GLYPH CATALOG
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Tables
How To Use This Catalog
Orthographic Key
Download Tables
Sources


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Tables

The following tables list the "pvalues" associated with each glyph identified by Thompson. A "pvalue" is a "phonetic" value. In this context, the term "phonetic" means only that the value has no semantic value per se. The term is not meant to imply that the Mayan writing system is phonetic in the strict sense. Actually, the writing system is composed of syllabic and ideographic signs, with which it is possible to encode phoentically unambiguous strings.

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How To Use This Catalog

The purpose of having these tables on-line, as the Handbook explains, is to provide a publicly accessible source of information that can be updated collectively. One of the advantages the Internet offers over other media of publication is the possibility of collectively authored and edited texts. Such texts are useful for scholarly research precisely because they have been standardized by a community of scholars, and therefore they bear the pedigree of consensus.
In pursuit of this goal, users of the Catalog are asked to comment on its contents, making any corrections and editions that they (you) may find. Please post your comments on the listserv AZTLAN-L, or send email to me at rca2t@jefferson.village.virginia.edu.

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Orthographic Key

In creating the orthography of these tables, I have tried to satisfy a unique set of conditions, owing to the digital medium in which I am working. First, for purposes of machine readability, I have tried to follow the rule of one grapheme per phoneme; that is, rather than use "ch" to designate the sound that these letters represent in English, I have used the letter "c" alone. The only exceptions to this rule are glottalized consonants. In the future, I may opt to use upper case consonants to represent their glottalized variants. Second, I have remained within the ASCII character set.
The value of meeting these conditions is that each phoneme has a specific ASCII code number, which will be useful when working with machine readable texts. One disadvantage of sticking to the ASCII set is that non-standard vowels cannot be represented by a single character. Eventually, I may adopt the Unicode character set to overcome this problem.
Given these conditions, the character set I have adopted makes the following changes to the generally accepted orthography of the Guatemalan Academy:
 
ch -> c
tz -> z
z  -> s


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Download Tables

To download a delimited ASCII version of this table, hold your shift key and the select this.

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Sources

I have assigned two-letter suffixes to each of the pvalues assigned to a glyph. These suffixes index the author of the source from which the pvalue was taken; they do not necessarily refer to the actual discoverer of the pvalue. I use Kurbjuhn's indexing scheme in assigning two-letter codes to individual epigraphers. These are as follows:
RA	Rafael C. Alvarado
TB	Thomas S. Barthel
HB	Heinrich Berlin
BH	Hermann Beyer
VB	Victoria R. Bricker
LC	Lyle Campbell
MC	Michael Closs
WC	Wolfgang Cordan
MD	Michael Davoust
DD	Dieter Dutting
JF	James A. Fox
WG	William Gates
NG	Nikolai Grube
CJ	Christopher Jones
JJ	John S. Justeson
DK	David H. Kelley
YK	Yuri Knorosov
KK	Kornelia Kurbjuhn
DL	Diego de Landa
FL	Floyd G. Lounsbury
BM	Barbara MacLeod
PM	Peter Mathews
TP	Tatiana Proskouriakoff
BR	Berthold Riese
LS	Linda Schele
ES	Eduard Seler
DS	David Stuart
CT	Cyrus H. Thomas
JT	J. Eric S. Thompson
GZ	Gunter Zimmerman
The only difference between Kurbjuhn's scheme and my use of it is that, at least for now, in some cases the index refers to a particular work associated with the epigrapher. Thus, the index "BM" actually refers to the handbook used at the 1995 glyph workshop at Chapel Hill with Barbard MacLeod and Dorie Reents-Budet.
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