Towards a Complex Theory of Writing: The Case of Aztec and Mixtec Codices

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propose the elements of a new theory of writing and writing systems. It concentrates on the decades-long controversy about whether to consider the highly pictorial communication system present in Aztec, Mixtec and other non-Maya Mesoamerican pictorial codices as writing. After exposing the history of this controversy and the problematic elements in contemporary grammatological and semasiographic visions, I propose to treat Aztec and Mixtec writing as complex systems which depict language through bottom-up strategies (logograms and/or syllabograms, which are signs that try to represent the morphological and phonological levels of language), and top-down strategies (pictography, which is a semantic depiction aided by contextual inferences grounded in pragmatics), strategies that roughly correspond to the bottom-up and top-down language processing operations. Based on this idea, I propose that semiotic writing strategies are possible, and that writing should not be seen as a mere surrogate of phonetics: this vision could solve the long-standing question of why writing systems that developed phoneticism seem to start in a non-phonetic stage that is still treated, in an unclear way, as ‘proto-writing’.