482 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1941 



will not be affected by theories concerned with the content of the 

 writing. He puts aside content to concentrate on linguistic form. 

 He aims to reconstruct the language as it actually was, with its con- 

 sonants and vowels in their actual places in words, its paradigms of 

 declension and conjugation and its patterns of syntax, thereby add- 

 ing a new body of facts to the whole domain of linguistic taxonomy. 

 A byproduct of his research is the reading of history and culture, 

 but it may be questioned if his discovery of strictly linguistic fact 

 in a time perspective is not the more important. The decipherment 

 of Hittite has proved to be far more important for the light it has 

 thrown on the development of the Indo-European languages than 

 for all the accounts of Hittite reigns and conquests. The battles 

 and politics of the Hittites are as dead as a nail in Hector's coffin, 

 but their verb forms and pronouns and common words are matters 

 of live interest in American universities at this moment, since the 

 accurate facts of the Hittite language revealed by careful decipher- 

 ment are completely revolutionizing our concepts of Indo-European 

 linguistics. This authoritative knowledge of Hittite could not have 

 come about if the deciphering scholars had not been linguists who 

 had slowly and carefully ascertained, by scholarly methods, with pro- 

 found respect for the text as a text, the exact words and grammar, 

 conceiving this as their paramount duty. It could not have come 

 about if they had conceived their duty as that of reading off a 

 sweeping survey of Hittite history and culture, or even as one of 

 clothing the dry bones of archeology with the flesh of human nar- 

 rative, important as these things are. 



The desiderata for Maya decipherment are no different. Reading 

 Maya texts must be a slow, careful investigation of linguistic forms, 

 regardless of the interest or lack of interest of their subject matter. 

 We must not conceive it our task to read off sweepingly the Maya 

 literature for the sake of the information on history, culture, re- 

 ligion, or whatever else may be contained in it. The annals of this 

 subject are cumbered by such attempts to read off or "interpret" the 

 whole corpus of the Maya codices at one fell swoop, from Brasseur 

 de Bourbourg to one very recent such an attempt. Such amusements 

 proceed from a longing for glamour and quick results, misconceiv- 

 ing what is the most valuable thing to be obtained from the results. 

 On the other hand much of the work of Cyrus Thomas, and various 

 bits of linguistic data pointed out by Morley and others have been 

 at least in the right direction — they seem to have understood what 

 the problem really is. 



The Maya writing system was a complex but very natural way — 

 natural to minds just beginning to exploit the idea of fixing lan- 

 guage in visual symbols — of using small picturelike signs to represent 

 the sounds of fractions of utterances (usually of a syllable or less in 



