INTKODUOTION. XXV 



tures), and some signs in the figures, they understood their matters, and 

 could explain them and teach them. We found great numbers of books in 

 these letters, but as they contained nothing that did not savor of superstition 

 and lies of the devil we burnt them all, at which the natives grieved most 

 keenly and were greatly pained. 



"I will give here an a, h, c, as their clumsiness does not allow more, 

 because they use one character for all the aspirations of the letters, and for 

 marking the parts another, and thus it could go on in hifinifi/m, as may be 

 seen in the following example. Le means a noose and to hunt with one; 

 to write it in their characters, after we had made them understand that there 

 are two letters, they wrote it with three, giving to the aspiration of the I the 

 vowel e, which it carries before it; and in this they are not wrong so to use 

 it, if they wish to, in their curious manner. After this they add to the end 

 the compound part."^ 



I need not pursue the quotation. The above words show clearly that 

 the natives did not in their method of writing analyze a word to its primitive 

 phonetic elements. "This," said the bishop, "we had to do for them." There- 

 fore they did not have an alphabet in the sense of the word as we use it. 



On the other hand, it is equally clear, from his words and examples, 

 that they had figures which represented sounds, and that they combined 

 these and added a determinative or an ideogram to represent words or 

 phrases. 



The alphabet he gives is, of course, not one which can be used as the 

 Latin a, b, c. It is surprising that any scholar should ever have thought so. 

 It would be an exception, even a contradiction, to the history of the evolu- 

 tion of human intelligence to find such an alphabet among nations of the 

 stage of cultivation of the Mayas or Aztecs. 



The severest criticism which Landa's figures have met has been from 

 the pen of the able antiquary. Dr. Phillip J. J. Valentin!. He discovered 

 that many of the sounds of the Spanish alphabet were represented by 

 signs or pictures of objects whose names in the Maj^a begin with that sound. 

 Thus he supposes that Landa asked an Indian to write in the native char- 

 acter the Spanish letter a, and the Indian drew an obsidian knife, which, 



'Diego do Lauila, Belacion de las Cosaa de Yucatan, pj). 310, 318, scq. 



