New Discoveries in Ancient Yucatan Temples–
Emily C. Davis
Times Colonist
06 Mar 1937, Sat · Page 3
A CONNECTICUT YANKEE is stepping across the centuries, not into King Arthur's court, but into the literary world of the Mayan civilization. He is having the thrill of reading slowly—but very surely, as he believes—words in Mayan books that were last read and understood by Mayan Indian scholars in their temple libraries in Yucatan, centuries ago.
For one thing, he has learned to tell the words from the pictures, and that is no simple thing in a kind of writing that has often been called picture writing. On the brightly-colored pages of a Mayan book, it appears, you can find our own popular modern method of telling a story by pictures and captions.
At the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, this young man from Methersfiekl, Conn., Benjamin Lee Whorf, surprised his fellow research workers by read-ing off sentences from two of the famous Mayan books. Various scholars have attempted to read these books. Mr. Whorf's interpretation of the ancient text is entirely different from anything that anyone had heretofore found on the Mayan pages. To account for his reading, he carefully analyzed his method of deciphering no less than forty-one Mayan words.
BEGAN WORK AS HOBBY Study of ancient languages began as a hobby with Mr. Whorf, and he has gradually become more and more engrossed In America's own prize puzzle, the writing system of the Mayan Indian civilization. Backing enthusiasm with technical training, Mr. Whorf has plugged at university courses to learn how the Babylonians, and other ancient people, constructed their writing systems, and he is now working as an honorary fellow at Yale. One of his reports on the Mayan writings was published by Harvard University.
ALL LITERATURE IN THREE BOOKS
The main goal is to read three Mayan books. There are no more. There are inscriptions in addition to date recordings on some of the stone monuments of the Mayans that archaeologists unearth in ruined cities in the American tropics. But the greatest interest attaches to the three Mayan books that escaped the flames when Spanish missionary zeal demanded that Mayan Indians make bonfires of all heathen works.
In one city alone, 4,000 books of the Mayan literature were lost, in them, fires, When the crusade was over, the amazing erudition of a self-made American civilization was almost lost to history. In astronomy, calendar making, literature, these Indiani could hold their own with any of the world's famous civilizations.
SPAIN'S PRECIOUS BOOK IN DANGER
Three books, so far as anyone knows. are the only exhibits from those libraries that escaped, and the three found their way to Paris, Dresden, and Madrid. The fate of Madrid's Mayan book, endangered by Spanish war, has not been learned. The book was separated in two parts, and treasured by two libraries in Madrid. It may have been removed from the city with numerous art works that have been saved. Fac-similes of the three Mayan books safeguard the contents for science, even though accident may befall the valuable originals.
It is not correct, says Mr. Whorf, to think of the Mayan Indians as drawing pictures for their writing system. They built their writing sys-tem on a much harder and more ad-vanced principle. It was phonetic, with each sign standing for a sound or syllable. Thus Mr. Whorf revives a very early theory about the Mayan writing. Yucatan's most famous colonial priest, the Spanish Bishop Landa, wrote down twenty-seven characters of Mayan writing and explained that they represented sounds similar to those in the Roman alphabet. But when American scholars fifty years ago launched an intensive attack to explain the Mayan writing, they could not find that the bishop's Mayan alphabet was of any help. Their efforts failed. And so the phonetic theory of Mayan writing came to be mainly discounted.
PHONETIC WRITING
"The Mayan writing is phonetic," explained Mr. Whorf. "But Landa was wrong in thinking that twenty-seven signs made a Mayan alphabet. In fact, there was no Mayan -alphabet at all. "The Mayas used several hundred signs in their writing. It was rather like the cuneiform writing of Babylonia in that respect. "So far, I have deciphered enough signs to spell out about 100 written words in Mayan texts. Using these words I have read certain passages in the Mayan codices, as the books are called."
One significant fact about Mayan writing, which his studies bring out. is that the Mayas often had several ways of writing the same word. Just as today we write "through" or "thru" and recognize both as the same word, or just as we might conceivably write "coffee" or "kawphy" and read them both the same, so the Mayas often varied their spelling.
