A Comparison of Maya and Oracle Bone Scripts

Visible Language, 2006 by Chiang, William

ABSTRACT

Maya script and Oracle Bone script are described and compared in terms of relationship between glyph, sound and meaning, glyph composition and grapheme positioning. They are found to be similar in having graphemes that are pictographic and adaptable to different glyph compositions, having glyphs that are square shaped, belonging to the category of logo-syllabic scripts and having the textual device of double dots/dashes for repetition. They are different in that Oracle Bone script is more abstract and has a much higher number of glyphs, that grapheme shape and the relationship between glyph, sound and meaning is more standardized than in Maya script. Another difference is that there are many more cases in Maya where one glyph includes several words, and that Maya is closer to the syllabic end on the logo-syllabic continuum. It is suggested that these differences may be the result of differences in the conceptions of "self" (as suggested by Houston and Stuart), the languages, the degree of political centralization and the extent of public use of the scripts. It is also suggested that early writing systems may reflect how tightly morphemes are bound in the language, as the agglutinative nature of Maya language may have led to the Maya script's containing more multi-word glyphs. It is surmised that the literacy rate in the two societies may have been similar.

(ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes formulae omitted.)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

William Chiang is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taichung Institute of Technology, in Taichung, Taiwan, ROC. He did graduate work in the United States and his research is concerned with the relation between writing systems, language and culture.

The Oracle Bone script is a logo-syllabic writing system used in north China (figure 1) from middle to late Shang dynasty (approximately 1500 B.C. to 1000 B.C.). Most of the extant writing is carved on tortoise shells and ox scapulae for the purpose of divination. A question is asked in both positive and negative manners, such as "Will there be unlucky events in the next ten day period? Will there not be unlucky events in the next ten day period?" The answer is determined from cracks in the shell/scapulae caused by drilling and heating with further text written to indicate how things turned out. The text is usually written from top to bottom, with the positive question on one side and the negative question on the other (figure 2).1

The Maya script is a logo-syllabic writing system used in the Mayan area, encompassing present day southern Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and Belize (figure 3) from the first century B.C. to the time of the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century. Most of the extant writing appears on ceramic vessels, stone stelae, building surfaces and bark paper codices. Its function seems to be naming the owners/donors of objects involved in ritual practices such as feasting, captive taking, building dedication and in the case of codices, recording calendrical and religious information for divination purposes. Maya texts from the Classical period of 250 A.D. to 900 A.D. usually run in columns of two, with the reading order of upper left, to upper right, to lower left, to lower right (figure 4).5

There are two reasons for comparing the Maya and the Oracle Bone scripts. First, there has been some mention of the similarity between Chinese and Maya writing systems yet, as far as I know, no detailed comparison of the two up to this dale. The Spanish Jesuit priest Jose de Acosta discussed European alphabets versus the Chinese script and native Central American script, but the discussion only concerned the general nature of the script, i.e., what we would term phonetic versus logographic scripts.9 Second, since the decipherment of Maya script has been progressing rapidly in the past thirty years, and since it is considered the most developed of the Mesoamerican scripts, a possible candidate for independent script invention, such a comparison might throw some light on the development of early writing systems.

A BRIEF NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY10

Scholars of Maya and Oracle Bone scripts have developed their own specialized vocabularies for describing the smaller units out of which whole texts were composed. In order to make comparison of these two scripts clearer, I will be using the following vocabulary to describe the units of both Maya and Oracle Bone texts. A "glyph" will refer to a roughly square-shaped unit of space into which the arrangement of one or more smaller units ("graphemes") is organized. These square glyphs are usually arranged in horizontal and vertical columns. The grid-of-square-glyphs nature of Maya inscriptions can be clearly seen in the inscription illustrated in figure 4. The linear lines of glyph units in Oracle Bone script can he seen in figure 2.

"Glyphs," in turn, are composed of one or more smaller units that I refer to as graphemes, of which there are two types: phonetic graphemes are those that make reference to a sound and assist in indicating how a glyph was pronounced; semantic graphemes are those that make reference to a semantic category and assist in indicating the meaning of the glyph. One glyph may correspond to one word or several words. If one word is represented by only one grapheme and that grapheme represents only one meaning, that grapheme is termed a logograph. If that grapheme can represent homonymous words, it is termed a phonetic grapheme.