Abstract
In 2004, Lacadena and Wichmann proposed a set of orthographic rules for the Maya script. The choice of using one of three different patterns of syn- or disharmonic spellings allowed Maya scribes to signal whether word-final syllables contained a short vowel, a long vowel or a glottal stop. In our earlier paper we focused on the lexical evidence for these orthographic «harmony rules». Although it was stated that the rules apply equally well when a suffix is involved and when no suffix is involved, the data relating to the former situation were not discussed in detail. This is the aim of the present paper.
Highlights
In this paper we would like to address the question of whether it was possible for the scribe to make the same kinds of distinctions in the suffix domain, i.e. to indicate differences among suffixes which are distinguished in their pronunciation only by the nature of the syllable nuclei that they contain
We shall address the question of whether the normal spelling rules extended to the suffix domain or were suspended, a question which has been at the core of an ongoing debate among epigraphers in the past years
In case of the examples just given there is no evidence against assuming that the patterns u-u, u-i, and u-a indicate respectively a short vowel, a long vowel, and a vowel plus glottal stop when they occur in the suffix domain
Summary
The present paper is a sequel to Lacadena and Wichmann (2004), where we proposed a revision of the orthographic theory of Houston, Stuart and Robertson (1998, 2004). A new situation sometimes arises, namely the situation where a logogram is involved and a vowel is underspelled and must be supplied by the reader In such cases the rule obtains that any vowel may in principle be inserted—this depends on the knowledge of the reader—but whatever vowel it be, it is subjected to complementation by the following syllabic sign. The hypothesis has been presented as a logical extension of harmony rules of Lacadena and Wichman (2004) This extension of the system accounts for the fact that the vowels of final syllabic signs and those of the suffixes that they serve to represent are not always identical and it accounts in a parsimonious and falsifiable way for the orthographic rules of the Maya script. This will prove more difficult since, (a) in many cases, the suffixes of the glyphic corpus are not attested in extant languages that may provide evidence of vowel length or glottalization, (b) the comparative phonology of the Mayan languages is still not fully worked out, (c) the glyphic inscriptions are around a millennium earlier than most of the data for current Mayan languages and may be expected to preserve linguistic features that have been lost in the current languages
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