Eds Alex de Voogt Irving Finkel 2010 The Idea of Writing Quack

The Idea of Writing
International Studies in
Religion and Society
Editors
Lori G. Beaman and Peter Beyer, University of Ottawa
VOLUME 9
The Idea of Writing
Play and Complexity
Edited by
Alex de Voogt
Irving Finkel
LEIDEN BOSTON
2010
Cover illustration: Book pedlar from Moji-e tsukushi, 1836 reprint, courtesy
Marianne Oikawa-Simon.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The idea of writing : play and complexity / edited by Alex de Voogt, Irving Finkel.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-90-04-17446-7 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. WritingHistory. 2. Written communicationHistory. 3. AuthorshipHistory.
I. Finkel, Irving L.
P211.I34 2010
411.09dc22
2009037924
ISBN 978 90 04 17446 7
Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

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To the memory of the Research School cnws
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ............................................................................ xi
Introducing Writing on Writing ..................................................... 1

Alex de Voogt
PLAY IN WRITING
Strange Byways in Cuneiform Writing .......................................... 9

Irving Finkel
Scripts and Shapes: The Interplay of Chinese Characters and

Japanese Syllabaries in Early Modern Japan ............................ 27
Margarita Winkel
Substitution, Substitution, Substitution: The Many Faces of

Maya Writing ................................................................................. 43
Erik Boot
LOANWORDS
From Group-Writing to Word Association: Representation

and Integration of Foreign Words in Egyptian Script ............ 73
Joachim Friedrich Quack
What is Being Borrowed? Language and Script Contact in

Taiwan ............................................................................................. 93
Henning Klter
The Adaptation of the Cuneiform Script to Foreign

Languages ....................................................................................... 117
Wilfred H. van Soldt
Loanwords, Foreign Words, and Foreign Signs in

Maya Writing ................................................................................. 129
Erik Boot
viii contents
On Loans and Additions to the Fidl (Ethiopic)

Writing System .............................................................................. 179
Azeb Amha
Languages and Scripts in the Maldive Islands: Coding and

Encoding ......................................................................................... 197
Alex de Voogt
Foreign Terms in Sanskrit Pertaining to Writing ........................ 207

Harry Falk
POLYSEMY
Reducing Polyvalency in Writing Systems: From Egyptian to

Meroitic ........................................................................................... 221
Claude Rilly
Difficult Hieroglyphs and Unreadable Demotic?

How the Ancient Egyptians Dealt with the Complexities of
their Script ...................................................................................... 235
Maya Writing: Synonyms and Homonyms, Polyvalency and

Polysemy ......................................................................................... 253
Erik Boot
In the Interstices of Representation: Ludic Writing and the

Locus of Polysemy in the Chinese Sign .................................... 281
Wolfgang Behr
TOWARDS ANOTHER SCRIPT
Egyptian Writing for Non-Egyptian Languages and Vice Versa:

A Short Overview .......................................................................... 317
The Caroline Islands Script: A Linguistic Confrontation ........... 327

Alex de Voogt
contents ix
The Interaction of Syllabic and Alphabetic Cuneiform Writing

in Ugarit .......................................................................................... 345
Writing Dance .................................................................................... 357

Joukje Kolff
Author Index ...................................................................................... 381

Language (Group) and Script Index .............................................. 388
Subject Index ...................................................................................... 392
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The idea originated at a conference on board games, where the two

editors discovered a second common interest in need of attention. At
the resulting gatherings, dedicated to the study of writing systems, the
audience and participants changed but the playful element remained.
The first meeting lasted only half a day but the enthusiasm from the
participants and the Research School cnws made a sequel unavoidable.
The generous support of the International Institute for Asian Studies
for the first gathering and the continuous logistic and financial support
from the Research School cnws have created a solid platform on which
many departments exchanged ideas while their favorite colleagues from
abroad were added to the list of speakers.
The fourth and fifth symposia expanded to three-day events, and
were funded by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences along with the
continuous support of Leiden University and the Research School cnws.
At this time, the symposium has found its own momentum so that it is
possible to announce here that the next symposia will be organized by
the participants from abroad in alternating European cities. After five
symposia entitled The Idea of Writing, this volume exhibits a collec-
tion of the results. It contains contributions of the first four symposia
and the themes of each meeting are reflected in the headings of the
individual sections.
The publication of this volume occurs following the discontinuation
of the Research School cnws that for more than twenty years protected
the interests of the small departments that specialized in non-Western
languages and writing systems. To this institution and its people this
volume is dedicated.
The following individuals are acknowledged for their logistic support
and include Connie Dickmeyer, Sabine Luning, Wilma Trommelen,
Ilona Beumer, Guita Winkel, Sanderien de Jong, Willem Vogelsang,
Rogier Busser and Wim Stokhof. Particular thanks go to Wilfred van
Soldt and Olaf Kaper for their support with grant applications. Most
of all, it is a pleasure to thank all those whose participation in these
symposia have made this publication possible.
INTRODUCING WRITING ON WRITING
Alex de Voogt
The Idea of Writing: Play and Complexity is an exploration of the

