MayaLex

The MayaLex project seeks to create a definitive resource tracing the historical relationships among the respective vocabularies of the languages of the Mayan family.  To provide a resource that can support scholarship continually reevaluating what is known and yet to be discovered, MayaLex places a premium on highlighting the sources of the data incorporated into the resource.

Documentation

Documentation of the Mayan languages has existed for the better part of two millennia.  In the earliest periods, this documentation consisted of hieroglyphic writing.  Such writing appears in stone inscriptions on buildings and monuments, in painted artwork on numerous ceramic artifacts, in book-like bundles known as codices, and elsewhere.  These writings intertwined linguistic representation with artwork in a highly unique and variable way, so that phonetic and pictographic representations could appear in a variety of forms depending on region, context, scribe, and other factors.

After the arrival of the Spanish in the region, writing of Mayan languages gradually adapted to the particular manuscript traditions the Spanish brought with them.  The Roman characters used in Spanish and Latin manuscripts were adapted imperfectly to the sounds of the various Mayan languages, and these replaced the earlier hieroglyphic representations.  But even in Europe at this time, scribal practice generally did not seek uniformity of spelling across documents, nor even within a single document.  This post-Colonial manuscript tradition of Mayan writing therefore maintains its own variability of writing.

This variation in source material can lead to greater or lesser ambiguities in the sounds represented, and therefore to scholarly debate on how best to interpret the language of earlier periods.  Differing interpretations can impact our modern understanding of how these languages evolved and the details of their relationships to one another.  It is critical, therefore, in creating lexicographical resources for the early Mayan languages to provide access whenever possible to the particular representations of words found in the various texts.  Continually returning to these original representations with new eyes provides the groundwork for novel interpretations and progress in our understanding.

Participation

A robust attempt to document the evolution of a language or languages must rely on the collaboration of many participants.  The communities that speak the languages under study preserve a unique cultural perspective and linguistic sensitivity that sheds light on documents from different times and places.  At the same time, scholars often bring different contextual perspectives and fruitful methodologies to bear on the analysis of linguistic and cultural data.  And profound understanding, deep insight, and rigorous methodology need not arise solely in the academic context: many enthusiasts, through thoroughgoing engagement with the language and culture, also contribute unique perspectives to our understanding.

The MayaLex project provides a platform and database where contributions from a range of participants can augment and improve the resource over time.