The word for letter or character is uooh. This is a primitive root found with the same or a closely allied meaning in other branches of this linguistic stock, as, for instance, in the Kiché and Cakchiquel. As a verb, pret. uooth, fut. uooté, it also means to form letters, to write; and from the passive form, uoohal, we have the participial noun, uoohan, something written, a manuscript.
The ordinary word for book, paper, or letter, is huun, in which the aspirate is almost mute, and is dropped in the forms denoting possession, as u uun, my book, yuunil Dios, the book of God, il being the so-called “determinative” ending. It occurs to me as not unlikely that uun, book, is a syncopated form of uoohan, something written, given above. To read a book is xochun, literally to count a book.
According to Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, the name of the sacred books of the Itzas was analté. In the printed Diccionario de la Lengua Maya, by Don Juan Pio Perez, this is spelled anahté, which seems to be a later form.
The term is not found in several early Maya dictionaries in my possession, of dates previous to 1700. The Abbé Brasseur indeed, in a note to Landa, explains it to mean “a book of wood,” but it can have no such signification. Perhaps it should read hunilté, this being composed of hunil, the “determinative” form of huun, a book, and the termination té, which added to nouns, gives them a specific sense, e. g. amayté, a square figure, from amay, an angle; tzucublé, a province, from tzuc, a portion separated from the rest. It would mean especially the sacred or national books.
The particular class of books which were occupied with the calendar and the ritual were called tzolanté, which is a participial noun from the verb tzol, passive tzolal, to set in order, to arrange, with the suffix té. By these books were set in order and arranged the various festivals and fasts.
When the conquest was an accomplished fact and the priests had got the upper hand, the natives did not dare use their ancient characters. They exposed themselves to the suspicion of heresy and the risk of being burnt alive, as more than once happened. But their strong passion for literature remained, and they gratified it as far as they dared by writing in their own tongue with the Spanish alphabet volumes whose contents are very similar to those described by Landa.
A number of these are still in existence, and offer an interesting field for antiquarian and linguistic study. Although, as I say, they are no longer in the Maya letters, they contain quite a number of ideograms, as the signs of the days and the months, and occasional cartouches and paintings, which show that they were made to resemble the ancient manuscripts as closely as possible.
They also contain not infrequent references to the “writing” of the ancients, and what are alleged to be extracts from the old records, chiefly of a mystic character. The same terms are employed in speaking of the ancient graphic system as of the present one. Thus in one of them, known as “The Book of Chilan Balam of Chumayel,” occurs this phrase: Bay dzibanil tumenel Evangelistas yetel profeta Balam—“as it was written by the Evangelists, and also by the prophet Balam,” this Balam being one of their own celebrated ancient seers.
Among the predictions preserved from a time anterior to the Conquest, there are occasional references to their books and their contents. I quote, as an example, a short prophecy attributed to Ahkul Chel, “priest of the idols.” It is found in several of the oldest Maya manuscripts, and is in all probability authentic, as it contains nothing which would lead us to suppose that it was one of the “pious frauds” of the missionaries.
“Enhi cibte katune yume, maixtan à naaté;