Writing
Mesoamerica is one of the relatively few places in the world where writing has developed independently throughout history. The Mesoamerican scripts deciphered to date are logosyllabic combining the use of logograms with a syllabary, and they are often called hieroglyphic scripts. Five or six different scripts have been documented in Mesoamerica but archaeological dating methods make it difficult to establish which was earliest and hence the forebear from which the others developed. Candidates for being the first writing system of the Americas are Zapotec writing, the Isthmian or Epi-Olmec script or the scripts of the Izapan culture. The best documented and deciphered Mesoamerican writing system, and hence the most widely known, is the classic Maya script. Post-Classic cultures such as the Aztec and Mixtec cultures did not develop true writing systems at all, but instead used semasiographic writing although they did use phonetic principles in their writing by the use of the rebus principle. Aztec name glyphs for example do combine logographic elements with phonetic readings. From the colonial period on there exists an extensive Mesoamerican literature written in the Latin script.
Read more about this topic: Mesoamerican Languages
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“I think it’s the real world. The people we’re writing about in professional sports, they’re suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)
“The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seems as absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of the right book I meet the eyes of the most determined men; his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,—can go far and live long.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)