Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex / with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs

by William Gates

, for instance, conveys to those using it primarily the idea of Heaven, or the spoken word T’ien. It is necessarily both, in a sense; it would not be written language otherwise. And it is equally true that the letter-combination Heaven is in a way as much to us a picture of the idea as of the sound; but the difference of procedure is radical. The glyph is related to the idea directly, the spelled word only through the formal combination of symbols for single vocal speech-elements, meaningless when separate. The relation of spoken sound to glyph is wholly adventitious; the relation of the idea to the spelled word is equally adventitious. The ascent, if we so call it, of written speech from the ideographic to the alphabetic, is the descent of the thought further into material forms.[53-*] And while it may be (and in the course of universal evolution rightly so) necessary for our thought to descend into the bondage of matter and form, for its knowledge and experience, and for the development of matter and form into fitter vehicles of thought, nevertheless the process is a binding and for a time an enchaining one, and the thought is, for a time at least, likely to be lost in the confusion of forms.

Thus we may lay down as our fundamental proposition that a hieroglyphic form of writing is better fitted to, and must properly, in the period of its natural development, accompany the imaginative processes of mind. Or, since imagination to our literal thought implies in some degree the fanciful (though wrongly so in essence), we might perhaps better say that that form of writing is the fit attendant and exponent of those functions of mind which cognize the inner meanings of the facts of life directly, rather than those which study them through the correlation of their phenomena. And also, that the development by any people of an alphabetic out of a hieroglyphic system, does not imply a greater advance in linguistic perfection on their part, but indicates a corresponding mental and inner change of attitude towards ideas and things, and a different conception of the self as related to them all.

It is not at all necessary to assume that the knowledge gained by one method is deeper or more exact than the other. True science may exist as fully under one set of circumstances as the other. If we will take the type of the so-called most primitive form, the monosyllabic—the Chinese, we shall find all this evidenced in the clearest manner. To note but one illustration, a study of the scientific and philosophical ideas involved in and conveyed by the word k’ung, for Space, ether, the fundamental substratum of sound or vibration, as well as the “interetheric” central point of balance and power, will disclose an understanding that has nothing to fear from modern comparisons.

And the very fact that Chinese has had to depend on placement of its monosyllables to express all the relations for which speech is called upon, instead of relying on changes of form, seems to have, and indeed has so stimulated the development of pure linguistic power that the language is actually as perfect and clear a medium of cultured and learned intercourse, as is the Sanskrit, the supreme type of the so-called most developed form, the inflectional. And by reason of its possession of the ideographic element it has a vividness which the Sanskrit has not. No language can be a highly developed one which does not provide in some way for the expression of all possible needed relations between the three fundamental postulates of life and activity—the self, the action and the world; and Chinese does this in spite of its monosyllabic structure by the development of its syntax of position. And it should be remembered further that Chinese syntax, in strict correspondence to the genius of the language, is not the same formal thing that syntax is with our inflectional tongues, but includes, or rather is primarily based on the harmonic adjustment of the inherent basic ideas of or within the words. The Chinese monosyllables are then not the naked separate things they are in the dictionary, but the whole phrase or sentence is on the contrary as much a unit as one of ours; and often more so.

This integral unity of the whole sentence or expression, dominated by a perspective of ideas rather than of forms, which is achieved in Chinese by the elaboration of placement, is also characteristic of the structure of the languages of the American continent; but, these languages being polysyllabic, the vividness and unity are attained by a method described as Incorporation, whereby the accessories of relation are so included in or attached to the leading word that the whole expression assumes the form and sound of a single word. And a similar process takes place with the various elements of a compound sentence. So that although this one of the divisions of language approaches very closely to the Inflectional in its external forms, it yet has held to the vividness and essential characteristics of the ideographic method. And it is a point of the utmost importance for the decipherment of the Maya glyphs, to note as has been stated before, that their syntax of combination must follow that of the spoken language, which we know.

There is one broad line of division marking all the languages and civilizations of the world—the line between the ideographic and the literal; it marks the use of hieroglyphic or of alphabetic writing, and it denotes a culture so widely different from ours, modes of thought so distinct, views of life and man’s relation to it one might almost say so opposite to ours, as to point unmistakably to a most distant past, and a former world-culture probably as wide-spread in its day as is now ours—or more so. And it is one of the strangest and most remarkable of the phenomena we are considering, that the two divisions have overlapped each other in time to such a degree that whereas we have in Sanskrit, the most perfect type of Aryan, or inflectional languages, the oldest of them all; on the other hand we have in Chinese an equally perfect linguistic medium of the other type, kept alive into our own times.

