The de Landa alphabet is the correspondence of Spanish letters and

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

s written in the

pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era, also known as the pre-contact era, or as the pre-Cabraline era specifically in Brazil, spans from the initial peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic to the onset of European col ...

Maya script Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs, is historically the native writing system of the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered. The earliest inscriptions found which ...

, which the 16th-century bishop of

Yucatán Yucatán, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán, is one of the 31 states which, along with Mexico City, constitute the 32 federal entities of Mexico. It comprises 106 separate municipalities, and its capital city is Mérida. ...

Diego de Landa Diego de Landa Calderón, O.F.M. (12 November 1524 – 29 April 1579) was a Spanish Franciscan bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Yucatán. He led a campaign against idolatry and human sacrifice.Timmer, 480 In doing so, he burne ...

, recorded as part of his documentation of the

Maya civilization The Maya civilization () was a Mesoamerican civilization that existed from antiquity to the early modern period. It is known by its ancient temples and glyphs (script). The Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writin ...

. Despite its inaccuracies, the information provided by him would much later prove to be crucial to the mid-20th century breakthrough in the

decipherment In philology and linguistics, decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of the symbols found in extinct languages and/or alphabets. Decipherment is possible with respect to languages and scripts. One can also study or try to decipher how spok ...

of the Maya script, starting with the work of the Soviet

epigrapher Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...

and

Mayanist A Mayanist () is a scholar specialising in research and study of the Mesoamerican pre-Columbian Maya civilisation. This discipline should not be confused with Mayanism, a collection of New Age beliefs about the ancient Maya. Mayanists draw ...

Yuri Knorozov.

History

With the aid of two Maya informants familiar with the script, de Landa made an attempt to provide a transcribed "A, B, C" for the Maya script with the intent of providing a key to its decipherment and translation. The "alphabet", along with some passages of explanatory notes and examples of its use in Maya writing, was written as a small part of de Landa's '' Relación de las cosas de Yucatán'' ("Account of the matters of Yucatán"), which also documented many aspects of the culture and practices of the indigenous

Maya peoples Maya () are an ethnolinguistic group of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. The ancient Maya civilization was formed by members of this group, and today's Maya are generally descended from people who lived w ...

that he had seen and been told of when he was living among them in the

Yucatán Peninsula The Yucatán Peninsula ( , ; ) is a large peninsula in southeast Mexico and adjacent portions of Belize and Guatemala. The peninsula extends towards the northeast, separating the Gulf of Mexico to the north and west of the peninsula from the C ...

. His work was written after he had been recalled to

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

to face trial by Inquisition for allegations of improper behaviour while there, and he wrote it as a defense of his mission there. The work was soon thereafter almost forgotten. The pre-existing establishments, such as the Mayan religious order, were all destroyed by invading Spanish belligerents, such as De Landa, to make way for

Christian A Christian () is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a Monotheism, monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus Christ. Christians form the largest religious community in the wo ...

“enlightenment”. In furtherance of this goal, nearly all the Mayan texts were destroyed, in deference to writings that conformed to

Biblical The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) biblical languages ...

doctrine.

Rediscovery

Lost to scholarship for several centuries, an abridged copy of ''Relación de las cosas de Yucatán'' was later rediscovered by the French antiquarian scholar Brasseur de Bourbourg in the 19th century. Then a number of unsuccessful attempts were made to use its de Landa alphabet passages to decipher the unknown script because the De Landa script was an

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

, but the extant Maya texts are logosyllabic. It has been theorized that De Landa might have unwittingly created a spurious writing system by a fundamental lack of understanding of how logosyllabic writing systems function as well as by tenuous access to reliable sources. It was not until the early 1950s when Knorozov published his landmark paper, analyzing it and other inscriptions in a new light, that substantial progress began to be made.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:De Landa Alphabet Alphabets Mesoamerican documents Maya script Multilingual texts 16th-century manuscripts ru:Письмо майя#Алфавит де Ланды