MayanWiki: An Online, Consensus-Based Linguistic Corpus of the Mayan Hieroglyphs MayanWiki: An Online, Consensus-Based Linguistic Corpus of the Mayan Hieroglyphs

by Haertel, Robbie A

The writing system used by the ancient Maya civilization has intrigued researchers and aficionados for centuries. Now that it has mostly been deciphered, the emphasis in the field of Mayan epigraphy has shifted to a study of the system of phonological, morphological, and grammatical rules that once governed the language that the hieroglyphs encode. One of the most important resources for linguistic study of this type is a comprehensive, electronic corpus of texts to investigate phraseology, frequency information, and collocations. Because Mayan linguistic epigraphy is in the early stages, a publicly available, editable corpus would be an invaluable resource in arriving at consensual readings.

Unfortunately, no such corpus currently exists. The purpose of this project is to present MayanWiki as a relational database of hieroglyphic transcriptions and transliterations with a wiki frontend that includes advanced search functionality that meets the aforementioned criteria. The principle behind the wiki is to accelerate the convergence of readings to the “truth”. Once the database is fully populated by users, it will become a valuable tool allowing them to manipulate data in ways that will facilitate scientific discovery of new and interesting linguistic patterns.