Colonial Scribes Following Hieroglyphic Conventions?

Scholars long supposed that some early colonial-era Maya scribes drew content from hieroglyphic codices as they penned in alphabetic script the first chapters of the amorphous genre of writings we know as the Books of Chilam Balam. Victoria Bricker was the first, however, to identify specific evidence of the bi-literate competency of such early Maya scribes. Bricker previewed her argument (¹⁹⁸⁵), reprised it (¹⁹⁸⁶), and then revisited it, as part of a broader discussion of bilingualism among Maya scribes (²⁰⁰⁰). However, the fullest exposition of that argument is found in her 1989 article, “The Last Gasp of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing in the Books of Chilam Balam of Chumayel and Chan Kan.” It is to that presentation of her thesis that I most frequently refer in the pages below.

In that influential article Bricker reported finding in two arguably early-composed parts of the Books of Chilam Balam of Chumayel and of Chan Kan evidence that Maya scribes had repeatedly modified the correct spelling of certain words. They added extra consonants, frequently when rendering the combination of a Maya root of the form CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) with a grammatical suffix of the form -VC (vowel-consonant). The word kinel, for example, consists of the root kin (“day”), and the relational suffix -el, as part of a phrase such as u kinel, “its day”. In those early texts identified by Bricker, the colonial-era scribes did not, however, write the word as kinel, but, rather, as kin nel. They parsed the word into two syllables and inserted an extra consonant. In other words, they doubled the “n”. So, too, did they double consonants in this word and others some 148 times in the two sources Bricker noted.

The practice of doubling consonants, also referred to as “consonant insertion,” had, according to Bricker, “no phonetic source or grammatical functions in Classical Yucatec (i.e. in Yucatec Maya as spoken and written around the time of the conquest and for some time thereafter)” (^{Bricker, 1989: 41}). To explain this seeming anomaly in colonial-era scribal orthography, Bricker pointed instead to some conventions of Maya hieroglyphic writing. As Bricker illustrated in her figure 4.3, to assemble a collocation of graphemes that together represented the phrase u kinel, a hieroglyphic scribe would utilize phonetic complements that in effect doubled the final consonant of the main sign, kin. Using glyphs, the -el suffix of the expression u kinel would be formed by affixing to the main sign kin two additional signs with the syllabic values /ne/ and /le/, together signifying the consonant-vowel-consonant cluster /nel/. The entire collocation of glyphs yielded u kin nel, producing the same kind of “consonant insertion” found in samples of early colonial alphabetic from the Books of Chilam Balam. Bricker made similar arguments concerning smaller numbers of examples of vowel insertion, consonant deletion, and vowel deletion found in the Chilam Balam texts. Noting the formal similarity of the Maya scribal practices, one in pre-conquest hieroglyphic writing, the other in post-conquest alphabetic writing, Bricker also noted that the practices were temporally proximate. The Chilam Balam texts in question “were written not long after the Conquest, when the traditional calendar and script were still in use” (^{Bricker, 1989: 41}). Bricker suggested that colonial-era Maya scribes writing the Chilam Balam passages in alphabetic script were conversant with hieroglyphic writing conventions -indeed, that they were adapting the latter to the former.

Maya epigrapher Stephen Houston has questioned some of the glyphic evidence Bricker presented as examples of consonant and vowel insertion similar to that found in the alphabetic books of Chilam Balam (^{Houston, Baines and Cooper, 2003: 466 fn. 9}). A few errant readings of the glyphs do not invalidate Bricker's thesis, as at least some of her readings are correct. Bricker's argument concerning the influence of hieroglyphic conventions on alphabetic writings contains, however, a different, more significant flaw. The temporal proximity of similar kinds of scribal practices -pre- and early post-conquest- does not imply they are causally related. We can be sure of that, because Maya scribal practice very distant in time from when hieroglyphs were still known or used also displays an abundance of the same orthographic anomalies of consonant and vowel deletion and insertion that Bricker detected in the early passages of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel and Chan Kan.

Between 1934 and 1936 Maya officials of villages in central Quintana Roo exchanged correspondence with the American archeologist Sylvanus Morley who was then directing the Carnegie Institution of Washington's researches at Chichen Itza and elsewhere on the Yucatan Peninsula (^{Sullivan, 1989}). Thirteen of the Maya letters to Morley have survived (Figure 1).² They are each handwritten on letter-sized, legal-sized, or occasionally smaller cuts of paper and total some 30 pages of text. The Maya letters were drafted by two different scribes -Apolinario Itza and Antonio Xiu.