When we consider the development and status of the American civilizations which have been revealed to us, and especially when we have once opened our minds to the possibility that world-civilizations different in their time from ours in ours, may for all we know have existed and been blotted out ages ago, leaving linguistic traces, and perhaps perpetuating cultural remnants in a few parts of the earth, it is impossible not to recognize the breadth of the problem we are considering. All over the American continent at the time of the Discovery we see cultures and systems whose time had come. Back of most of the North and South American tribes we find the remains of mighty and utterly extinct civilizations—only their dim memory left. In the centers of higher culture from Mexico to Peru we see the ancient civilization brought further down to our own times; but there also, in process, all the incidents of break-up and an expiring greatness. Internecine strife, invasion from outside, changes of center, are all going on, and all marked by a steady decrease in everything that means civilization. Of the ancient mathematical and astronomical knowledge a corner of which is revealed to us by the Maya glyph remains, only a distorted fragment appears in the Mexican, where also hieroglyphs have yielded to a cruder rebus-writing. The stately and incomparable compositions and architecture of Palenque, Copan and Quiriguá have yielded to the ball courts and local strifes of Chichen Itza—all this following the very course of changing historical succession preserved in the Chronicles. The later the date, the lower in every case the culture; this is impossible not to recognize, nor have we traces of any different course of events. Of course we see the rise of the Aztec nation, a small cycle, but like the Gothic upon the Roman, it comes at the end of the general American break-up—an incursion of barbarians settling on and preserving for us fragments of the culture that preceded them, just as has happened over and over again all over the world. And the same with the Incas in Peru. And yet even the Mexican culture demands our high respect, comparing favorably with European of the same period. Indeed it was actually far ahead of the latter in matters of education and many points of polity.

But in spite of its seeming greatness, its heart and energy were gone, just as with Peru, and both yielded to what on the face seems a miracle, but was only the expression of that force which was preparing the American continent for a new race and civilization, still now only in its beginnings. The Mayan empire had already broken up. And even as we write, the archaeological history of the other hemisphere is being repeated here; on the heels of Manabi comes the Chimu Valley, and soon it will be with America as with Egypt—one will not be able to print an up-to-date work on its early history, for new discoveries will carry it back further, and to greater scope, before the previous ones can be edited and gotten to press. Compare the few pages of earliest Egypt in Sharpe’s history, with Flinders Petrie’s work of a decade or so ago, and that with the situation today.

It is a simple fact that decipherment and publication all over the world can no longer keep pace with discovery; and the time has come for archaeology to begin to survey these remnants, engineering works that would tax any modern nation with all our appliances, vast ruined cities, one above the other, innumerable languages and writings, the traces of peoples whose very names are lost to history—as a whole, and to ask itself how long it must have taken for all these works to be accomplished, let alone for the birth and decay of the civilizations that supported them, and gave environment for the development of such technical skill as could finish the enormous bulk of the Great Pyramid with an accuracy beyond the fineness of our best instruments to measure. For not only mere bulk is to be considered—though there is enough of that scattered over the earth to keep all the possible available craftsmen of the world a wholly incommensurate time achieving them, but the ability to conceive and carry out such works. What sort of people leveled Monte Alban for its crown of pyramids, dreamed and executed the stucco modelings of Palenque, built the temple of Boro Budur in Java, cut the Bamian statues of the Hindû Kush, and so on, and so on, for page after page? If they had such appliances as we have, they must be ranked at least in our class for having them; if they did them without our great engines, what sort of men were they? And if they could do these things without our appliances, is it not a fair inference that they could easily have made the tools, or others better perhaps?

One fact is becoming more prominent with every advance of archaeology over the world, a fact of the greatest linguistic interest, namely that ancient civilizations and empires, as a whole, lasted longer than ours of today. Consider how many different and successive empires Europe has had in the last 2000 odd years, our history; and how long each of our cultures has lasted. All of them put together would go into one of these older periods, and have plenty to spare. Passing over what may be the real meaning and bearing of this fact on the problem of universal history and human evolution, and the position of our race today, the linguistic considerations which follow are most interesting.