Languages and Linguistics | Polyglots, Language Learners and Linguists!

Well this seems like a fun project. I especially like your idea of "evolving" the script.

Might add this image at least til I can elaborate more on it. These are some characters I modified for the glottalized consonants k', t', p', ch', and tz'. Since a lot of these are not known from classical Mayan texts, I've embedded the characters k'in, ch'a, t'u, pa, and a small part of tz'a into the vowels a, e, i, o, u. Now, I may remove some of these (as Tzotzil doesn't have that many words with t', and there are other ways/rules of writing them, but for the moment it's what I have).

In the above image, you'll see there are two characters for the sound ch'u, that's because the first set (main sign & affix) are following my rules, u embedded with ch'a. The second set are the more likely candidates to be used as those characters...erm...Don't know the appropriate term to use, but they are a huge part of the religious speech of both Mayan classical and Catholic present. K'ul (yucatec, Lacanton, etc), something like holy, sacred, spirit, etc, which is ch'ul as well in other dialects (Ch'ol, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, etc).

How did you come to be interested in Mayan languages? And how did you go about learning them?

Ok! What I have at the moment (for casual text).

And a line from "The Jaguar and the Jaguarundi" as written in "Of Cabbages and Kings, Tales from Zinacantan".

Ivay la ta be ta yak'ol bik'it nich (He slept by the road above Little Flower).

(I'll add more details about my ideas and opinions sometime later...But I will say, doing this makes me wonder how Hangul, Davangari, Dravidian, etc alphabets are written in a school setting. So I may need to make a few inquiries).

Ok, I wanted to get this uploaded before my brain stops thinking about it. I wanted to show...erm...the path that I take to create/re-write the Mayan characters in a simplified script. You'll see three titles: Stone (What was most often carved into stone), Codex (What was more predominately used in their books), and Mine (Which are the variants that I'm creating).

I'll label these by their rows. So 1 will be the top row (and will include the codex form on what should be row 2), then row 2, 3, and 4.

1. You'll note that the Codex form doesn't look like Mine, as the Codex form would be too similar to other characters of Mine. The last two characters with Mine and with the Stone forms show how I came up with the design.
2. There's probably no mystery how I designed Mine, as the Codex form is pretty much a copy of it.
3. Again, there's probably no mystery how I designed Mine here, as well.
4. If you look at the affix (3rd character from the left), I took the circular part of the bottom, and only went up one side, then I used only two of the lines that span the entire width of the character rather than 1/3 to 1/4th the width as in the Stone variant.

And that's my brain power for today.