Consonant insertion of exactly the same type detected and discussed by Bricker for the early colonial period appears in abundance in these twentieth-century texts. Vowel insertion, and consonant and vowel deletion, occur also, though much less frequently than consonant insertion. All of these processes are exemplified, for example, in the Maya officers' 3 May 1935 letter to Morley (The first line of each triplet in the transcription below mirrors the handwritten original. Consonant and vowel sequences involving one of the processes of insertion or deletion under discussion here are highlighted by underlining. The second line of each stanza provides a normalized transcription; the third line, a free English translation. Corrections and insertions made by the Maya scribe in the original are indicated by strikethrough and superscript insertions).³

In the entire Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel Victoria Bricker counted some 148 instances of consonant insertion. In sections with heavy concentrations of such orthographic anomalies she found 22 examples on 3 pages of the book, and 27 examples on another 9 pages of the book (^{Bricker, 1989: 41}). In the two-page letter from 1935 quoted above I count 36 instances of consonant insertion, a frequency comensurate with that found by Bricker in sections of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel. The types of consonant insertion found in the 1935 letter are like those found by Bricker in the Chilam Balam texts. They included:

Consonant deletion occurs with Spanish borrowings as well as with Maya original words, as shown in the examples above. Bricker noted that in her colonial-era sample consonants subject to doubling included the plain consonants b, c, h, l, m, n, s, t, w (u), x and y (^{Bricker, 1989: 41}). So, too, in the 1935 letter quoted here or in other letters from the Maya-Morley correspondence can one find all these consonants doubled (except w (u)), as well as two not noted by Bricker, ch and ts.

As was the case with Bricker's colonial-era sample, analagous instances of vowel insertion (19 tokens), and consonant or vowel deletion (eight tokens) are much less numerous, but nonetheless present in the 1935 text under consideration here. The twentieth-century Maya scribe, like his colonial-era counterparts, did not consistantly nor frequently note vowel length or -VɁV- occurrences. Sometimes he appears to have done just that by doubling the letter for a vowel, as in, from the letter quoted above, the words Ↄooc (ts'o'ok), ta uee tel, (tawéetel), tro pa il loob (tropailo'ob), u be toob (u bèeto'ob), u tuc lic coob (u tukliko'ob), hun tzaan (hun ts'áan). However in other instances, as Bricker found, vowels were doubled unrelated to the need to convey vowel length, tone or the glottal infixes of Maya roots. Bricker found that vowel insertion in the colonial texts she discussed all pertained to roots of the form CVɁ, CVh, and CVy, and to suffixes of the form -VC. Concerning the latter, Bricker noted the three -VC suffixes -ac, -ah, and -al were sometimes written with inserted vowels as -aac, -aah, and -aal in order to facilitate syllabification as in examples such as chu ca ah, mu ca ah (^{Bricker, 1989: 41-43}). The only similar examples that can be found in the 1935 letter quoted above, or in other letters from the Maya-Morley correspondence, involve the -al suffix as in yan ta al (ku yàantal). In the modern correspondence one finds additionally the vowel of the suffix -ik frequently doubled, with the scribe thus altering the form CVC-t-ik into CVC-ti-ik, or the form CVC-ik into CV-Ci-ik, as in men ti ic (mèntik), be ti ic or be tiic (bèetik), ohel ti ic ('oheltik), con tes tar ti ic (kontestartik).⁵

