at the time (e.g. Julia Guernsey, David Freidel, Mary Pohl), but it was never submitted for publication. Here I am rescuing some of the key ideas from that manuscript.

 

Figure 1

 

Mayan writing uses several distinct signs as allograms (variant signs with the same value) to represent the root ʔaajaaw ‘lord, ruler’ and some of its derivations[1]: T533/AM1, T1000d/PT7, and T168(:518)/2M1. Though in principle equivalent, these logograms are typically found in a rather loose complementary distribution: T533 is mostly relegated to calendrical contexts, as a sign spelling the ritual day name ‘lord’, but was on relatively rare occasions employed as a title; T1000d is common both as a day sign and a title; and T168(:518) is more strictly confined for use in titles phrases of individuals.

 

Interestingly, the Late Preclassic texts from San Bartolo (Saturno et al. 2006a, 2006b; Taube et al. 2010) in the Maya lowlands bear examples of two of these signs, T1000d as a day sign (Figure 2a) and T168:518 as a title (Figure 2b), but so far no examples of T533 as a day sign, though T533 does appear there in iconographic contexts. The earliest, reliably dated, glyphic use of T533 in the Maya lowlands is attested on Uaxactun Stela 19, dated to 8.16.0.0.0 (357 CE), followed shortly thereafter by the example from Sufricaya Mural 7, dated to 8.16.2.4.16 (379 CE).

 

Figure 2

Prior to such examples, though, at least one non-calendrical use of T533, functioning as part of a title, appears on Kaminaljuyu Stela/Monument 10 (Figure 3), dated to ca. 400-200 BCE (Shook and Popenoe de Hatch 1999) or 100 BCE (Inomata and Henderson 2016), as described by Mora-Marín (2001, 2005, 2008, 2016). This example shows a juxtaposition of an early (rotated) form of T518/2M1b, which is in origin a form of the day sign REED, and T533 ʔAJAW. I have suggested previously that the REED sign in question may have functioned as a phonetic complement to the T533 logogram, based on Proto-Mayan *ʔaaj ‘reed’ (Mora-Marín 2005:76, 2016:43; cf. Kaufman with Justeson 2003:1157), resulting in a spelling ʔaj-ʔAJAW for *ʔaajaaw ‘lord, ruler’. (This partly phonetic spelling would support a Mayan affiliation for the language represented in the Kaminaljuyu script, as does also the possible 10-chi-SNAKE expression on the same inscription as a spelling of the day count 10-Chijchan (Greater Tzeltalan *chihj=chaan).) Thus, the use of T533 as a logogram ʔAJAW can be established already during the Late Preclassic period in the broader region of use of the script.

 

Figure 3

 

The question that I address now is the iconographic motivation of T533 ʔAJAW. I propose that it depicts the face of a ritual specialist in the act of howling. Stross and Kerr (1990) presented an iconographic argument for howling and whistling personages associated with the use of ritual hallucinogens as a pan-Mesoamerican theme. The howling face theme (Figure 4) they describe may be indicative of the ritual practices of blowing air to imbue an object with ‘breath’, and howling common as a result of the use of hallucinogens, consumed to achieve a trance state and communicate with, or travel to the supernatural realm (Stross and Kerr 1990). To the modern examples by Stross and Kerr (Figures 4a-b), from Guerrero and Michoacan, respectively, I have added a couple of Pre-Columbian examples (Figures 4c-d), one of them being the O’Boyle ceramic mask (Late Preclassic or Early Classic) and the upper torso of a hollow ceramic figurine from the Early Classic Peten. The howling expression in these artifacts is of course very similar to the expression seen on T533.

 

Figure 4

 

This howling face theme can be traced back to the Late Preclassic potbelly sculpture tradition spanning much of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Pacific Piedmont and highlands of Guatemala. The potbelly tradition has been described by a number of scholars, among them Navarrete and Hernández (2000) and Guernsey (2010). Figure 5 provides two similar examples from Tiltepec, Chiapas, and San Juan Sacatepequez, Guatemala, respectively.

 

Figure 5

Of special interest are the cases from Tiltepec, Chiapas, which have been dated to ca. 500-200 BCE by Navarrete and Hernández (2000), seen Figure 6, and which I argue here bear evidence of possible writing: a glyph-like sign “affixed” to the faces of pot-bellied individuals. In several examples, the glyph-like sign matches the face of the pot-bellied individual very closely, while in others it is much more stylized, showing only the dots for the two eyes and mouth.

 

Figure 6

 

The similarity between these early examples of T533 and later ones can be appreciated in Figure 7. I propose that these glyph-like signs are in fact early examples of T533 not only labeling the figures as ‘lords’, but also associating the office of rulership with the ritual specialization practiced by these potbellied individuals. More interestingly, this association appears first in Mixe-Zoquean or more specifically Mixean territory, rather than Mayan territory: while potbelly sculptures with the howling expression are also found in highland Guatemala, there are no cases of such sculptures bearing a T533-like sign. So it is possible that this sign could be a case of diffusion from a non-Mayan tradition into a Mayan tradition.

 

Figure 7

While some might use this type of evidence to support the idea that the term ʔaajaaw ‘lord, ruler’ derives etymologically from a compound meaning ‘he of shouting’ or ‘he who shouts’ (i.e. ‘shouter’), as proposed by Stuart (1995:190-191), the linguistic data preclude such a solution, as recently explained by Terrence Kaufman (personal communication, 2020). First, the term is reconstructible as *ʔaajaaw to Proto-Mayan (Kaufman with Justeson 2003:84-85). Second, although *ʔaj= ‘male proclitic’ is reconstructible to Proto-Mayan (Kaufman with Justeson 2003:83), the term *ʔaaw ‘shout(ing)’ is not: it is reconstructible to Proto-Western Mayan (Kaufman with Justeson 2003:716), a much later stage, although its attestations in Yucatecan, if not the result of diffusion from Greater Tzeltalan or Ch’olan specifically, could point to a Southern Mayan (Late Proto-Mayan) stage. Third, and more significantly, a compound consisting of these two roots would yield *ʔaj=ʔaaw, not *ʔaajaaw: note that the vowel of *ʔaj= ‘male proclitic’ is short, not long like the first vowel of *ʔaajaaw, and note that *ʔaaw ‘shout(ing)’ bears an initial glottal stop, which would not disappear upon compounding. In fact, not a single Mayan language preserves evidence for a medial glottal stop in this root, and not a single Mayan language preserves evidence for a synchronic analysis of this root based on ‘male proclitic’ plus ‘shout(ing)’.

 

To conclude, I propose that the iconographic motivation of T533 ʔAJAW can be explained on the basis of the shouting or howling imagery evident in the potbelly tradition, but especially the examples with associated T533 signs described by Navarrete and Hernández (2000) for Tiltepec and by Guernsey (2010) for highland Guatemala. This does not necessarily mean that the possible cases of T533-like signs on the potbelly sculptures from Tiltepec are meant to be read with a Mayan value. For one, such sculptures are well within the region of likely Mixean speech; also, signs similar to T533 can be found in non-Mayan iconography, as with the case of the Young Lord sculpture (Reilly 1991), and other, even earlier examples of Olmec iconography (Fields 1989). I merely propose that the association between ritual specialists engaged in the act of howling and the T533-like signs present in the potbelly sculptures reviewed here explain the association between T533 and rulership: rulers may have co-opted such ritual imagery for their own purposes.

 

[1] I use both Thompson (1962) and Macri and Looper (2003) as reference catalogs.

 

References

Cordry, Donald. 1980. Mexican Masks. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Fields, Virginia. 1989. The Origins of Divine Kingship among the Lowland Classic Maya. PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

Guernsey, Julia. 2010. Rulers, Gods, and Potbellies: A Consideration of Preclassic Sculptural Themes and Forms from the Pacific Piedmont and Coast of Mesoamerica. In The Place of Stone Monuments: Context, Use, and Meaning in Mesoamerica’s Preclassic Tradition, edited by Julia Guernsey, John E. Clark, and Bábara Arroyo, pp. 207- 230. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Inomata, Takeshi, and Lucia Henderson. 2016. Time tested: re-thinking chronology and sculptural traditions in Preclassic southern Mesoamerica. Antiquity 90. 456–471.

Jones, Carl, and Lyndon Satterthwaite. 1982. The Monuments and Inscriptions of Tikal: The Carved Monuments. University Museum Monograph 44. Tikal Report 33, part A. Philadelphia: University Museum.

