Armchair traveling

It’s good to get out of your head for a while and take in new scenery.

Of course, I’m a homebody and it’s still pretty cold out there on and off. So I’ve been trying what any normal person with a background in linguistics does.

It just seemed like the right time to learn a little Mayan hieroglyphics.

I was fully prepared to see the irony of using a linguistic tour of another culture as a bit of light reading, but apparently I’m not the only nerd out there. Reading the Maya Glyphs was written and marketed toward the hobby scholar. In particular, the text is intended as a casual guide for “armchair travelers” or anyone looking to learn to read “simple Maya texts” before their trip to Guatemala or Belize. Because don’t you just hate it when you visit ancient ruins, but you can’t read the glyphs on several hundred year old stelae and murals? Talk about relatable mass marketing.

We’ll see when I can jet out to Belizean archaeological sites (but boy, will I save money on guidebooks and tours! That’s gotta be enough to cover a checked bag), but for now, it’s nice to “get out” a little. Of the language family anyway.

Glyphs may not take you anywhere closer to the equator, even with hot chocolate – the Maya were among the earliest drinkers of liquid cacao delicacies – and a humidifier to recreate the feel of an authentic Maya tourist attraction. But attempting to retrain your brain along somebody else’s entire way of thinking, i.e. trying to speak their language, is one way to switch it up.

Ancient written Mayan has a combination of what are basically grammar glyphs (terminology mine) – think the picture equivalent of -ing or ‘s – and meaning glyphs. For the latter, think a stylized rounded image representing cacao beans. They also had a unique way of reading from left to right and top to bottom, but in columns. Glyphs were put together to create words and phrases, and, just to make things really interesting, these glyphs could be written (“drawn” to us) in just about any orientation.

Imagine if the word ‘cat’ could be written vertically, upside down, and as a mirror-image, perhaps all at once. Then imagine we could add spots to the word, draw the ‘a’ differently, or put it in the “wrong” order in the sentence – taking a sort of visual-poetic license to make a point or show the importance of something (especially when we’re talking about kings and gods). That’s a new way of conceptualizing writing and grammar, to this writer anyway.

Now there’s some key grammatical rules and details missing in this picture (I’m only on chapter 2), but you can see the very way Mayans understood writing was different. They even have a word that works for both writing and drawing and had two kinds of scribes – one who wrote glyphs and another who wrote images on murals, stone texts, etc.

Maybe they were onto something we almost tend to ignore: how visual most writing is. Most of us even see pictures when we read collections of letters and “hear” their sounds on the page.

It’s nice to be recognized as an artist, too. Maybe we’re all better at drawing than we think.