The examples of vowel deletion and consonant deletion which Bricker found in Chilam Balam passages were both limited and mixed. Her tokens of vowel deletion included numerous examples of the use of abbreviation by the Maya scribes who wrote certain pages of the Chilam Balam of Chan Kan, produced presumably by Maya scribes already familiar with Spanish abbreviation conventions. In those examples scribes not only elided unwanted vowels, but also marked the resulting sequence of letters for syllable boundaries as well. For example, as Bricker noted, one finds the word ayikal rendered in abbreviation as ãy.k.l, and the word yahalcab, as y.h.l.cab. That suggested to Bricker that the Maya scribe was treating the Latin alphabet as a syllabary, with each consonant in these abbreviations standing for a consonant-vowel combination (^{Bricker, 1989: 44-45}). That suggestion seems unwarranted, however. In the examples she gave not every consonant represented a consonant-vowel combination. The final l in ãy.k.l represented just the sound /l/. So, too, the .l. in the abbreviation y.h.l.cab. The scribe who wrote these abbreviations intended a reader to reconstitute the full expression based upon an awareness of the syllabification of the spoken expression -hence the dots between the consonants. But this is not the same as treating the Latin alphabet as a syllabary, even in this limited, somewhat idiosyncratic corpus of abbreviations. In any event, the Maya scribes who penned their leaders' correspondence to Sylvanus Morley in the 1930s appear to have been less familiar with Spanish abbreviation conventions than was the scribe of the Chilam Balam passages to which Bricker made reference. In the Maya-Morley letters one finds only abbreviations for the words año, señor and don.

Drawing again from pages of the Chilam Balam of Chan Kan Bricker pointed to the use of consonant deletion to faciliate a syllabic rendering of words and phrases. She suggested that was done sometimes to eliminate consonant clusters that would impede writing in preferred CV- syllable sequences, as with the example of numya rendered as nu ya. As one might by now expect, this practice is also found in the Maya-Morley letters. In the 1935 text quoted above one finds such examples as (brackets indicating the deleted consonants and sometimes vowels) lu[k]s[i]cob, lu[k]saal, ohe[l]tic, alca[b]pachtic. Bricker also noted in the Chilam Balam of Chan Kan instances in which the final consonant l was ommitted from expressions, and this one finds also in the Maya-Morley letters with such examples as ta ue te[l] (tawéetel), ka nan ta[l] (k'a'ana'antal), yanta[l], (yàantal), hunpe[l], (hun p'éel).

From the Chilam Balam of Chumayel Victoria Bricker extracted one more token of a curious orthographic practice that appeared to point to borrowing from hieroglyphic scriptural conventions -a case of rebus writing (^{Bricker, 1989: 41}). In that book one finds the expresson 2n hele which Bricker surely correctly read as meaning can hele. The numeral 2 stood for the sound of the word for “two” in classical Yucatec, /ka/ (a phonetic suffix, n, was added to transform that into the word can, meaning “four”, with the expression as a whole presumably meaning “four hel”).⁶ This appeared to Bricker a possible borrowing from hieroglyphic writing presumably because it involves the combination of the (logographic) sign for ca with a phonetic complement, just as one finds so often in hieroglyphic inscriptions. Virtually the same practice, however, is found instantiated twice in the Maya-Morley letters from the 1930s, once each in a letter penned by each of two scribes. Both involve the use of the numeral 5 to represent by itself not the number “five”, but a sequence of sounds used with a “phonetic complement” to make a complete word meaning in one case “five of them” and in the other “the fifth”. In the letter from Maya officers to Sylvanus Morley dated 2 June 1936, one finds:

In this case the numeral 5 is not employed to represent the entire word cinco. Were that the case one would have articulated this as /sin ko kob/, producing a kind of stutter which does not conform to any example of syllabification or consonant insertion found in these letters. Rather, the numeral 5 is used to represent only the initial syllable /sin/, with the expression then read as sin cob.

A second, slightly more elaborated instance of rebus writing, also involving the use of the numeral 5, is found in the Maya officers' letter to Morley dated 5 June 1936. Here the scribe wrote:

Here the numeral 5 is reduced to representing only the initial consonantal sound /s/. What is more, the scribe merged the graphic qualities of the written numeral 5 and the written, capital letter S to produce a hybrid 5/S, as can be seen below in the facsimilie of this section of the letter. Note the difference between the modified 5/S, and the way the scribe wrote otherwise ordinary capital S's elsewhere in this sample (Figure 2).