Macri, Martha J., and Matthew G. Looper. 2003. The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs, Volume One, The Classic Period Inscriptions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Méluzin, Sylvia.  1995.  Further Investigations of the Tuxtla Script: An Inscribed Mask and La Mojarra Stela 1.  New World Archaeological Foundation, Provo, Utah.

Mora-Marín, David. 2001. The Grammar, Orthography, Content, and Social Context of Late Preclassic Mayan Portable Texts. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University at Albany, New York.

—–. 2005a. The Iconographic Origin and Historical Development of the T533/AM1 7AJAW ‘Lord, Ruler’ Title.  Unpublished Ms.

—–. 2005b. Kaminaljuyu Stela 10: Script Classification and Linguistic Affiliation. Ancient Mesoamerica 16:63-87.

—–. 2008. Análisis epigráfico y lingüístico de la escritura Maya del período Preclásico Tardío: Implicaciones para la historia sociolingüística de la region.  XXI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2007, editado por Juan Pedro Laporte, Bárbara Arroyo y Héctor E. Mejía, pp. 853-876.  Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Instituto de Antropología e Historia, Asociación Tikal, Fundación Arqueológica del Nuevo Mundo.

—–. 2010. La epigrafía y paleografía de la escritura preclásica maya: nuevas metodologías y resultados. In XXIII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2009, edited by Bárbara Arroyo, Adriana Linares Palma, and Lorena Paiz Aragón, pp. 1045-1957. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología.

—–. 2016. A Study in Mayan Paleography: The History of T168/2M1a ʔAJAW ‘Lord, Ruler’ and the Origin of the Syllabogram T130/2S2 wa. Written Language and Literacy 19:1-58.

Navarrete, Carlos, and Rocío Hernández. 2000. Esculturas preclásicas de obesos en el territorio mexicano. In XIII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala 1999, edited by Juan Pedro Laporte, Héctor Escobedo, Ana Claudia de Suasnavar, and Bárbara Arroyo, pp. 589-624. Guatemala City: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Instituto de Antropología e Historia, Asociación Tikal. http://www.asociaciontikal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/38.99-Navarrete.pdf.

Nicholson, H. B. and Cordy-Collins, A. 1979. Pre-Columbian Art from the Land Collection. Los Angeles: California Academy of Sciences.

Parsons, Lee Allen. 1986. The Origins of Maya Art: Monumental Stone Sculpture of Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala, and the Southern Pacific Coast.  Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Reilley, Kent. 1991. Olmec Iconographic Influences on the Symbols of Maya Rulership: An Examination of Possible Sources. In Sixth Palenque Round Table, 1986, edited by Virginia M. Fields. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Saturno, William A. 2002 Archaeological Investigation and Conservation at San Bartolo, Guatemala. Reporte Final, FAMSI. http://www.famsi.org/reports/01038/index.html.

Saturno, William A., David Stuart y Boris Beltrán. 2006a. Early Maya Writing at San Bartolo, Guatemala.  www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content.full/1121745/DC1.

—–. 2006b. Early Maya Writing at San Bartolo, Guatemala.  Science 311:1281-1283.

Saturno, William A., Karl A. Taube, and David Stuart. 2005. The Murals of San Bartolo, El Petén, Guatemala, Part I: The North Wall. Ancient America, 7. Barnardsville, North Carolina: Center for Ancient American Studies.

Shook, Edwin M., and Marion Popenoe de Hatch. 1999. Las tierras altas centrales: períodos Preclásico y Clásico. In Marion Popeneo de Hatch (ed.), Historia general de Guatemala, Tomo 1: época precolombina, 289–318. Guatemala: Fondo para la Cultura y el Desarrollo.

Smith, A. Ledyard. 1950. Uaxactún, Guatemala: Excavations of 1931–1937. (Publication 588.) Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Stross, Brian, and Justin Kerr. 1990. Notes on the Maya Vision Quest Through Enema. In The Maya Vase Book, Volume 2, edited by Justin Kerr, pp. 348-361. New York: Kerr Associates.

Stuart, David S. 1995. A Study of Maya Inscriptions.  Ph.D. Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee.

Taube, Karl A., William A. Saturno, David Stuart, and Heather Hurst. 2010. Los murales de San Bartolo, El Petén, Guatemala, parte 2: El mural poniente. Ancient America 10:1-115.

Thompson, J. Eric S. 1962. A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

 

Revisiting nak ‘to fight’: Additional Mayan Evidence Could Suggest Cognacy with Mije-Sokean *naks ‘to beat, to whip’

 

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill

1/25/2021

In Note 13 I proposed that Greater Lowland Mayan speakers had borrowed the Proto-Mije-Sokean term *naks ‘to whip, to beat’, and that such term was represented in Epigraphic Mayan, attested at the site of Dos Pilas, in a verbal expression first recognized by Grube and Schele (1993). To review, the expression shows the spelling ʔu-na-ka-wa, analyzable as u-nak-aw-Ø ‘s/he fought/beat him/her’, as seen in Figure 1. I argued in my previous Note that the Tzotzil, Ch’ol, and Yucatec entries supported the proposition that the term was likely diffused within the Greater Lowland Mayan region, as it appeared to lack attestations in other Mayan languages, and furthermore, that its phonological and semantic similarity to the Mije-Sokean term *naks, which is found in both branches of Mije-Sokean, were indicative of a loan from Mije-Sokean.

 

Figure 1

 

Within a day of posting my Note 13, linguist Evgeniya Korovina at the Institute of Linguistics at the Russian Academy of Sciences reached out by email to note that there were in fact entries of relevance in Kaufman with Justeson (2003:63): Colonial Yucatec #no7col ‘enemy’ and Tzeltal nak-umal ‘enemy’. Indeed, Kaufman with Justeson suggested a reconstruction *naq, with *q to explain why such a term would not have experienced the *k > ch shift of Greater Tzeltalan. I had completely missed this entry because of the simple fact that I had searched for entries resembling *nak, when I should have considered both *naq and *nak. A rookie mistake!

 

More interestingly, Korovina noted in her email that there exist Greater K’ichee’an items with likely related forms and meanings based on a root naq in Poqom, Poqomchi’, Tz’utujiil, Kaqchikel, Q’eqchi’, and Sakapulteko. For instance, Poqomchi’ offers both naq-aj ‘regañar (to scold, intransitive)’ and naq-ooj ‘regañar (to scold, transitive)’, among other inflections and derivations based on such root and stems (Dobbels 2003:439). More importantly, this root naq confirms the presence of *q hypothesized by Kaufman with Justeson (2003:63) in their Greater Lowland Mayan form *naq ‘enemy’.

 

This last point now raises an interesting question. It seems less likely that Mayan speakers would have borrowed a Mije-Sokean root with a final k as q, i.e. Mije-Sokean *naks as Mayan *naq. Perhaps this etymon could provide evidence for cognacy, rather than diffusion, as Terry Kaufman indeed suggested to me on 8/25/20 when I mentioned this comparison. At the time I didn’t feel comfortable with the notion of cognacy, since up until then only languages from the Greater Lowland Mayan diffusion area attested to this etymon. However, Korovina’s email pointing to its wide attestation within Greater K’ichee’an with the expected form to support the possibility of an older etymology certainly makes it plausible. Mora-Marín (2016:143, Table 8) presented 9 possible cognates attesting to the correspondence of Mayan *q to Mije-Sokean *k, such as Proto-Mayan *qay ‘to eat eagerly’ and Proto-Mije-Sokean *kay ‘to eat (tortillas, bread)’, PM *b’aaq ‘bone’ and PMS *pak ‘bone’.

 

To sum up, Epigraphic Mayan nak ‘to fight/battle with’ can be more securely traced back to *naq. This root is more widely attested in the Greater Tzeltalan and Yucatecan languages, but now appears to be present also in Greater K’ichee’an, as Korovina has pointed out. Potentially, then, it could be a Central Mayan or Southern Mayan (Late Proto-Mayan) etymon. And potentially, as such, it could be a candidate for cognacy with Mije-Sokean *naks ‘to beat, to whip’. But given the prevalence of diffusion within the Greater Lowland Mayan region (Justeson et al. 1985), the term could be much more recent within Mayan, and may have been diffused between Greater K’ichee’an and a language from the Greater Lowland Mayan region prior to the *q > k shift of Greater Tzeltalan. A more systematic search for cognates in other Mayan subgroups (e.g. Huastecan, Greater Q’anjob’alan, Greater Mamean) should help clarify the issue.

