Writing in the early Americas
Writing was first invented on the American continent in southern Mesoamerica around 900 BCE, completely independently from Old World writing first developed in Mesopotamia. The earliest written sources in Mesoamerica are associated with the Olmecs. After the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, Spanish colonial authorities and Catholic Church missionaries aimed to purge indigenous culture, religion and traditional institutions, which included the destruction of texts of Mesoamerican and pre-Columbian origin. However, some Mesoamerican texts were spared, particularly from the Yucatán of southern Mexico, recording the languages of the area. These surviving texts give anthropologists and historians valuable insight into the origins of Mesoamerican languages, culture, religion, and government. Languages recorded in Mesoamerican writing include Classical Maya, Classical Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mixtec, and various other languages, particularly of the Oto-Manguean and Uto-Aztecan families.
Mesoamerica (pre-1492)
The earliest known written work in Mesoamerica was created in approximately 900 BCE, around modern-day Veracruz by the Olmec civilization. There is only one known work of Olmec writing, the Cascajal Block, written on a block of serpentinite. It is the earliest identified piece of writing in the Western Hemisphere. The Olmec writing system repeats certain graphemes which may indicate that glyphs represent morphological or phonological information, like alphabets and syllabaries of the Old World, and not simply representing each word with one character, like Egyptian Hieroglyphics or modern day Chinese writing, though this is purely speculative as the exact nature and meaning of the Cascajal Block is unknown. It is unclear how widespread writing was in the Olmec empire. The script is highly unusual compared to other scripts used later on in the region. Some characters are easily identifiable as plants and animals of the region, such as maize, pineapples, fish, and insects. Others are abstract blocks or blobs. Some experts, such as Mary Pohl at Florida State University, speculate that the inscriptions were created for religious ritual purposes, like many later texts of Mesoamerica.
The first phonetic written language of Mesoamerica was first attested in 600 BCE, in the Zapotec. Zapotec writing represented phonetic sounds including vowels and consonants with written characters. Zapotec scribes were conflated with artists and were often called huezeequichi, meaning 'an artist on paper'.[1] This suggests that writing may have developed out of an older artistic tradition, in which abstract concepts were represented with symbols, which later more concretely came to represent spoken language. The Zapotec developed a highly advanced 260-day ritual calendar, and a 365-day secular calendar from their knowledge in astronomy. The Mayan writing system is one of the longest-lived and well documented writing systems of Mesoamerica. Like Zapotec writing, Mayan writing was a syllabary, similar to modern Japanese Kana writing, where each glyph represents a syllable, instead of each glyph representing a single phoneme or sound as in the Latin or Greek-derived alphabets of Europe.
Post-Colombian Indigenous Writing Systems
Outside of Mesoamerica in 1821, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah created a syllabary for the Cherokee language, which is still in use today. Sequoyah was inspired by English signs created by American settlers, which he termed "talking leaves". Tecumseh did not speak English, and so he was not aware of the exact nature of English writing, however he knew they represented spoken language visually. Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics is a syllabic writing system used in Canada by several indigenous communities, particularly Inuit and Cree communities, to represent indigenous languages. Most modern indigenous languages of the Americas utilize the Latin alphabet, typically utilizing Spanish, English, Portuguese or French spelling conventions, adapted to the particular language's phonology. This includes nearly every language in Mesoamerica which previously used an indigenous script, including Mayan and Nahuatl languages.
References
- ↑ Nolte, Jaycob (May 2021). Writing of the Americas (MA thesis). University of Nevada. Retrieved 2022-04-13 – via ScholarWorks.
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