In summary, both the early colonial texts analyzed by Victoria Bricker and the twentieth-century samples of Maya writing presented above display virtually the same practices of consonant and vowel insertion and deletion, and rebus writing. Bricker had argued that these practices possibly evidenced a carry-over of hieroglyphic scribal practices into the handling of the new alphabetic script in the preparation of Maya-language documents. Formal similarity and temporal proximity of the two scribal practices -hieroglyphic and alphabetic- made this possibility seem likely. The twentieth-century examples I have provided, however, lack the element of temporal proximity, leaving only formal similarity to suggest a link to the hieroglyphic past. One might argue, I suppose, that this evidence points to a continuation of the influence, if not the very practice, of hieroglyphic writing far into the colonial, even into the modern period. John Chuchiak, for example, claimed that he found in post-conquest Maya scribal practices “evidence . . . [that] points to the preservation, propagation, and pluralistic use of both writing systems [hieroglyphic and alphabetic] long into the colonial period and, in some regions, into the dawn of the nineteenth century” (^{Chuchiak, 2010: 90}). Yet this is surely flight of fancy, with no evidence actually provided to support such an extraordinary assertion. Perhaps practices once derived from hieroglyphic writing and transferred by early scribes into the handling of an alphabetic script were subsequently passed down, generation after generation, from one Maya scribe to another to the very men who penned Maya letters to Sylvanus Morley in the 1930s? This too seems doubtful. The chain of transmission is too long and was broken here and there by the intervention of non-Maya literates uninfluenced by Maya hieroglyphic practices. We know that the predecessors of our scribes from the 1930s, the scribes and secretaries of the Caste War Maya, were not always Maya, and not members of an age-old guild of scribes preserving writing traditions through the ages.⁸

An Alternative Hypothesis

The fact that examples of twentieth-century Maya orthography match examples gleaned from colonial-era writing is sufficient to invalidate the argument that such orthographic anomalies reflect a lingering scribal knowledge of hieroglyphic writing conventions. Refuting this prior, well-established notion opens the door to consideration of alternative explanations for anomalous Maya orthographies. Limitations of space and available research permit me here to only suggest one alternative hypothesis. Namely, that the examples of consonant/vowel insertion/deletion discussed in this paper reflect heretofore poorly researched aspects of Yucatec Maya accoustical phonetics and syllable formation and recognition.

The letters to Sylvanus Morley penned by Maya secretaries in the 1930s were the product of dictation. Officers spoke, the scribes jotted down what was said, offices spoke on, the scribes wrote on. This much is evident from the numerous self-referential phrases in the letters that do not refer back to the scribe who wielded the pen, but to their superiors who imagined themselves speaking directly to Sylvanus Morley through the medium of the written word. “Thus then this holy hour, thus then this holy day, there is then the great necessity of my making this letter for me to give to you ….” That letter from 20 September 1935 was signed by Evaristo Zuluub alone. But he didn't actually “make the letter.” His scribe did, by trying accurately to capture in writing, syllable-by-syllable, the sounds of Zuluub speaking.

Sometimes the scribe used blank space to separate syllables -kan nan tal- sometimes he did not -kinnil, santo, mentiic. But the orthography nonetheless provided a prospective reader with information necessary to reproduce the corresponding syllables as articulated by Zuluub (or as the scribe imagined they should be articulated). A consonant was inserted in the writing of the word kinil (in the phrase u santo kinnil ̶ “the holy day [for]”) not to conform to a standard preference, or to produce a favored CVC-CVC syllabification for a word that otherwise would be rendered as CVC-VC. The consonant was inserted because that was how the word is articulated - /k'ìin nil/. The twentieth-century scribe, otherwise inexperienced in finer orthographic practices, was simply trying to render exactly what he heard. So, too, I imagine, for the colonial-era scribes who penned the books of Chilam Balam. In this sense I disagree with Bricker's assertion that “words written with double consonants . . . have no phonetic source or grammatical functions in Classical Yucatec” (^{Bricker, 1989: 41}). They do, rather, have a phonetic function -to accurately reflect in writing one aspect of the articulatory phonetics of carefully spoken Yucatec Maya. So, too, in colonial times when written texts were already “pervaded by oral features” as ^{William Hanks has observed (2010: 112, 287}; ^{2015: 659-661)} (Since her 1989 article ^{Victoria Bricker [2015]} has, in fact, identified such oral bases for types of aberrant orthography other than consonant/vowel insertion/deletion in colonial Maya documents.)