 

Acknowledgments. My sincere thanks to Evgeniya Korovina for noting that I missed the *naq ‘enemy’ entry in Kaufman with Justeson (2003), and especially for steering me toward the Greater K’ichee’an cognates of relevance.

References

Dobbels, Marcel. 2003. Tusq’orik Maya Poqomchi’–Kaxlan Q’orik. Diccionario Poqomchi’–Castellano. Primera edición. Guatemala: PROASE.

Grube, Nikolai, and Linda Schele. 1993. Un verbo nakwa para “batallar o conquistar.” Texas Notes on Pre-Columbian Art, Writing, and Culture 55. URL: https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/15931.

Kaufman, Terrence, with John Justeson. 2003. Preliminary Mayan Etymological Dictionary. URL: http://www.famsi.org/reports/01051/index.html.

Justeson, John S., William M. Norman, Lyle Campbell, and Terrence Kaufman. 1985. The Foreign Impact on Lowland Mayan Language and Script. Middle American Research Institute, Publication 53. New Orleans: Tulane University.

Mora-Marín, David. 2016. Testing the Proto-Mayan-Mije-Sokean Hypothesis. International Journal of American Linguistics 82:125-180.

Nak ‘to fight’: Another Mije-Sokean Loan in Epigraphic Mayan?

 

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill

1/24/2021

In this note I propose that Greater Lowland Mayan speakers borrowed the Proto-Mike-Sokean term *naks ‘to whip, to beat’, and that this term is the ultimate source of a Classic Mayan verb that appears in a spelling at the site of Dos Pilas.

 

The story begins in 1993, when Grube and Schele (1993) published a brief note on a spelling that appears on Hieroglyphic Stairway 2 from Dos Pilas, dedicated ca. 9.11.10.0.0 (or 662 CE), seen in Figure 1a. The spelling in question, seen more clearly in Figure 1b, shows the syllabographic sequence ʔu-na-ka-wa. Grube and Schele (1993:1) observed that the expression is a transitive verb, and they related it to the Colonial Tzotzil entry nak, a transitive root glossed as ‘battle, compete against, conquer, contend, fight in a contest, make an enemy of, oppose, repel, resist, wage war against’ (Laughlin with Haviland 1988:268). The term is used inflected and derived in a number of different ways, among them nak-av, an antipassive inflection, nak-av-el ‘opposition, persecution, pursuit’, a verbal noun derivation, and nak-m-al ‘conqueror, enemy, opponent, pursuer, warrior’, an agentive nominalization. Polian (2014:464) documents this term in Tzeltal as nak-om-al ‘enemigo; mal perjudicial (enemy; harmful affliction)’. Although it does not appear in Aulie and Aulie’s (2009) contemporary Ch’ol dictionary, it does show up in Becerra’s (1935:260) Ch’ol vocabulary from 1935 as nak-om-al ‘enemy’. And finally, it is attested in Colonial Yucatec as nak ‘enfadar, empalagar, dar y causar fastidio o hastío y dar en rostro (to annoy, to pall, to give and cause annoyance or weariness and to hit on the face)’, among other inflections and derivations based on the same root, including the agentive derivation nak-om, which includes, among several meanings, ‘military chief’ and ‘sacrificer’ (Barrera Vásquez  1980:553). The term does not appear in Mayan languages from outside the Greater Tzeltalan (Ch’olan, Tzeltalan) and Yucatecan subgroups—there is no entry for this etymon in Kaufman with Justeson (2003) for example. The glyphic spelling ʔu-na-ka-wa can be analyzed as u-nak-aw-Ø ‘s/he fought him/her’ (third person singular ergative-fight-plain/completive of root transitive-third person singular absolutive).

 

Several months ago, as I was reading Kaufman’s monograph on language contact involving Mesoamerican languages, I came across his comparison between Mije-Sokean *naks ‘to beat, to whip’ and Tonika náka ‘war, battle’ and Shitimasha <nakc> #nakš ‘war, warfare, fight, battle’ (Kaufman 2020:248). It immediately rang a bell, leading me to recall Grube and Schele’s (1993) note. Though not as far-flung as the Tonika and Shitimasha languages, the Greater Tzeltalan, Yucatecan, and Epigraphic Mayan attestations of the root nak are quite straightforward. Since the Mije-Sokean root *naks is widely distributed within that family, appearing in both the Mijean and Sokean branches (Wichmann 1995:397), whereas the Mayan root #nak is restricted to the languages of the Greater Lowland Mayan interaction sphere, a well known diffusion zone involving Ch’olan, Tzeltalan, and Yucatecan (Justeson et al. 1985), it is likely that the term diffused from Mije-Sokean into Greater Lowland Mayan, and can therefore be added to the almost one hundred loans documented so far between Mije-Sokean and Mayan languages (Campbell and Kaufman 1976; Wichmann 1999; Mora-Marín 2016).

 

I therefore propose that the root nak attested by ca. 662 CE at the site of Dos Pilas was diffused into the Greater Lowland Mayan languages from Mije-Sokean.

 

References

Aulie, Wilbur H., and Evelyn W. de Aulie. 2009. Diccionario Ch’ol-Español, Español-Ch’ol. Mexico City: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. Third edition.

Barrera Vásquez, Alfredo. 1980. Diccionario Maya Cordemex: Maya-Español, Español-Maya.  Mérida, Yucatán: Ediciones Cordemex.

Becerra, Marcos E. 1935. Vocabulario de la lengua chol. Anales del Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía, 2 (quinta época):249-278, 1935.

Campbell, Lyle, and Terrence Kaufman. 1976. A Linguistic Look at the Olmecs.  American Antiquity 41:80-89.

Grube, Nikolai, and Linda Schele. 1993. Un verbo nakwa para “batallar o conquistar.” Texas Notes on Pre-Columbian Art, Writing, and Culture 55. URL: https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/15931.

Hopkins, Nicholas A., Ausencio Cruz Guzmán, and J. Kathryn Josserand. 2008. A Chol (Mayan) vocabulary from 1789. International Journal of American Linguistics 74:83-114.

Hopkins, Nicholas A., J. Kathryn Josserand, and Ausencio Cruz Guzmán. 2011. A Historical Dictionary of Chol (Mayan): The Lexical Sources from 1789 to 1935. Tallahassee, Florida: Jaguar Tours 2011. URL: http://www.famsi.org/mayawriting/dictionary/hopkins/dictionaryChol.html.

Justeson, John S., William M. Norman, Lyle Campbell, and Terrence Kaufman. 1985. The Foreign Impact on Lowland Mayan Language and Script. Middle American Research Institute, Publication 53. New Orleans: Tulane University.

Kaufman, Terrence. 2020. Olmecs, Teotihuacaners, and Toltecs: Language History and Language Contact in Meso-America. URL: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340721651_MALP_2020. 

Laughlin, Robert M., with John B. Haviland.  1988.  The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán.  Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology No. 31.  Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Mora-Marín, David. 2016. Testing the Proto-Mayan-Mije-Sokean Hypothesis. International Journal of American Linguistics 82:125-180.

Polian, Gilles. 2015. Diccionario Multidialectal del tseltal. URL: https://tseltaltokal.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Polian_Diccionario-multidialectal-del-tseltal-enero2015-2.pdf.

Wichmann, Søren. 1995. The Relationship Among the Mixe-Zoquean Languages of Mexico. Provo: University of Utah Press.

Wichmann, Søren. 1999. A conservative look at diffusion involving mixe-zoquean languages. Archaeology
And Language II: Archaeological Data and Linguistic Hypotheses, ed. Roger blench and
Matthew Spriggs, pp. 297–323. London: Toutledge.

 

Two Instances of T1ʔu on the Painted Stone Block from San Bartolo Sub-V: Reviewing Giron-Ábrego (2015)

 

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill

1/16/2021

In my most recent blog post (Mora-Marín 2020), I proposed the identification of an early design of T1/HE6, the syllabogramʔu, on the painted stone block from San Bartolo Sub-V (Saturno, Stuart, and Beltrán 2006), dated to ca. 300-200 BCE. In that note I failed to cite Mario Giron-Ábrego’s (2015) article on Mesoweb where he proposed the identification of the same design of T1 in a different part of the same text. By means of this note, I would like to apologize for that failure, and rectify it by reviewing Giron-Ábrego’s discussion on the matter in light of my more recent identification. But before proceeding, I will reuse Figure 1 from my previous post in order to refer to parts of the text. The image in the Figure 1 is a high-resolution orthomosaic, that is, “a 3D-model-based combo of overlapping photographs reflecting average values of overlapping pixels,” prepared by Alexandre Tokovinine and published online 2/13/18 (Tokovinine 2018), and which the reader may consult here. The text is likely incomplete on both ends. In fact, Tokovinine’s rendering allows for the identification of traces of another glyph below the bottommost full glyph.