versatility of writing systems. From ancient Egyptian, Cuneiform and
Meroitic writing to Chinese, Maya and Maldivian script, the authors
examine the problems and possibilities of polysemy, representing loan-
words or adapting a writing system to another language. The playful
and artistic use of writing, including a contribution on writing dance,
further illustrates the possible intricacies of the scripts. This collection
of articles aims to highlight the complexity of writing systems rather
than to provide a first introduction. Yet as complex as the description
of these writing systems may appear, the readers and writers of the most
complex scripts did not suffer in a way that has made these systems
impractical or impossible to them.
The different academic traditions in which these writing systems
have been studied use linguistic, socio-historical and philological
approaches that all provide insight into largely the same phenomena.
The contributions were first presented in a series of symposia in which
the interaction between experts of different fields and writing systems
was central. As a result, the complex content of each contribution is
made accessible to other specialists in the study of writing.
A first point of reference in the Idea of Writing is the seminal work
by Daniels & Bright (1996) who provided a systematic overview of the
worlds writing systems. They concentrated on how the systems work
by analyzing and classifying them. They follow earlier publications by,
for instance, Diringer (1968), DeFrancis (1989) and, in particular, Gelb
(1952) whose academic approach also launched the term grammatology
to describe the field.
Daniels & Bright specifically advance the work of Gelb. Their pub-
lications resulted in a growing interest in writing systems. However,
later works are not much concerned with the working of writing sys-
tems or are limited to only a small region (e.g., Goody 2000, Borchers,
Kammerzell & Weninger 2001, Houston 2004, Sanders 2006). The idea of
writing has associations that go beyond and away from the system itself
and arrive at cultures, languages, communication and interpretation.
2 alex de voogt
A broad perspective on the study of writing systems increases its pos-

sible relevance to other disciplines, a development that is only in its
beginning stages.
As this volume illustrates, culture, language and different disciplines
are also part of the study of writing systems in the narrow sense. The
analysis and intricacies of the system need an understanding of scripts
that is not integral to any single discipline, but requires linguistics,
philology and history as a starting point. The interpretation of writing
always necessitates an understanding of language and its context. An
analysis of how the elements of the script are employed presumes that
the effort to read and interpret the text has already been made. Writing
is still of interest even when the reading is completed.
The systematic study by Daniels & Bright introduces nearly all writing
systems and occasionally speaks to the details to which this volume is
dedicated. These elements become apparent when the script shows its
versatility. How does the system work when words from other languages
need to be represented? Does a scribe have options when writing the
same (string of) words and how are these choices governed? What
possibilities are created when a scribe is playing with the versatility
of the writing system? The exploration of play in writing, polysemy,
loanwords and the application of scripts to other languages combine
to demonstrate the versatility of writing systems.
Versatilities
Play in writing, also known as jeu dcriture, is the individuals explora-

tion of a scripts versatility. It is the realm of poets and designers, but
includes the ancient scribes who showed off their abilities in texts they
produced in the service of others.
A play on writing adds to a play on words. In the Cuneiform exam-
ples more than one language can be played at once. In Japanese two
scripts take part in play, while in Maya seemingly endless possibilities
of substituting one sign for another display the scribes knowledge of
language and writing system.
While the above examples are curiosities created by individuals, the
representation of loanwords in writing systems requires a more uni-
versally found versatility. Most, if not all, writing systems have been
used to write words from languages for which the writing system was
not developed. More precisely, scribes of any era are forced to develop
introducing writing on writing 3
ways to write sounds or sound sequences not immediately found in

