My Life and Ancient Mayan
Jun. 13th, 2008 05:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccastareyesSo, I've been trying to track down why I'm not sleeping well -- I usually go to bed at 11 PM, then spend two hours staring at the ceiling/doing crosswords. Current theory is that me brewing tea with dinner is keeping me up. Which annoys me, since I do it because tea leaves are good for at least two refills of the pot -- probably 4-5, if you don't mind the last couple of cups being slightly brown, tasty and fragrant hot water. I don't mind weak tea in the evening, but it means drinking four cups (or two pots) before I head to work in the morning. Like I have time for that.
I tried to test the theory, but ended up falling asleep after dinner when I was waiting for my headache medicine to kick in, then waking up at 9:30 PM. As a result, I didn't sleep well for reasons having nothing to do with caffeine.
So, Matt has started an ancient Mayan glyph-reading group. For all of those who thought written Japanese was a language designed by sadists -- Mayan is worse. First off, it's verb-object-subject, which is weird in a real language -- most real languages will put subject first, regardless of where they think a verb goes. (Klingon and some other constructed languages don't do this, because the creators wanted to be different.) Second off, the Mayans had an allergy to empty space -- every bit of the page/rock/etc. is filled up with glyphs, and they are deliberately made ornate. As in, they have a number system with dots and dashes, but they also can represent the numbers with stylized heads. They also make each glyph out of the various parts of the noun or verb phrase, like Korean -- then you read them down in rows of two.
The Mayans have a sillibary (like Japanese and Cherokee), which confused the Spanish missionaries. One of them burned most of the Mayan books he found, which even pissed off the Church -- they made him go bug the native scribes for language samples once they realized he set most of them on fire. Since he didn't realize that alphabets (like Latin and Cyrillic) weren't the only option, he'd do things like ask a scribe to write:
La. L, A -- La.
and the scribe would write
La El A La. (For those of you with Japanese support, think らえるあら.)
On the other hand, the Mayans were obsessive about dates -- all of their monuments (most of what there is to read) have the dates of events on them. We spent the first day learning the calendar system and counting.
It's gonna be awesome. ^_^
I tried to test the theory, but ended up falling asleep after dinner when I was waiting for my headache medicine to kick in, then waking up at 9:30 PM. As a result, I didn't sleep well for reasons having nothing to do with caffeine.
So, Matt has started an ancient Mayan glyph-reading group. For all of those who thought written Japanese was a language designed by sadists -- Mayan is worse. First off, it's verb-object-subject, which is weird in a real language -- most real languages will put subject first, regardless of where they think a verb goes. (Klingon and some other constructed languages don't do this, because the creators wanted to be different.) Second off, the Mayans had an allergy to empty space -- every bit of the page/rock/etc. is filled up with glyphs, and they are deliberately made ornate. As in, they have a number system with dots and dashes, but they also can represent the numbers with stylized heads. They also make each glyph out of the various parts of the noun or verb phrase, like Korean -- then you read them down in rows of two.
The Mayans have a sillibary (like Japanese and Cherokee), which confused the Spanish missionaries. One of them burned most of the Mayan books he found, which even pissed off the Church -- they made him go bug the native scribes for language samples once they realized he set most of them on fire. Since he didn't realize that alphabets (like Latin and Cyrillic) weren't the only option, he'd do things like ask a scribe to write:
La. L, A -- La.
and the scribe would write
La El A La. (For those of you with Japanese support, think らえるあら.)
On the other hand, the Mayans were obsessive about dates -- all of their monuments (most of what there is to read) have the dates of events on them. We spent the first day learning the calendar system and counting.
It's gonna be awesome. ^_^
