MAYA HIEROGLYPHS — WHORF 481 



or with mutually interchangeable signs, a condition also satisfied by 

 Maya. It is a language in which the writings for honeybee, earth, 

 and the name of a day begin the same, in which "hold in the hand" 

 and "nothing" begin the same, in which "spear" and "noose" begin 

 with the same sign, which is also found in the clusters that mean 

 jaguar, nine, and lunar month, and so on. The evidence mounts 

 and becomes at last overwhelming. Not even Cholti or Tzeltal, the 

 languages closest to Maya, can satisfy the requirements; only Maya 

 can do so. 



There exists also a lesser equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, i. e., the 

 preserved names of the ancient months and other calendar terms 

 with the sign clusters for writing them, the ways of writing the 

 numerals, the 27 characters recorded by Bishop Landa, the sign 

 clusters for the cardinal directions, the colors, quite a number of 

 animals, and various gods — a collection of odd bits that, when gath- 

 ered together, make a not inconsiderable total. Finally there axe 

 many texts in the codices in which the meaning is almost as plain 

 as though a translation ran beside it, because of the detailed pic- 

 tures that run parallel with the text and illustrate it. Thus we really 

 do have a Maya Rosetta Stone, as well as a knowledge of the lan- 

 guage of the texts, so that, given linguistic scholarship like that of 

 ChampoUion, it is perfectly feasible to decipher and translate some 

 of the texts now^ and eventually all of them. 



But, on the other hand, the linguistic decipherer today has to con- 

 tend with the chasm that now exists between American archeology 

 and philology. The philological viewpoint, with its scholarly in- 

 terest in texts simply as texts, has become rather strange and incom- 

 prehensible to modern American archeology, with its high develop- 

 ment, along the scientific side, of the logical correlating of strictly 

 material evidence, the while its popular side and its financing is 

 largely connected with the esthetic interest, and with the interest 

 that attaches to concrete human subject matter, particularly that of 

 an exotic kind. Now the linguistic and philological interest is to 

 be distinguished both from the materially and physically scientific 

 interest and from the estheticohuman one; for while it is not en- 

 tirely divorced from either, and it cannot live in a vacuum, yet it 

 finds its main concern upon a different level, a level of its own. 

 The linguistic scholar is interested in a text as the monument of a 

 language arrested and preserved at a certain point of time. He is 

 not primarily intei-ested in the subject matter of the text, either as 

 history, folklore, religion, astronomy, or whatnot, but in its lin- 

 guistic form, which to him is the supreme interest of interests. From 

 this proceeds his type of objectivity, an earnest that his reading 