the writing system. This development is both part of and outside of
the writing system. It might make the system less efficient by adding
signs, or less systematic by allowing exceptions to a rule. The contribu-
tions in this volume reveal the different perspectives that can be used
to explore this topic. From borrowing signs, to loanwords for writing-
related instruments, the topic of loanwords and writing systems has
much future scholarship to anticipate.
Polysemy in writing systems complicates the reading and writing of
a script even if loanwords are absent. The word polysemy itself is as
ambiguous as the writing that results from it and the contributions on
this aspect of writing systems investigate the different meanings of the
word and possible alternative or additional terms such as polyvalency.
One sign may have different readings and one reading may be found
in different signs. The non-alphabetic scripts that are featured here
are in a continuous competition for the most complex possibilities
that polysemous elements of writing systems can bring. Although no
winner is proclaimed, it is a game to play with writing. It is possible to
conclude that no convincing direction in the development of writing
systems is found that disambiguates that which is written.
The application of a script to another language is the study of the
writing of loanwords in extremis. It is shown that complex scripts, in
terms of polysemy, have been applied to other languages as well as
the modern Roman script. In some examples, more than one script
have been applied to one language so that a competition of systems
can develop.
As in the work of Daniels & Bright the book concludes in a domain
in which many writing systems have been developed, but in which
movement rather than words play the leading role. The writing of
dance refers back to jeu dcriture in which individual and playful
writing takes the stage, whereas scripts for dance attempt to write that
which is playful.
Scripts
Only a selection of the participants and writing systems presented at

the Idea of Writing symposium series is represented here. Some con-
tributions are still in progress and may be published elsewhere, but
the present collection has not been made haphazardly. They include
4 alex de voogt
four main writing systems for which a tradition of research on writing

exists: Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and its related scripts,
Chinese and Japanese scripts as well as Maya hieroglyphs. Contributions
on scripts for which much fewer studies are available add examples
and exceptions.
The Americas (Maya), Asia (Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit) and Africa
(Meroitic, Fidl) are well-represented next to the ancient Cuneiform
and Egyptian systems on the border of Africa and Asia. Examples also
come from Indian Ocean (Maldive Islands) and Pacific Ocean (Caroline
Islands) countries. European scripts are mentioned as an influence
rather than a topic of their own with the exception of the European
and American writing of dance. The examples date from a wide range
of time periods illustrating the broad relevance of an otherwise narrow
perspective on writing systems that has been applied.
This spread of geography and time is also represented in the back-
ground of the individual authors: French, British, German and Dutch.
More significantly, each author is part of a separate university tradition.
This fueled the contrasts in approach and perspective. In order to do
justice to the topic presented here, this diversity has been encouraged
and has led to an exchange of views in a still unfolding field.
For each contribution the author was required to go beyond what
was already described in the volume by Daniels & Bright. Explanations
of the writing systems are only presented as far as it is necessary to
comprehend the general argument or the examples in the text. Instead,
the contributions correct, expand or bypass what is found in general
introductions to writing systems.
Styles
The study of writing systems, also known as grammatology, is not a

field in which any of the contributors hold a degree, although some
may have met and most are acquainted with the pioneering work of
Gelb. There is no unifying perspective or language that brings studies
on writing together as part of one discussion. Sinologists exchange
views with Sinologists and Egyptologists participate in Egyptology
conferences. At the most, regional connections are made, such as East
Asia or Middle East studies, where writing meets other writing. In the
study of writing systems this segregation needs to be overcome in order
to gain from a diversity of styles.
introducing writing on writing 5
Writing systems do not belong exclusively to grammatologists.

Linguists have a view and method of analysis that is frequently applied
to scripts. Philologists developed their own view, less abstract and
more connected with the interpretation of texts, that lies at their basis.
A range of other disciplines reads scripts for their own disciplinary
purposes and historians may have a view on the development of the
script itself. These views come with their own jargon, traditions and
viewpoints; in short, they all have their own style of presenting their
material, introducing their topic and addressing the reader.
This diversity reveals more than it obscures. From the contributions
found here, not only aspects of other writing systems can be gathered,
but also the different possible perspectives from which data may be
analyzed can be observed. With the study of writing systems as its own
discipline, this amalgam of backgrounds and approaches is most likely
blurred, while in its present shape it leaves all freedom to explore.
To appreciate the versatility of writing systems, this book should
be read from beginning to end, a rare necessity with edited volumes.
Meanwhile the reader is entertained with playful examples for which
serious study is the basis.
References
Borchers, D. F. Kammerzell & S. Weninger 2001. Hieroglyphen Alphabete, Schrift-