Following Smalley in his Manual of Articulatory Phonetics by “syllables” I refer groups of sounds out of a stream of speech, each grouping of which carries its own beat (^{Smalley, 1963: 152}). The pattern or rhythm of such beats in a stretch of spoken language one readily notices. The precise boundaries between sound groups -between syllables- can be much less obvious, as Smalley noted: “It is not always possible, however, to determine an exact syllable boundary.” Smalley provided the example of the spoken English word “money”. Rendering the word phonetically, he stated that “it is clear what the syllabics and non-syllabics are” -i.e. which sounds bear stress, which do not- “however in the [n] in the middle is a boundary between two syllables, and does not belong more completely with one than with the other, unless you pronounce the word in an over-precise way” (^{Smalley, 1963: 154}). Smalley noted that in some languages “syllable division is [always] clearly audible”. That is not, however, the case in English.

Nor is it the case in Yucatec Maya. The problem that Smalley alluded to with the example of the word “money” is the same Maya scribes confronted when he chose to “insert” consonants, or to double consonants, in so many written words and phrases. Every syllable peak in Yucatec Maya -the point of greatest stress in a sequence of phonemes- is a vowel, and, Robert Blair tells us in his ¹⁹⁶⁴ study of the morpho-syntax of Yucatec Maya, every vowel “constitutes the occurrence of a syllable peak” (^{Blair, 1964: 21-22}).⁹ Consonants are relegated to the sometimes vague boundaries between syllables, with Maya scribes assigning a consonant to the final sound of one syllable, or to the initial sound of the next syllable, or to both.

That is the phonetic source of what Bricker has named, and others have followed, “consonantal insertion”. One should keep in mind that inserting an extra letter in written words and inserting an extra articulated consonant in the spoken word are not the same thing and will not always correspond. Consonant/vowel insertion/deletion should refer ultimately not to the writing of letters but the articulation of sounds, and where the latter seems impossible or unlikely, one is not really dealing with this practice, but, rather, with scribal error or something else still. Matthew Restall in his article “Heirs to the Hieroglyphs” (^1997a) followed Bricker in noting “logosyllabic principles” in colonial-era alphabetic writing that hark back to corresponding practices displayed in pre-conquest hieroglyphic inscriptions. Some of the additional examples he provided, however, fail the test I have suggested above and are not examples of the practices that Bricker highlighted. For example, Restall found in documents he consulted the phrase hun p'éel (meaning “one inanimate object”) written variously as humpel, hunnpel, hunpell. The extra "n" in the second version, and the extra “l” in the third, however, cannot plausibly be articulated as separate syllables. All three versions are just ways of writing (one version more accurate than the other) the sequence of syllables hun p'éel (^{Restall, 1997a: 248}).

A case somewhat different from that I've made concerning the cause of consonantal insertion will need to be made for the less common occurrences of “vowel insertion”. Because, as noted above, every vowel is syllabic in itself, with or without consonantal accompaniment. If a scribe inserted a letter representing a vowel, it implied the scribe imagined articulating an additional syllable. Restall provided an example of this noting that a Maya scribe wrote the word cruz as curuz. This would appear to be a valid instance of vowel insertion, as the scribe likely intended that the latter be articulated as two syllables, cu ruz (^{Restall, 1997a: 248}). Not every instance is so clear, however. Bricker found the word chu cah, “caught”, (written thus it is a two-syllable word) rendered by Maya scribes sometimes as chu ca ah. As an example of vowel insertion we would have to read this as a three-syllable word. However I must suppose in this instance and similar examples given by Bricker or found in the 1935 letter cited above that we are dealing not with an accurate rendering of the spoken word /čukah/, but with a scribe who stumbled for a moment attempting to spell out the word. Neither can one rule out a scribal effort to capture junctural variations in vowel tone and length of the sort enumerated by Blair who noted that “contour junctures [pauses in speech we represent with commas, semi-colons and periods] are generally characterized by a pause (of unspecifiable length) as well as by features of deceleration in the rate of phonation, intensity decrescendo, and pitch-turn, these latter three extending over the previous syllable” (^{Blair, 1964: 4}).

