The thing about de Landa was, despite writing down "a whole alphabet," he was so fundamentally wrong about how Mayan writing worked that his "alphabet" was basically useless.

The problem was that Mayan writing wasn't an alphabet, like English and Spanish have, where each individual sound has its own letter. It was like modern Japanese writing. Letters stood for combinations of sounds — either whole syllables (like Japanese hiragana and katakana) or words (like Japanese kanji).

De Landa didn't get this. He only knew about alphabets, so he assumed Mayan had one. We're pretty sure what happened is, he asked Maya speakers questions like "What's your letter B?" and they picked a syllable that sounded like "B" and showed him how to write it.

It was as if you said to a Japanese speaker "What's your letter B?" and they said "Oh, we write the syllable bi as び." And then you said, "What's your letter G?" and they said, "Oh, we write the syllable ji as じ." And then you said "What's your letter U?" and they said "Oh, we write the syllable yu as ゆ." And then if you were like, "Great, so びゆじ spells bug?" they'd be like "WTF? No, びゆじ spells biyuji."

That's the level de Landa was operating at, except he never figured out he'd made a mistake.

THAT SAID, he understood that Mayan writing represented sounds, which a lot of later scholars didn't. There are so many different ways to be wrong, and so few ways to be right.