 

Figure 1

 

In his 2015 article, Giron-Ábrego focused on the long-lipped head glyph seen at the very bottom of the surviving text. However, he discussed in detail most of the text, including the third glyph block, seen in Figure 2, which he had also studied in an earlier article (Giron-Ábrego 2012), where he had suggested that the first sign could constitute an example of T51 ta/TA, and that the entire glyph block could function to represent a count of k’atuns.

 

Figure 2

 

In his more recent article, Giron-Ábrego suggests that this glyph block could be composed of the following signs: ta-FIVE-?KATUN. He continues (2015:7):

 

Upon closer inspection of pA3, based on published photographs and drawings, it is possible that the element to the right of the locative ta is a small representation of an archaic and calligraphic T1 u glyph, which in Classic-period inscriptions often indicates the third-person singular preconsonantal ergative/possessive pronoun. The superfix clearly shows a bracket or C-like shape, engulfing two dot-like elements. These traits are also diagnostic of some of the earliest variants of T1 […].

 

Figure 3 illustrates the comparison made by Giron-Ábrego (2015) reutilizing the image in Figure 2 above (Figure 3a), this time juxtaposed to a drawing of the sign in question by David Stuart (Figure 3b) and the early examples of T1 ʔu (Figure 3c) adduced by that author (2015:Figure 8c). Note that the San Bartolo example would agree with the other early examples in the C-shaped bracket, the two dots, and the lack of a central, triangular element.

 

Figure 3

 

If correct, this identification by Giron-Ábrego, plus the more recent one offered in my previous note (Mora-Marín 2020), illustrated in Figure 4, would contribute significantly to our understanding of this early text from San Bartolo, given that the more likely function of the early form of T1 ʔu is the spelling of the u- ‘third person singular ergative/possessive’ proclitic, which would facilitate any attempt at a linguistic analysis of the text.

 

Figure 4

 

To sum up, it is entirely possible that the text painted on the San Barolo Sub-V stone block could bear two instances of the early variant of T1 ʔu characterized by a C-shaped bracket, two dots, and no central triangular element, a significant addition to our understanding of this text, as it opens up possibilities for its grammatical analysis.

 

References

Giron-Ábrego, Mario. 2012. An Early Example of the Logogram TZUTZ at San Bartolo. Wayeb Notes 42.

Giron-Ábrego, Mario. 2015. On a Preclassic Long-Lipped Glyphic Profile. Mesoweb: www.mesoweb.com/articles/giron-abrego/Giron-Abrego2015.pdf.

Mora-Marín, David F. 2020. A Previously Unidentified Example of T1/HE6 ʔu on the Painted Stone Block from San Bartolo Sub-V. Notes on Mesoamerican Linguistics and Epigraphy 11. https://davidmm.web.unc.edu/2020/12/12/note-11/.

Tokovinine, Alexandre. 2018. “Painted inscription, San Bartolo.” Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution. URL: https://skfb.ly/6VzQF.

 

Un ejemplo no identificado previamente de T1/HE6 ʔu en el bloque de piedra pintado de San Bartolo Sub-V

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
Universidad de Carolina del norte
Chapel Hill

12/12/2020

Esta es una nota muy breve sobre la identificación de un grafema previamente desapercibido en el texto del famoso bloque de piedra pintado de San Bartolo Sub-V publicado por Saturno, Stuart y Beltrán (2006), quienes lo fechan hacia 300-200 a.C. El sitio web del proyecto San Bartolo mantiene un enlace a una versión descargable del artículo, aquí (seleccione el botón “PDF” en lugar del enlace “Ver texto completo”). El dibujo del texto pintado está en la página 1282 de ese documento. El Bloque Glífico 8 del mismo es el que concierne a esta publicación. En él se encuentran al menos dos signos: un signo que se asemeja a un pájaro mirando hacia la izquierda, y debajo de éste, un signo que se parece a T602/XD1, el silabograma pa. (Véase Thompson (1962) para los códigos numéricos con “T” y Macri y Looper (2003) para los códigos alfanuméricos.) A la derecha de estos dos signos, el dibujo de David Stuart muestra lo que sólo puede describirse como un motivo ondulado, parecido a una cola.

 

Recientemente, Alexandre Tokovinine preparó un ortomosaico de alta resolución del bloque que constituye “un combo basado en un modelo 3D de fotografías superpuestas que reflejan valores promedio de píxeles superpuestos” (Tokovinine, comunicación personal, 12/11/20). La imagen, dada a conocer al autor por Dana G. Moot II, se publicó en línea el 13/02/18 (Tokovinine 2018). La Figura 1 presenta una captura de pantalla, pero el lector puede consultar el original aquí.

 

Figura 1

Decidí echarle un vistazo detallado a la imagen por Tokovinine de este notable texto, en relación a un proyecto sobre la paleografía de T1/HE6 ʔu aún en preparación. Inicialmente estaba interesado en un signo en el Bloque Glífico 4 que se asemeja a dos puntos, ya que algunos textos del Preclásico Tardío exhiben un signo similar, y en al menos dos de ellos, el signo en cuestión se puede analizar, en base a similitudes contextuales con textos posteriores, como una grafía del proclítico gramatical u- ‘tercera persona del singular ergativo/posesivo’ (p.ej., Mora-Marín 2001, 2008a, 2010). Sin embargo, en mi opinión, y a pesar de algunas discusiones sobre este texto además del informe original (p.ej. Skidmore 2006; Mora-Marín 2008b; Girón-Ábrego 2012), aún no hay pruebas fehacientes para una interpretación particular del signo DOS.PUNTOS en el bloque de San Bartolo.

 

A pesar de esta evaluación negativa, noté algo más en el fotomosaico de Tokovine que no había anticipado: cuando dirigí mi atención al elemento representado como un motivo ondulado en el Bloque Glífico 8 en el dibujo de David Stuart, me di cuenta de que no es un motivo ondulado del todo, sino un ejemplo de T1/HE6 ʔu correspondiente al diseño presente en dos textos portátiles muy tempranos que carecen de información calendárica, pero que ha sido asignado estilísticamente al período Preclásico Tardío o Protoclásico. El Cuadro 1 incluye los textos portátiles relevantes en cuestión, específicamente una máscara pectoral de estilo Olmeca en el Museo de Arte de Brooklyn y una cuenta de jade tubular fragmentaria encontrada en el Cenote Sagrado de Chichén Itzá, junto con algunas de las discusiones anteriores y fechas estilísticas relativas. La representación de este signo en el bloque de piedra de San Bartolo como un elemento ondulado en forma de cola probablemente se debió a una grieta o fractura en la piedra, visible en el escaneo de Tokovinine. La Figura 2A muestra una captura de pantalla del Bloque Glífico 8 del bloque de piedra de San Bartolo, capturado del fotomosaico por Tokovinine, con una flecha apuntando al signo que corresponde al diseño de T1/HE6 ʔu presente en los dos textos del Preclásico Tardío o del Protoclásico en cuestión (Figuras 2B-C). El mismo diseño de T1/HE6 aparece en uno de los textos del Grupo 4 de la Cueva de Joljá en Chiapas (Sheseña 2007: 4, Fig. 3).

 

Cuadro 1

 

Figura 2

 

Un tema más merece atención. En su descripción del descubrimiento y la datación del texto, Saturno et al. (2006:1282) afirman lo siguiente:

 

En su apariencia general, el texto guarda cierta semejanza con la denominada escritura Epi-Olmeca utilizada por los pueblos vecinos del oeste durante los períodos Preclásico Tardío y Clásico Temprano […]. Sin embargo, todos los ejemplos de esa escritura son posteriores al bloque de San Bartolo, lo que plantea la cuestión de la dirección en la que pudo haber fluido cualquier influencia.