WORD SPELT TWO WAYS
On a piece of paper quickly Mr. Whorf sketched two ways that a Mayan Indian could write the word "sit." It can be spelled, he explained, with different combinations of signs, and the result, to uninitiated eyes, gives very different appearances. Complete deciphering of Mayan writing, Mr. Whorf maintains, means not merely recognizing what a sign means, but knowing how it sounded when a Mayan Indian read it aloud. In time he believes, it will be possible to read the ancient books aloud. Living Mayan Indians, who have lost the literary and scientific heritage of their ancestors. still retain most of the speech forms, and can be of con-siderable help in fitting Mayan sounds to signs.
Some pages in the Mayan books are inscribed with chants or verses, and illustrated by series of pictures, Mr. Whorf says. The Indians repeated the chants in stanzas, like songs chanted by some Indian tribes in the United States today. Frcm the Spanish-owned Mayan book, the Codex Tro-Cortesianus. Mr. Whorf read this line: "God II our lord implants staff in ground." God I is just an alphabet letter name that a German scholar made up for this particular Mayan god. Mr. Whorf has not yet discovered how this god's tame was pronounced in Mayan. From the Mayan book in Dresden, Germany, he offered this sample of Mayan song: "The lightning monster with the vessel of the rain destroys.” Pictures beneath each line show the events told of, he explained, but the translation does not depend on the pictures, nor on the appearance of the characters, but solely on the way the characters are put together, which is to speel (spell) the words of these Mayan sentences.
Beyond illustrative examples, this man who is ambitious to read the Mayan "classics" is not yet ready to read the Mayan books publicly. "There is much work to be done." he says. "before the language can be regarded as fully understood. Hun-dreds of signs remain to be deciphered. And I feel the time has not come to tell more about the con-tents of the books as they are un-folding themselves.''
06 Mar 1937, 21 - Times Colonist at Newspapers.com
In summary, Benjamin Whorf ran up against the early development of universal language theory. That set the paradigm in motion that required all languages have some form of structural backbone in the form of not just phonemes, morphemes, but syntax as well. Modern phonetics only substitutes “proto-Phoenician” characters for the hieroglyphs that Whorf deciphered from inscriptions on the temple walls. The modern IPA system then sets the framework to make language “universal,” though there might not be any other evidence to verify it.
APPENDIX:
Google: “einstein on the sapir whorf theory”
Koerner, E. F. Konrad. “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: A Preliminary History and a Bibliographical Essay.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 2, no. 2, 1992, pp. 173–98. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43102168. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.
— the developed science of the West is described by Whorf as a "binomial formula." This binomial formula not only guides the creation of individual sentences; it also provides the basis for analogous integrations of experience. Ever since Aristotle codified the use of subject and verb, the Western mind has been obliged to divide reality into an agent-acting, and a thing acted upon— (Rollins, 575)
Rollins, Peter C. “The Whorf Hypothesis as a Critique of Western Science and Technology.” American Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 5, 1972, pp. 563–83. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2711660. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.
Rejection of the binomial formula by Whorf, and his early mystical influences allowed him to examine the link between language and culture from a metaphysical plateau beyond that created by positivist Western quantitative restrictions based on, in a word, syntax.
Whorf contends that the structure of SAE is such that it violates the scheme of nature (575) “Standard Average European” languages.
Cryptotype–
Microsoft Word - stan.clrf (psu.edu)
Linguistic typology - Wikipedia
10 Dec 1827, 1 - The Philadelphia Inquirer at Newspapers.com
Chinese Novels and Poetry, PP Thoms..
Gumperz, John J., and Stephen C. Levinson. “Rethinking Linguistic Relativity.” Current Anthropology, vol. 32, no. 5, 1991, pp. 613–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743696. Accessed 26 Feb. 2023.
Kay's arguments were intended as a cautionary tale. Janet Keller (anthropology, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) also had such a tale, this time eth- nographic. After studying blacksmithing for some time with Charles Keller, she had come to the conclusion that there are some kinds of activity that are mediated by an essentially image-driven kind of thought rather than a linguistically categorized mode of thinking. (page 616)
“Picture this in your mind..” a concept that doesn’t use language or structures of it in the thought process. What would work as s substitute?
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