As for consonant and vowel deletion, these processes also seem to reflect the morpho-phonological processes of consonant cluster reduction, vowel elision, and contraction evinced commonly in the spoken language and noted by students of the language even in colonial times (^{Blair, 1964: 34-37}; ^{Tozzer, 1977: 23-26}; ^{Beltrán, 1859: 39-45}; ^{Sobrino, 2007}). In his 1742 Arte del idioma maya reducido a sucintas reglas (^{1859: 39}), Pedro Beltrán observed that

Porque en este idioma no se habla en todo como se escribe, ni se pronuncian muchas voces conforme lo piden las reglas (y es lo que causa, que algunos que lo hablan parezcan forasteros ó se juzgue que no pronuncian como deben; siendo así, que hablan según las reglas del arte) se advierta que es tan necesario el uso de las sinalefas y síncopas, que sin hipérbole se puede afirmar, que todo el ser y hermosura de esta lengua es el uso de ellas . . . .

[Because in this language not all is spoken as it is written, nor are pronounced many letters as the rules suggest (it is what causes some who speak it to seem like outsiders or to be judged as not pronouncing it like they should; because they are speaking according to the grammar rules), one is advised it is very necessary the use of elision and syncope, such that without hyperbole one could say that all the being and beauty of this language rests in the use of them … .]

By saying the language is not spoken just as written, Beltrán was referring, of course, to how Spaniards wrote the language following rules laid out in grammars like his own. Those of his colleagues who spoke just what they read did not sound right, he observed. Maya scribes did not have that problem -at least some did not. They did not speak as rules dictated they write; rather, they wrote as oral practice dictated they speak.

That the peculiar othrography of some Maya scribes, from the colonial period to modern times, reflects their pronounciation and perception of syllables must remain now just an hypothesis. As ^{Bennett (2016: 503)} has recently noted, “two major areas of phonetic research -articulatory phonetics and speech perception- remain essentially unexplored for Mayan languages”. Only skilled phonetic research, including likely spectogram analysis combined with studies of native-speaker intuition regarding syllabification, will enable a test of the hypothesis I have outlined above (see, for example, ^{Kidder, 2013}.)

Other Evidence for Scribal Syncretism Is Also Invalid

Victoria Bricker's influential studies are not the only ones presenting evidence and arguments in favor of the notion of scribal syncretism in colonial Yucatan. Colonial historian ^{John Chuchiak (2010)} added to Victoria Bricker's arguments concerning scribal syncretism in an article in Ethnohistory titled, “Writing as Resistance: Maya Graphic Pluralism and Indigenous Elite Strategies for Survival in Colonial Yucatan, 1550-1750”. In that publication and others Chuchiak offered evidence for the continued use of hieroglyphic codices and for bi-literacy (in hieroglyphic and alphabetic scripts) among some Maya on the peninsula in the early colonial period. Chuchiak noted that before the conquest hieroglyphic literacy was restricted to priests and some nobles, contributing to their prestige and influence over commoners. The Spanish conquest and the gradual imposition of new forms of governance jeopardized the power of the surviving priesthood and nobility. As Franciscans favored elite children for religious instruction and literacy training, Maya nobles came to perceive in the cultivation of new literacies an opportunity to shore up influence over commoners. Retention of hieroglyphic literacy and mastery of the new means of alphabetic writing would allow them to retain access to ancient sacred knowledge, a source of their original legitimacy, while making them indispensable cogs in the new machinery of colonial rule. Bi-literate nobles came to dominate the important new writing-dependent salaried positions of escribano and maestro de escuela even as they kept alive the remnants of hieroglyphic writing into the early 19^th century.¹⁰ In sum,

By adapting and utilizing both styles of writing, the colonial Maya elite created a system of graphic pluralism that enabled the Maya nobility to better defend their elite interests in a manner consistent with both pre-Columbian and colonial forms of writing, address, religion, and government administration (^{Chuchiak, 2010: 87}).

