Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Mayan Hieroglyphs, Part III

In previous posts [1] I've 'translated' my name and Leann's name into Mayan hieroglyphs. But we also have a surname, so I next tackled the task of converting Crook into Mayan hieroglyphs. As I've discussed before, the last name Crook could have many meanings.[2] Since we're unsure what the exact origins of our last name really are, I searched the English–Mayan dictionary [3] for all of the possibilities. I was able to find witza (which means "a person from the hills"), ch'at (which means "hunchback"), and eb'et (which means "messenger"). The rest did not appear in the dictionary. Well, I decided that I liked all three, so I did all of them.

First, ch'at (spelled ch'a-ta):
  • For ch'a- I chose this glyph (which has no Thompson number)
  • For -ta I chose T103
Second, eb'et (spelled ye-b'e-te):
  • For ye- I chose T33:512 [4]
  • For -b'e- I chose T301 [5]
  • For -te I chose T350
Third, witza (spelled wi-tzi-'a; a combination of witzi, which means "mountain" or "hill", and the suffix -a, which means "a person of"):
  • For wi- I chose T117 [6]
  • For -tzi- I chose T507b [6]
  • For -'a I chose T229
And this is the final result:


The meaning could be "hunchbacked messenger[s] from the mountains"—my family![7]

Read Part IV here.


Notes:

[1] See my previous posts Mayan Hieroglyphs I and Mayan Hieroglyphs II.

[2] See my post entitled What's in a Name?


[4] T33 has no phonetic value; it's just for decoration.

[5] There is no phonetic hieroglyph for b'e in the syllabary I chose, so I used one of the hieroglyphs for b'i instead.
      Remember that I'm using John Montgomery's drawings, which are available here. This link includes both a syllabary (where you can see the different syllable hieroglyphics) and a dictionary (where you can see actual words constructed using hieroglyphics).
      You can also find overlapping, but non-identical sets of Mayan hieroglyphics in this .pdf, in this .pdf, or at this website (scroll down to Step 3 and follow the links).

[6] Actually I chose T117:507 for these first two.

[7] And if you stick the glyphs from all three posts together you get (the word and doesn't exist in Mayan):

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