 

En primer lugar, me gustaría comentar sobre el hecho de que existe al menos un texto Epi-Olmeca que podría ser anterior o contemporáneo con el bloque pintado de San Bartolo: el fragmento de Chiapas de Corzo puede datarse ca. 400-150 a.C. (Fase Francesa) ó 150-0 a.C. (Fase Guanacaste) en base a sus asociaciones contextuales, recientemente resumidas por Macri (2017:2), pero que data específicamente de la fase Francesa según otros autores (Kaufman y Justeson 2001:2, 2008:56). En segundo lugar, la ubicación extraña del signo T1/HE6 ʔu en el texto de San Bartolo, de ser su función la de representar el proclítico u-, podría apuntar a una interpretación diferente de la dirección de influencia. En el texto grabado en la cuenta tubular de jade hallado en el Cenote Sagrado, la ubicación de T1/HE6 en el lado derecho de dos bloques glíficos (Figuras 2C-D) tiene sentido en términos de convenciones visuales: los glifos en forma de cabeza de perfil están en ambos casos orientados hacia la derecha y, por lo tanto, el orden de lectura interno de los bloques glíficos era de derecha a izquierda. En cambio, en el bloque pintado de San Bartolo, los glifos en forma de cabeza están orientados hacia la izquierda, por lo que no proporcionarían ninguna justificación visual para la colocación de T1/HE6 a la derecha. A continuación ofrezco una posibilidad diferente.

 

Mora-Marín (1996, 1997, 2001a, 2010) ha discutido previamente varios casos posibles de difusión de grafemas entre escribas Mayas y Epi-Olmecas que involucran silabogramas, uno de ellos es posiblemente el Epi-Olmeca MS20 wʉ, visto en la Figura 3A, y maya T1/HE6 ʔu. El diseño presente en el bloque de piedra pintado de San Bartolo y los otros textos discutidos anteriormente, dos ejemplos de los cuales se ven en la Figura 3B, se asemeja al diseño de MS20 wʉ, cuyas funciones típicas en la escritura Epi-Olmeca, según Justeson y Kaufman ( 1993, 1997) y Kaufman y Justeson (2001, 2004) incluyen marcadores finales de palabras y frases, a saber, el sufijo verbal completivo independiente -wʉ y el relativizador -wʉʔ. Si los escribas Mayas de hecho copiaron y adaptaron el signo T1/HE6 ʔu de los escribas Epi-Olmecas, tal vez con el propósito de deletrear el morfema gramatical de alta frecuencia u-, un proclítico que comienza con vocal y cuya pronunciación se asemejaría a la /w/ inicial del silabograma Epi-Olmeca wʉ, entonces el bloque de piedra en cuestión podría ser evidencia de tal influencia ya en 300-200 a.C.[1] En otras palabras, el signo Epi-Olmeca MS20 wʉ puede haber sonado muy parecido a un marcador /u-/ de un idioma Maya cuando éste no aparece al inicio de una frase o palabra, y los escribas Mayas bien podrían haber copiado tal signo Epi-Olmeca para deletrear dicho marcador.[2] Pero esto es nada más una conjetura por ahora, digna de un blog a lo más, y que requiere de más evidencia para sustentarla.

 

Figura 3

 

Por ahora, lo que importa destacar es la atestación de este diseño de T1/HE6 ʔu, posiblemente el diseño más antiguo de dicho grafema, ya para el 300-200 a.C. en el bloque de piedra pintado de San Bartolo Sub-V. La posibilidad de difusión Epi-Olmeca/Maya planteada aquí requerirá de datos adicionales, datos que muy bien podrían salir a la luz en el sitio de San Bartolo en un futuro cercano.

 

Agradecimientos. Me gustaría agradecer a Dana G. Moot II por su correspondencia por correo electrónico sobre los dibujos disponibles del bloque de piedra pintado de San Bartolo, y por llamar mi atención al escaneo de Alexandre Tokovinine. Estoy en deuda con Alexandre Tokovinine por la información proporcionada sobre el escaneo del texto en cuestión.

 

Referencias

Fields, Virginia, and Dorie Reents-Budet. 2005. Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship. London: Scala Publishers Limited.

Giron-Ábrego, Mario. 2012. An Early Example of the Logogram TZUTZ at San Bartolo. Wayeb Notes 42.

Justeson, John, and Terrence Kaufman. 1993. A Decipherment of Epi-Olmec Hieroglyphic Writing. Science 259:1703-1710.

—–. 1997. A Newly Discovered Column in the Hieroglyphic Text on La Mojarra Stela 1: A Test of the Epi-Olmec Decipherment. Science 277:207-210.

Kaufman, Terrence. 2020. Olmecs, Teotihuacaners, and Toltecs: Language History and Language Contact in Meso-America. URL: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340721651_MALP_2020?channel=doi&linkId=5e9a4336299bf13079a24ec9&showFulltext=true.

Kaufman, Terrence, and John Justeson. 2001. Epi-Olmec hieroglyphic writing and texts.  Austin: Texas Workshop Foundation.

—–. 2004. Epi-Olmec. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages, edited by Robert D. Woodard, pp. 1071-1108. Cambridge University Press.

—–. 2008. The Epi-Olmec Language and its Neighbors. In Classic Period Cultural Currents in Southern and Central Veracruz, edited by Philip J. Arnold, III, and Christopher A. Pool, pp. 55–83.  Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Macri, Martha J. 2017. Isthmian Script at Chiapa de Corzo. Glyph Dwellers 56.

Macri, Martha J., and Matthew Looper. 2003. The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs. Volume One: The Classic Period Inscriptions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Mora-Marín, David F. 1996. The Social Context for the Origins of Mayan Writing: The Formative Ceremonial Complex, Portable Elite Objects, and Interregional Exchange. Unpublished Senior Honors Thesis on file in the Anthropology Department at The University of Kansas, Lawrence.

—–. 1997. The origins of Maya writing: The case for portable objects. In Tom Jones and Carolyn Jones (eds.), U Mut Maya VII, 133-164. Arcata: Humboldt State University.

—–. 2001a. The Grammar, Orthography, and Social Context of Late Preclassic Mayan Texts.  Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis.  University at Albany, Albany, New York.

—–. 2001b.  Late Preclassic inscription documentation (LAPIDA) project.  Retrieved from: http://www.famsi.org/reports/99049/99049MoraMarin01.pdf.

—–. 2008a. Análisis epigráfico y lingüístico de la escritura maya del período Preclásico Tardío: Implicaciones para la historia sociolingüística de la region. In Juan Pedro Laporte, Bárbara Arroyo, and Héctor E. Mejía (eds.), XXI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2007, 853-876. Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología.

—–. 2008b. Two Parallel Passages from the Late Preclassic Period: Connections Between San Bartolo and An Unprovenanced Jade Pendant. Wayeb Notes 29:1-6.

—–. 2010. La epigrafía y paleografía de la escritura preclásica maya: nuevas metodologías y resultados preliminares. In Bárbara Arroyo, Adriana Linares Palma, and Lorena Paiz Aragón (eds.), XXIII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2009, 1045-1057. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología.

—–. 2016. Testing the Proto-Mayan-Mije-Sokean Hypothesis. International Journal of American Linguistics 82:125-180.

Proskouriakoff, Tatiana. 1974. Jades from the Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichén Itzá, Yucatán.  Peabody Museum Memoirs, Vol. 10, No. 1. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Saturno, William A., David Stuart, and Boris Beltrán. 2006. Early Maya Writing at San Bartolo, Guatemala. Science Magazine: Science Express, pp. 1-6.

Schele, Linda, and Mary E. Miller. 1986. The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. New York: George Braziller, Inc., in association with the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

Sheseña, Alejandro. 2007. Los textos jeroglíficos mayas de la cueva de Jolja, Chiapas. Artículos de Mesoweb. Mesoweb: www.mesoweb.com/es/articulos/jolja/Jolja.pdf.

Skidmore, Joel. 2006. Evidence of Earliest Maya Writing. URL: http://www.mesoweb.com/reports/SanBartoloWriting.html.

Thompson, Eric J. 1962. A Catalogue of Maya Hieroglyphics.  Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Tokovinine, Alexandre. 2018. “Painted inscription, San Bartolo.” Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution. URL: https://skfb.ly/6VzQF.

Zavala Maldonado, Roberto. 2007. Las cláusulas de relativo en lenguas cholanas, un calco zoqueano.  Paper presented at CILLA III, Austin, Texas, October 25-27, 2007.

