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FoolishConsistency17 t1_ix3jurz wrote

Reply to comment by thatcantb in Yuri Knorozov: The Maverick Scholar Who Cracked The Maya Code by tyrannosauru

There were reasons that made it a lot trickier than that. Among other things, written Maya uses multiple symbols to represent the same sound (think soft c and s in English, but many more variations) and scribes would freely substitute as they wrote. There was also very few texts to work from: most of them are on stones in the middle of jungles, and reproductions and photographs often left out details that were critical. And they thought it was written by people who spoke a form of Yucatec Maya, and it was a form of Ch'olti', which is a different language.

Deciphering Maya was a hell of an achievement. Truly astounding. Ot wasn't just a bunch of people being stupid until one dude was like "hey, what about this?"

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thatcantb t1_ix3kqt9 wrote

Yah, I get it's all complicated. Actually it was exactly one guy saying hey what about this. By completely ignoring the contemporaneous linguistics recorded by the Spanish priest, academics hamstrung themselves for centuries in understanding a native American culture and essentially they gave up. Kudos to Knorozov for ignoring the conventional wisdom and starting from that base, which had been previously dismissed. And subsequently his work generated interest in working on the language again.

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FoolishConsistency17 t1_ix3mrlb wrote

Honestly, what Landa left was pretty rudimentary, and early attempts to use it ended in disaster. It didn't seem to work. It was less ignored and more prematurely dismissed.

I mean, language decipherment is always a study in cognitive biases, and Maya is no exception. If anything, the tendency to ignore Knorosov because of Cold War political issues seems more frustrating in retrospect.

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hillo538 t1_ix49x5w wrote

I think knorozov had personally saved the majority of the writing left from the Mayans before deciphering it from (according to some) a library fire

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FoolishConsistency17 t1_ix4rfd2 wrote

What? No. He was working off photographs. I don't think he ever saw a glyph in person until after he published his research.

He almost lost his own work in a fire, iirc.

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hillo538 t1_ix4sbzm wrote

I’m talking about the Berlin affair, where research pertaining to the Mayan codices (a good amount under fascist hands at this point) were retained and sent to the ussr by this guy, not that he went to Mexico himself or anything

I remember this anecdote well, because most of the written text in this language had been previously systematically destroyed by European powers

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