The Greatest Invention by Silvia Ferrara

Author:Silvia Ferrara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

22. La Mojarra Stela, Veracruz, Mexico

EMOJIS

The signs in the Isthmian and Mayan scripts resemble one another, and so, too, do their internal structures. The earliest Mayan inscriptions date to around the birth of Christ; the most recent are from sixteen centuries later. A highly durable writing system, and one filled with a good deal of creativity and imagination, as we’ll see.

Its structure is logo-syllabic, with hundreds of signs in its inventory (a base of nearly 250, with at least 500 logograms). The signs can carry the value of both a logogram and a syllabogram: the same glyph can be used for both functions. Which means that, to all effects, each text is charged with double meaning. To give you an idea of just how well developed its structure was, let’s look at an example using one of its most delightful glyphs—the glyph for cacao. Chocolate was sacred, the drink of the gods, a mixture of cacao and spices.

But what matters to us is the sign (fig. 23) and how it functions. As a whole it indicates the word kakau, and the individual elements, its constituent parts, are what allow us to read it. This reading is syllabic. The syllable ka is repeated and combined with the syllable u(a), in which the a is a redundant vowel, though Mayan notates it all the same, picking up the a from the preceding syllable. The cherry, or cherries, on top, are the two dots just above the figure. These alert us to the phonetic reduplication, letting us know that we need to read ka twice. The Maya weren’t fiddling around—even the tiniest of dots counted.

23. Mayan sign for “chocolate”

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