Glyph of the Day

Aztec "snake"

There are no pre-Columbian Aztec books remaining: the colonists managed to get every last one.  However, there are a few books written by Aztecs left from the period after the Spaniards occupied the land, with translations/explanations written in Spanish.

The Aztec writing system was very similar to Mixtec.  Neither had a syllabary; both used text to support pictures instead of using pictures to support text; both used visual puns to represent words, especially city names.

This doesn't happen

Aztec used colour as an integral part of the communication, which is very unusual.  In English writing, the letters can be in different colours, but the colour is usually not meaningful.  (One exception is on the Web, where hyperlinks are conventionally in blue.  However, changing the colour of modern glyphs does not change the meaning of the word.)  Latin letters also (almost) never have different colours within that a letter.  The descender of a “g” is almost never a different colour than the “o” part of the “g”, for example, and even if it were, it would still be a “g”.  However, in Aztec, glyphs were multi-coloured, and changing the colours could sometimes change the meaning.

In modern writing systems, we are used to text being linear.  Latin script is read left to right (then top to bottom); Arabic script is read right-to-left (then top to bottom); Chinese and Japanese are sometimes read top-to-bottom (then right-to-left). However, in cultures that read left-to-right, it is assumed that if you have a bunch of pictures, you start at the left and move to the right.  The reading order affects us readers so much that we European-language-readers unconsciously tend to start looking at any scene the left and moving to the right.   Arabic readers look at the right first and then move left.  This tendency is so strong that in Hollywood movies, monsters almost always appear from the right to increase the surprise.

However, Aztec (and Mixtec) look more like annotated pictures, and like annotated pictures today, don’t have a clear order.  If you don’t have a cultural bias to read left-to-right or right-to-left, and if your writing does not have an inherent order, how do you tell your readers which direction the narrative proceeds?  In Aztec, they sometimes solved this problem by showing footprints leading from one point to another, in the same way that we might use arrows.

Links: Ancient Scripts, Wikipedia

Mixtec writing

The Mixtec writing system is from Southern Mexico, very close to the Mayan civilization in distance and contemporaneous.  The Spaniards only did half as good a job destroying the Mixtecs books — there are a whopping eight pre-Columbian Mixtec books still in existence instead of just four like the Mayan books.

Mixtec doesn’t really look like writing in the way that Westerners think of writing.  It’s not that the shapes of the glyphs is odd — you should be used to that by now if you’ve been following this blog.  Rather, the text seems to be in service of enhancing pictures (mostly with dates and names), while we are used to our writing being mostly text, occasionally with pictures in the service of enhancing the text.

Text serving pictures is not unknown in the Western world.  Go into practically any old church in Europe and look at the stained glass.  You will see pictures that tell stories, with a little bit of text on them to enhance or clarify the pictures (mostly with names).

Now, it might be that the Mixtecs had lots of books where text dominated, but that those were preferentially destroyed, and the only ones the Spaniards left were ones that they felt were just innocuous picture books.

I think that is unlikely.

• First, the Mixtecs kept writing after the Spaniards showed up.  There are not a huge number of post-colonial books, but it’s more than eight.  These post-colonial books frequently had Spanish annotations/translations written next to the text/figures they represent, so it’s not that we don’t understand the writing system.
• Second, the Mixtec writing system was strongly logographic: they did not seem to have a syllabary amongst their symbols.
• Third, many of their symbols are more like what we would think of as picture wordplay than writing.  Many place names, for example, were drawn as little pictures that evoked the name of the place, sort of as if I drew laundry hanging on an electrical cord over a 1000-pound weight everywhere where I wanted to talk about “Washington, DC”  (washing+ton+DC [current]).

Links: Ancient Scripts (excellent), Wikipedia, nice writing sample/example