[1] The vowel of Epi-Olmec MS20 wʉ that might have been perceived by Mayans as [a], [ə], or [u], depending on the particulars of the language and the context Evidence for Mixe-Zoquean /ʉ/ being borrowed by Mayan languages as [a] can be found in the borrowing of Proto-Mixe-Zoquean *sʉk ‘bean’ as K’iche’ sak ‘coral bean tree’ and Kachikel <sac> ‘dados; habas con que juegan los indios dados’ (Kaufman 2020:155); as [ʉ] in Zoquean *-pʉ(ʔ) ‘relativizer’ borrowed as Ch’ol and Chontal -b’ə ‘relativizer’ (Zavala 2007); and as [u] in the borrowing of Proto-Mixean *hʉ¢ ‘to grind’ and *hʉ¢-i ‘dough’ into Mayan as Western Mayan and Lowland Mayan *juch’ ‘moler’, and Proto-Mixean *mʉkʉk ‘strength’ as Greater Lowland Mayan *muq’ ‘strength’ (Mora-Marín 2016).

[2] A phrase- or word-initial /u-/ would be realized phonetically as [ʔu-]. In fact, the pronunciation of such marker, by far the most frequent motivation for the use of T1/HE6 ʔu, could have led to scribes reanalyzing it orthographocally as ʔu.

A Previously Unidentified Example of T1/HE6 ʔu on the Painted Stone Block from San Bartolo Sub-V

 

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill

12/12/2020

This is a very brief note on the identification of a previously unnoticed sign on the famous painted stone block from San Bartolo Sub-V published by Saturno, Stuart, and Beltrán (2006), who date it to ca. 300-200 BCE. The San Bartolo project website maintains a link to a downloadable version of the article, here (select “PDF” button instead of “View Full Text” link). The drawing of the painted text is on page 1282 of that document. Glyph block 8 is the one that concerns this post. In it one finds at least two signs: a sign that resembles a bird facing to the left, and underneath it, a sign that resembles T602/XD1, the syllabogram pa. (See Thompson (1962) or “T-number” numeric codes, and Macri and Looper (2003) for alphanumeric sign catalog codes.) To the right of these two signs, the drawing by David Stuart shows what can only be described as a squiggly motif, resembling a tail.

 

Recently, Alexandre Tokovinine prepared a high-resolution orthomosaic of the block, which constitutes “a 3D-model-based combo of overlapping photographs reflecting average values of overlapping pixels” (Tokovinine, personal communication, 12/11/20). The image, brought to my attention by Dana G. Moot II, was published online 2/13/18 (Tokovinine 2018). Figure 1 presents a screenshot, but the reader may consult the original here.

 

Figure 1

 

I decided to take a close look at Tokovinine’s rendering of this remarkable text, in connection with a project on the paleography of T1/HE6 ʔu. Initially I was interested in a sign on Glyph block 4 that resembles two dots, as some Late Preclassic texts exhibit a similar sign, and in at least two of them, the sign in question can be argued, on the basis of contextual similarities with later texts, to be functioning to spell u-, the third person singular ergative/possessive proclitic (e.g. Mora-Marín 2001, 2008a, 2010). However, in my opinion, and despite a few discussions of this text besides the original report (e.g. Skidmore 2006; Mora-Marín 2008b; Giron-Ábrego 2012), there is still no good evidence to settle on a particular interpretation of the TWO.DOTS sign on the San Bartolo painted block.

 

Despite this negative assessment, I noticed something else on Tokovine’s photomosaic that I did not expect: when I turned my attention to the element rendered as a squiggly motif in David Stuart’s drawing, I realized that it is not a squiggly motif at all, but an example of T1/HE6 ʔu corresponding to the design present on two very early portable texts lacking calendrical information but which I and others have stylistically assigned to the Late Preclassic or Protoclassic period. Table 1 lists the relevant unprovenienced texts, an Olmec-style pectoral mask at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and a fragmentary tubular jade bead found in the Sacred Cenote of Chichen Itza, along with some of the previous discussions and relative stylistic datings. The rendering of this sign on the San Bartolo stone block as a squiggly, tail-like element was probably by a crack or fracture on the stone, visible in Tokovinine’s scan. Figure 2A shows a screenshot of Glyph block 8 from the painted San Bartolo stone block, captured from the photomosaic by Tokovinine, with an arrow pointing to the sign that corresponds to the design of T1/HE6 ʔu present on the two Late Preclassic or Protoclassic texts in question (Figures 2B-C). The same design of T1/HE6 appears on one of the Group 4 texzts from Jolja Cave in Chiapas (Sheseña 2007:4, Fig. 3).

 

Table 1

 

Figure 2

One more issue deserves attention. In their description of the text’s discovery and dating, Saturno et al. (2006:1282) state the following:

 

In their overall appearance, the text bears some resemblance to the so-called Epi-Olmec script used by neighboring peoples to the west during the Late Preclassic and Early Classic periods […]. All examples of that script postdate the San Bartolo block, however, raising the question of the direction in which any influence may have flowed.

 

First, I would like to comment on the fact that there is in fact at least one Epi-Olmec text that could predate or be co-eval with the San Bartolo painted block: the Chiapas de Corzo sherd can be dated to ca. 400-150 BCE (Francesa Phase) or 150-0 BCE (Guanacaste Phase) based on its contextual associations, recently reviewed by Macri (2017:2), but dating specifically to Francesa phase according to some authors (Kaufman and Justeson 2001:2, 2008:56). Second, the odd placement of the T1/HE6 ʔu sign on the San Bartolo text, should it be there to spell a proclitic u-, could point to a different interpretation of the direction of influence. In the text incised on the tubular jade bead found in the Sacred Cenote, the location of T1/HE6 on the right side of two glyph blocks makes sense in terms of visual conventions: the profile head glyphs are in both cases facing to the right, and thus the intra-glyph block reading order is right-to-left. In contrast, on the painted stone block from San Bartolo, the portrait head glyphs are facing to the left, leaving no visual justification for the placement of T1/HE6 to the right. Instead, I offer a different possibility.

 

Mora-Marín (1996, 1997, 2001a, 2010) has previously discussed possible cases of grapheme diffusion between Mayan and Epi-Olmec scribes involving syllabograms, one of these being possibly Epi-Olmec MS20 wʉ, seen in Figure 3A, and Mayan T1/HE6 ʔu. The design present on the painted stone block from San Bartolo and the other texts discussed earlier, two examples of which are seen in Figure 3B, resembles the design of MS20 wʉ, whose typical functions in Epi-Olmec writing, according to Justeson and Kaufman (1993, 1997) and Kaufman and Justeson (2001, 2004) include word- and phrase-final markers, namely, the independent completive verbal suffix -wʉ, and the relativizer -wʉʔ. If Mayan scribes did in fact borrow T1/HE6 ʔu from Epi-Olmec scribes, perhaps for the purpose of spelling the high-frequency grammatical morpheme u-, a vowel-initial proclitic whose pronunciation would resemble the initial /w/ of the Epi-Olmec syllabogram wʉ, then the stone block in question could be evidence of such influence already by 300-200 BCE.[1] In other words, Epi-Olmec MS20 wʉ may have sounded very close to a non-phrase or word-initial /u-/ marker in Mayan, and Mayan scribes may have borrowed it to spell such marker.[2] But this is speculation at this point, worthy of a blog post, but requiring more evidence for substantiation.

 

Figure 3

For now, what is important to highlight is the attestation of this design of T1/HE6 ʔu, possibly the earliest design of such grapheme, by ca. 300-200 BCE, on the San Bartolo Sub-V painted stone block. The possibility of Epi-Olmec/Mayan diffusion raised here will require additional data, data that may very well be uncovered at the site of San Bartolo in the near future.

 

Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Dana G. Moot II for his email correspondence on the available drawings of the painted stone block from San Bartolo, and for calling my attention to Alexandre Tokovinine’s scan. I am indebted to Alexandre Tokovinine for the information provided on his scan of the text in question.

 

References

Fields, Virginia, and Dorie Reents-Budet. 2005. Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship. London: Scala Publishers Limited.

Giron-Ábrego, Mario. 2012. An Early Example of the Logogram TZUTZ at San Bartolo. Wayeb Notes 42.

Justeson, John, and Terrence Kaufman. 1993. A Decipherment of Epi-Olmec Hieroglyphic Writing. Science 259:1703-1710.

—–. 1997. A Newly Discovered Column in the Hieroglyphic Text on La Mojarra Stela 1: A Test of the Epi-Olmec Decipherment. Science 277:207-210.

Kaufman, Terrence. 2020. Olmecs, Teotihuacaners, and Toltecs: Language History and Language Contact in Meso-America. URL: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340721651_MALP_2020?channel=doi&linkId=5e9a4336299bf13079a24ec9&showFulltext=true.

