Mesoamerican Languages - Writing

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.