GLYPH CATALOG
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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.
This URL: /med/glyph_catalog.html
Last update: Thu Jun 29 11:00:51 EDT 2000
© 1994-1998 Rafael C. Alvarado. All rights reserved.