Kaufman, Terrence, and John Justeson. 2001. Epi-Olmec hieroglyphic writing and texts.  Austin: Texas Workshop Foundation.

—–. 2004. Epi-Olmec. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages, edited by Robert D. Woodard, pp. 1071-1108. Cambridge University Press.

—–. 2008. The Epi-Olmec Language and its Neighbors. In Classic Period Cultural Currents in Southern and Central Veracruz, edited by Philip J. Arnold, III, and Christopher A. Pool, pp. 55–83.  Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Macri, Martha J. 2017. Isthmian Script at Chiapa de Corzo. Glyph Dwellers 56.

Macri, Martha J., and Matthew Looper. 2003. The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs. Volume One: The Classic Period Inscriptions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Mora-Marín, David F. 1996. The Social Context for the Origins of Mayan Writing: The Formative Ceremonial Complex, Portable Elite Objects, and Interregional Exchange. Unpublished Senior Honors Thesis on file in the Anthropology Department at The University of Kansas, Lawrence.

—–. 1997. The origins of Maya writing: The case for portable objects. In Tom Jones and Carolyn Jones (eds.), U Mut Maya VII, 133-164. Arcata: Humboldt State University.

—–. 2001a. The Grammar, Orthography, and Social Context of Late Preclassic Mayan Texts.  Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis.  University at Albany, Albany, New York.

—–. 2001b.  Late Preclassic inscription documentation (LAPIDA) project.  Retrieved from: http://www.famsi.org/reports/99049/99049MoraMarin01.pdf.

—–. 2008a. Análisis epigráfico y lingüístico de la escritura maya del período Preclásico Tardío: Implicaciones para la historia sociolingüística de la region. In Juan Pedro Laporte, Bárbara Arroyo, and Héctor E. Mejía (eds.), XXI Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2007, 853-876. Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología.

—–. 2008b. Two Parallel Passages from the Late Preclassic Period: Connections Between San Bartolo and An Unprovenanced Jade Pendant. Wayeb Notes 29:1-6.

—–. 2010. La epigrafía y paleografía de la escritura preclásica maya: nuevas metodologías y resultados preliminares. In Bárbara Arroyo, Adriana Linares Palma, and Lorena Paiz Aragón (eds.), XXIII Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2009, 1045-1057. Guatemala City, Guatemala: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología.

—–. 2016. Testing the Proto-Mayan-Mije-Sokean Hypothesis. International Journal of American Linguistics 82:125-180.

Proskouriakoff, Tatiana. 1974. Jades from the Cenote of Sacrifice, Chichén Itzá, Yucatán.  Peabody Museum Memoirs, Vol. 10, No. 1. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Saturno, William A., David Stuart, and Boris Beltrán. 2006. Early Maya Writing at San Bartolo, Guatemala. Science Magazine: Science Express, pp. 1-6.

Schele, Linda, and Mary E. Miller. 1986. The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. New York: George Braziller, Inc., in association with the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.

Sheseña, Alejandro. 2007. Los textos jeroglíficos mayas de la cueva de Jolja, Chiapas. Artículos de Mesoweb. Mesoweb: www.mesoweb.com/es/articulos/jolja/Jolja.pdf.

Skidmore, Joel. 2006. Evidence of Earliest Maya Writing. URL: http://www.mesoweb.com/reports/SanBartoloWriting.html.

Thompson, Eric J. 1962. A Catalogue of Maya Hieroglyphics.  Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Tokovinine, Alexandre. 2018. “Painted inscription, San Bartolo.” Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution. URL: https://skfb.ly/6VzQF.

Zavala Maldonado, Roberto. 2007. Las cláusulas de relativo en lenguas cholanas, un calco zoqueano.  Paper presented at CILLA III, Austin, Texas, October 25-27, 2007.

[1] The vowel of Epi-Olmec MS20 wʉ that might have been perceived by Mayans as [a], [ə], or [u], depending on the particulars of the language and the context Evidence for Mixe-Zoquean /ʉ/ being borrowed by Mayan languages as [a] can be found in the borrowing of Proto-Mixe-Zoquean *sʉk ‘bean’ as K’iche’ sak ‘coral bean tree’ and Kachikel <sac> ‘dados; habas con que juegan los indios dados’ (Kaufman 2020:155); as [ʉ] in Zoquean *-pʉ(ʔ) ‘relativizer’ borrowed as Ch’ol and Chontal -b’ə ‘relativizer’ (Zavala 2007); and as [u] in the borrowing of Proto-Mixean *hʉ¢ ‘to grind’ and *hʉ¢-i ‘dough’ into Mayan as Western Mayan and Lowland Mayan *juch’ ‘moler’, and Proto-Mixean *mʉkʉk ‘strength’ as Greater Lowland Mayan *muq’ ‘strength’ (Mora-Marín 2016).

[2] A phrase- or word-initial /u-/ would be realized phonetically as [ʔu-]. In fact, the pronunciation of such marker, by far the most frequent motivation for the use of T1/HE6 ʔu, could have led to scribes reanalyzing it orthographocally as ʔu.

 

 

 

Drawings of Quotative Glyphic Captions of K1398, “The Regal Rabbit Vase”

 

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
Universidad de Carolina del norte
Chapel Hill

11/3/2020

In the Fall of 1995 I wrote a paper for a religion class on Classic Mayan religion in which I described the case of the text on K1398, a Naranjo-style vase dating to the Late Classic period, as an example of story-telling genre involving deities. My paper is too out of date to be worth citing here, and so much work has been carried out on this topic for me to provide an overview, much less a review, here. In the References section I merely provide a few basic sources.

 

Figure 1 shows the photo of K1398 available through Justin Kerr’s Maya Vases archive. The reader will notice four captions, each associated with one of the depicted figures, and at least three of them connected to such figures by means of a speech scroll emanating from the figures’ mouths.

 

Figure 1

.

 

Figures 2-5 show my ink drawings of these captions in top-to-bottom, left-to-right order, as they appear in the photo. I prepared enlarged photocopies of the photograph and traced the captions directly with ink pens. I was an undergraduate student at the time, so check the drawings against high-resolution photos before you decide to use them (for academic purposes); if you do use them, please cite this Note.

 

Figure 2

 

Figure 3

 

Figure 4

 

Figure 5

 

If I finish my drawings of the rest of the text on the vessel at some point, I’ll make sure to post them as a future Note in this series.

 

References

Beliaev, Dmitri, and Albert Davletshin. 2006. Los sujetos novelísticos y las palabras obscenas: Los mitos, los cuentos y las anécdotas en los textos mayas sobre la cerámica del período clásico. In Sacred Books, Sacred Languages: Two Thousand Years of Religious and Ritual Mayan Literature: 8th European Maya Conference, Complutense University of Madrid, November 25–30, 2003. Acta Mesoamericana, Vol. 18. Publisher: Verlag Anton Saurwein

Hull, Kerry Michael. 2003. Verbal Art and Performance in Ch’orti’ and Maya Hieroglyphic Writing. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

Hull, Kerry M., and Michael D. Carrasco, editors. 2012. Parallel Worlds: Genre, Discourse, and Poetics in Contemporary, Colonial, and Classic Period Maya Literature. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Kerr, Justin. 1998. Kerr Number: 1398. http://research.mayavase.com/kerrmaya_list.php?_allSearch=&hold_search=&x=0&y=0&vase_number=1398&date_added=&ms_number=&site=.

Stuart, David S., Stephen D. Houston, and John S. Robertson. 1999. Recovering the Past: Classic Mayan Language and Classic Maya Gods. In Notebook for the XXIIIrd Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, pp. 1-80. Austin: Maya Workshop Foundation, University of Texas at Austin.

Velásquez García, Erik. 2009. Reflections on the Codex Style and thePrincetonVessel. http://www.mesoweb.com/pari/journal/archive/PARI1001.pdf.

Wald, Robert Francis. 2007. The Verbal Complex in Classic-Period Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions: Its Implications for Language Identification and Change. PhD Dissertation, UT-Austin.

