Fascinating documentary, I was captivated by this ... and not one mention of that 2012 nonsense either - ‪Cracking the Maya Code‬‏ - YouTube




Peace,

kowalski

2012 must be true, there is a film about it

The documentary video which K found on YouTube will be better than 2012 movie.


Couldn't be bothered with that 2012 movie at all: John Cusack busy being a twat while the world gets smashed up.

I like Cusac, Grosse Point Blank, Say Anything, some other films i can't remember as fast as I type, etc. but not enough to watch that film (so far).

One of the most genius things about Mayan language (which is explained in the documentary so SPOILER ALERT) is that the written language transpires to contain phonetics which are still known today, so we can actually speak this dead language with a reasonable degree of confidence that pronunciation is correct or within an acceptable range thereof such that we sound not too dissimilar from the last native speakers approx. 1,000 years ago. Stranger than fiction.


Peace,

kowalski

I agree that this documentary is fascinating, though I'm not sure about the Mayan language being dead. The writing system was obliterated by the Spanish Inquisition, but I got the impression (I admit I could be wrong here, I was drunk whilst watching this) that the spoken language still existed and was spoken by certain people as a second native language (almost like Cornish)

They do say that. The written language was dead, not the spoken.

I love the way that any time you wrote a word in Mayan hieroglyphs, you could choose from a series of different symbols for each character and combine them any way you wanted to. It is so much like graffiti.


Peace,

kowalski

Oh it's incredible, although I do wonder if our current understanding is flawed, we have a map of these symbols, but I would hazard a guess that different symbols have subtly different meanings.
This is complete conjecture on my part, I'm not a linguistic expert.