As an hypothesis, Chuchiak's portrayal of the surviving nobility's interest in scribal posts is not implausible, but it suffers from poor evidentiary support. Due to limitations of space, only one of the deficiencies in his argument can be addressed in this paper. Having argued that noble lineages successfully dominated offices requiring alphabetic literacy under Spanish rule, Chuchiak asserted that “both the alphabetic script and the traditional Maya glyphs became the sacred knowledge of this apparent noble scribal class” (^{Chuchiak, 2010: 100}). Moreover, Chuchiak argued, echoing Victoria Bricker's argument concerning scribal syncretism discussed above, Maya scribes of the early colonial period left linguistic evidence of their ability to manipulate the multiple literacies of the colonial world (^{Chuchiak, 2010: 93}). Chuchiak noted, for example, that Maya scribes varied in their knowledge of the correct spelling of Spanish loan words. Scribes further east away from the capital in Merida were less familiar with the Spanish language and Spanish spelling conventions, so they displayed more variability in how they wrote Spanish loanwords in Maya documents. The ways those eastern scribes rendered Spanish loanwords in writing, Chuchiak claimed, suggests that they “preserved an understanding of the phonetic Maya script longer than the Maya scribes in the west” (^{Chuchiak, 2010: 103}). According to Chuchiak that is evident in the way Maya scribes syllabically parsed Spanish loanwords as they carefully committed them to paper. He asserted that “no matter how many true syllables a Spanish loan word had, the Maya of the eastern peninsula almost always attempted to break it down into four parsed syllables so that it fit into their understanding of a proper [i.e. hieroglyphic] writing system” (^{Chuchiak, 2010: 104, table 4}). That argument is invalid.

Chuchiak provided no evidence for the claim that “the most common form of Maya hieroglyphic inscription that was rendered into phonetic or syllabic glyphs was made up of four readily separable phonetic syllables”, which was the origin, supposedly, of the colonial Mayas' preference for rendering Spanish loan words as four-syllable words (^{2010: 104, table 4}). Here Chuchiak was likely referring to the frequency of alternative patterns of glyph blocks or glyph collocations (see his illustration -“Example of Most Common Phonetic Order of Maya Glyph Blocks”, page 104, table 4). Perhaps collocations of four glyphs were especially common in Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions (I do not know). Whatever the frequency of four-glyph collocations, combinations of four glyphs do not necessarily represent words that when spoken could be parsed as four-syllable words. A main sign alone may represent a two-syllable word -balam, kisin, winik, muyal, áakab. Collocations of a main sign and affixes may sometimes have represented four-syllable words. But they could as well represent words of more or less than four syllables -depending upon the meaning of the main sign and whether affixes represented phonetic complements to the main sign (adding no additional articulated syllable to the expression) or syllabic complements. Finally, glyph blocks do not only represent words, but phrases, too. A main sign and three affixes do not necessarily yield a four-syllable word. Nor need a collocation of four syllabograms yield a four-syllable word. A block of four glyphs readable as chu-ku-ji-y(a) was to be read as the two-syllable word chukjiiy, “he was captured”, for example (^{Coe and Van Stone, 2001: 33}).

Having posited a preference on the part of pre-Hispanic Maya scribes for parsing words into syllables four in number, Chuchiak attempted to show that colonial Maya scribes labored under a similar preference, manifest in how they wrote some Spanish loan words. To illustrate his point, he claimed that Maya scribes in the east of the Yucatan Peninsula, where they were less familiar with correct Spanish orthography, tended to write the word información as though it were a four-syllable word, rather than the five-syllable word that Chuchiak supposed it to be. They might write the word, for example, as in por maz çion. Here Chuchiak made an error. The less experienced scribes of the east were scanning the word syllabically, just as Chuchiak suggested. However they did so correctly, not under the influence of a pre-Hispanic preference. Contrary to Chuchiak's assertion that información is a five-syllable word, as articulated by native Spanish speakers, it is a four-syllable word, the final syllable being a diphthong not to be separated into /ci-on/ as Chuchiak evidently assumed. Chuchiak's example of an alleged Maya preference for four-syllable scanning is invalid, and he offered no other evidence to back up his assertion for such a preference.

Conclusions

Arguments put forward by Victoria Bricker, John Chuchiak and Matthew Restall suggesting that the orthographic anomalies of colonial-era scribes utilizing an alphabetic script evince the lingering influence of hieroglyphic writing conventions cannot be sustained in the light of evidence from modern Maya handwritten documents. The anomalies noted by Bricker are real, patterned, and significant, but not unique to early-colonial writing. They are evident in some modern Maya writing, too. Further research is necessary to explain these anomalies which may be atributable to the acoustical phonetics and syllabification of spoken Yucatec Maya and to the inexperience of the scribes in whose writing such anomalies are found. Space prohibits discussing here still other claims concerning the coexistence and interaction of scribal competencies in both hieroglyphic and alphabetic writing in the early colonial period. They will merit close scrutiny elsewhere.