Actualizaciones sobre la paleografía de T168/2M1a ʔAJAW ‘señor, gobernante’ y T130/2S2 wa

 

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
Universidad de Carolina del norte
Chapel Hill

30/10/2020

En Mora-Marín (2016) propuse que T130 / 2S2, el sylabograma wa, se derivó gráficamente del logogram T168/2M1a ʔAJAW para ʔaajaaw ‘señor, gobernante’. Este proceso involucró la rotación de los dos componentes de T168, pero los elementos gráficos internos de cada componente experimentaron una rotación posterior en momentos distintos. Uno de ellos, argumentó Mora-Marín (2016), el signo que contiene el elemento en forma de “U”, T517 en el catálogo de Thompson (1962), es en origen una parte del cuerpo: una frente y ceja humana. El otro consiste en una versión simplificada y miniaturizada del T518, en sí mismo una versión simplificada del T584, el signo del día CARRIZO/JUNCO. Ver Mora-Marín (2016: Figs. 3-5 y Figs. 7-8) para ejemplos que apoyan estas identificaciones.

La Figura 1 ilustra cómo propuse que tuvo lugar el proceso de innovación gráfica que lleva de T168 a T130: 1) T168 experimentó una rotación de 180 grados, lo que resultó en un elemento en forma de U invertido, es decir, un T517 invertido; 2) el diseño resultante, y más específicamente, el componente con el elemento en forma de U solamente, T517, experimentó una rotación de 90 grados; 3) se produjo otra rotación de 90 grados del mismo componente, reorientando el elemento en forma de U del T517 nuevamente hacia la derecha; y 4) el otro componente, T518 (<T584), experimentó una reorientación de sus elementos gráficos internos, una rotación de 180 grados (o “re-rotación”). Esta es la secuencia de eventos durante el período Clásico Temprano. Poco después, el elemento en forma de U cambiaría a un elemento en forma de O, parte de un proceso más amplio de cambio gráfico regular descrito por Lacadena (1995).

 

Figura 1

 

En mi artículo de 2016, me vi obligado a formular la etapa 1) de manera hipotética, sin ejemplos reales que la confirmaran. Sin embargo, recientemente me di cuenta de que hay al menos un ejemplo que respalda esta etapa. La Figura 2 muestra una foto de despliegue (“roll-out”) de la vasija K7529 (http://research.mayavase.com/kerrmaya_list.php?_allSearch=&hold_search=&x=0&y=0&vase_number=7529&date_added=&ms_number=&site=). El glifo que se ve en el medio de la foto, ²ka-wa, para *käkäw ‘cacao’, es la clave para resolver el rompecabezas actual,

 

Figura 2

 

De hecho, el diseño gráfico de T130/2S2 empleado en esta grafía glífica, como se ve en la Figura 3, corresponde exactamente al “eslabón perdido” previamente hipotetizado: esencialmente, una versión de T168/2M1a que se ha girado 180 grados sin reajustes.

 

Figura 3

 

Este diseño gráfico de T130/2S2 ahora se puede utilizar para completar el modelo para la innovación yo evolución gráfica de T130/2S2 a partir de T168/2M1a, tal y como se muestra en la Figura 4.

 

Figura 4

 

En Mora-Marín (2016) también se analizó un diseño gráfico diferente del signo T130/2S2, uno con un elemento gráfico en forma de espiral en lugar del componente T517, para el cual formulé una serie de etapas que aún no he podido identificar por completo en el registro glífico. La búsqueda continúa …

 

Referencias

Lacadena García-Gallo, Alfonso. 1995. Evolución formal de las grafías escriturarias mayas: implicaciones históricas y culturales. Tesis doctoral, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Mora-Marín, David F. 2016. A Study in Mayan Paleography: The History of T168/2M1a ʔAJAW ‘Lord, Ruler’ and the Origin of the Syllabogram T130/2S2 wa. Written Language and Literacy 19: 1-58. https://www.academia.edu/31869577/A_study_in_Mayan_paleography_The_history_of_T168_2M1a_ʔAJAW_Lord_Ruler_and_the_origin_of_the_syllabogram_T130_2S2_wa.

Updates on the Paleography of T168/2M1a ʔAJAW ‘lord, ruler’ and T130/2S2 wa

 

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill

10/26/2020

 

In Mora-Marín (2016) I proposed that T130/2S2, the syllabogram wa, originated in T168/2M1a ʔAJAW for ʔaajaaw ‘lord, ruler’. This process involved the two components of T168 rotating together, but their respective internal graphic elements “re-rotating” at separate points in time subsequently. One of these, Mora-Marín (2016) argued, the sign containing the U-shaped element, T517 in Thompson’s (1962) catalog, is in origin a part of the body: a human brow. The other consists of a miniature, simplified version of the T518, itself a simplified version of T584, the day sign REED. See Mora-Marín (2016:Figs. 3-5 and Figs. 7-8) for examples supporting these identifications.

Figure 1 illustrates how I proposed the process of graphic innovation leading from T168 to T130 took place: 1) T168 experienced a 180-degree rotation, resulting in an upside-down U-shaped element, i.e. an upside-down T517; 2) the resulting design, and more specifically, the component with the U-shaped element only, T517, experienced a 90-degree rotation; 3) another 90-degree rotation of the same component took place, reorienting the U-shaped element of T517 once again right-side up; and 4) the other component, T518 (< T584), experienced a reorientation of its internal graphic elements, a 180-degree rotation (or “re-rotation”). This is the sequence of events during the Early Classic period. Soonafter, the U-shaped element would shift to an O-shaped element, part of a broader process of regular graphic change described by Lacadena (1995).

 

Figure 1

 

In my 2016 paper I was forced to hypothesize stage 1), with no actual examples to confirm it. However, recently I realized that there is at least one example to support such a stage. Figure 2 shows a roll-out photo of vase K7529 (http://research.mayavase.com/kerrmaya_list.php?_allSearch=&hold_search=&x=0&y=0&vase_number=7529&date_added=&ms_number=&site=). The glyph seen in the middle of the photo, ²ka-wa, for *käkäw ‘cacao’, is the key to solving the current puzzle.

 

Figure 2

 

Indeed, the graphic design of T130/2S2 wa used in this glyphic spelling, as seen in Figure 3, corresponds exactly to the “missing link” I had hypothesized: essentially, a version of T168/2M1a that has been rotated 180 degrees with no readjustments.

 

Figure 3

 

This graphic design of T130/2S2 can now be used to fill in the model for the graphic innovation of T130/2S2 out of T168/2M1a as in Figure 4.

 

Figure 4

 

In Mora-Marín (2016) I also discuss a different graphic design of T130/2S2, one with a spiral-shaped graphic element instead of the T517 component, for which I hypothesized stages which I had not yet identified in the glyphic record. The search continues…

 

References

Lacadena García-Gallo, Alfonso. 1995. Evolución formal de las grafías escriturarias mayas: implicaciones históricas y culturales. Ph.D. Dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Mora-Marín, David F. 2016. A Study in Mayan Paleography: The History of T168/2M1a ʔAJAW ‘Lord, Ruler’ and the Origin of the Syllabogram T130/2S2 wa.  Written Language and Literacy 19:1-58. https://www.academia.edu/31869577/A_study_in_Mayan_paleography_The_history_of_T168_2M1a_ʔAJAW_Lord_Ruler_and_the_origin_of_the_syllabogram_T130_2S2_wa.

Hipótesis de Convencionalización de Afijación: Una explicación de las convenciones de deletreos fonéticos en la escritura Maya

 

David F. Mora-Marín
davidmm@unc.edu
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill

18/10/2020

 

Ésta es una traducción al español de una ponencia presentada en la conferencia de la Society of the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) en enero del 2005. Una versión mucho más ampliada y detallada de los argumentos presentados en esta ponencia se encuentran en un artículo publicado en 2010:

Mora-Marín, David F. 2010. Consonant Deletion, Obligatory Synharmony, Typical Suffixing: An Explanation of Spelling Practices in Mayan Writing. Written Language and Literacy 13: 118-179.

Éste se puede descargar aquí.

En esta versión en español he añadido algunas palabras o frases que no se encuentran en la versión original; las señalo con [].

También hay algunas interpretaciones de sufijos desactualizadas, por lo que le pido al lector consultarme por correo electrónico en caso de que haya una duda.

 

 

This is a translation into Spanish of a paper presented at the conference for the Society of the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in January of 2005. The English version is available at this link: https://www.academia.edu/4446222/Affixation_Conventionalization_Hypothesis_Explanation_of_Mayan_Spelling_Practices_Paper_presented_at_the_43th_Conference_on_American_Indian_Languages_in_Oakland. A more detailed and expanded version of the arguments presented here are found in my 2010 paper:

Mora-Marín, David F. 2010. Consonant Deletion, Obligatory Synharmony, Typical Suffixing: An Explanation of Spelling Practices in Mayan Writing. Written Language and Literacy 13: 118-179.

You may access this paper here.