reformen. Lingua Aegyptia Studia Monographia 3. Gttingen: Seminar fr gyptologie
und Koptologie.
Daniels, P. T. & W. Bright 1996. The Worlds Writing Systems. New York & Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
DeFrancis, John 1989. Visible speech: the diverse oneness of writing systems. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press.
Diringer, David 1968 (first edition 1948). The Alphabet: A key to the history of Mankind.
Volume I and II. London: Hutchinson.
Gelb, I. J. 1952. A Study of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goody, J. 2000. The power of the written tradition. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press.
Houston, S. (ed.) 2004. The first writing: script invention as history and process. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Sanders, Seth L. (ed.) 2006. Margins of writing, origins of cultures. The University of
Chicago Oriental Institute Seminars 2. Chicago: The University of Chicago.
PLAY IN WRITING
STRANGE BYWAYS IN CUNEIFORM WRITING
Irving Finkel
One might be forgiven for thinking that cuneiform writing was already
sufficiently difficult in itself that puns, secret writing or even downright
cryptography were altogether unnecessary. Cuneiform is certainly
complex, and we can be sure that over the three thousand years of its
usage no-one possessed of administrative status ever significantly tried
to simplify it, let alone make it accessible to all. Literacy as a social
desideratum was on nobodys agenda in antiquity. In a world where
hardly anyone could read, including the kings, reading ability conferred
an undoubted power, and those who held it, with their access to age-
old wisdom and other literary traditions, would have seen no merit
whatsoever in the idea of reading for the masses.
The cuneiform script is syllabic, and chronologically and technically
wholly pre-alphabetic. The closest that the Mesopotamian mind got to
the concept of alphabetic writing is in the vowel signs. No consonant
could ever be written free of a vowel, be it before (CV, such as BA) or
after (VC, such as UB), but they did devise free and clear-standing signs
for four individual vowels, A, E, I, and U; for O they had no use.
The script can only be classed as inconvenient, at least from the
perspective of the modern student, and surely likewise for those in
antiquity who were constrained to master it with a career in mind.
Once learned, however, the script is surprisingly workable, free of
ambiguity and adaptable to other tongues. It ran and ran for more
than three thousand years, also serving other languages and cultures
beyond Sumerian and Akkadian.
As is well known, cuneiform writing proper derived at some point
about 3200 bc, if not before, from an initial stage of purely pictographic
signs. The shortcomings of pictographic writing fast became appar-
ent in day-to-day contexts where the recording of words and ideas
was crucial. The repertoire of original signs, more or less realistic and
depending on curves, was reduced to straight-edge stylised forms that
could be produced by the linear strokes of a stylus in clay. Before long
the graphic symbols had left their antecedents far behind, and developed
to a point where they were practically unrecognisable.
10 irving finkel
Meanwhile, parallel developments in usage meant the creation

of numerous CV or VC syllables to provide the background of the
mature script. In addition to such primary signs, the script for various
historical reasons grew littered with more complex phonetic elements,
as exemplified by CVC (such as NAM) signs, on the one hand, or
CVCVC (such as BULUG) on the other. Other crucial features of the
developed script were logograms, in which one sign served for a whole
word, ideograms where a sign served to convey a range of meanings,
some abstract, determinatives (such as stone, wood, or city) and
phonetic complements, to gloss ambiguities.
Mastery of the cuneiform script by apprentices was impeded by two
essential characteristics:
1. Any given phonetic sign, such as BA or LU, also had a range of

other unrelated phonetic values, in some cases many, and
2. Any given value, such as ba, could be expressed by more than one
sign, some times many, which today are given a numerical identity,
i.e., ba1, ba2, ba3 or ba4 etc.
A further point was that throughout its long history Mesopotamian

cuneiform was locally used to write both Sumerian and Akkadian,
languages which were linguistically wholly unrelated to one another.
Connections and interdependence between the two languages within
the culture meant that it was always possible for a Babylonian or
Assyrian scribe to write a word or words in Sumerian, leaving it to
the reader to supply the translation where needed. The phenomenon
occurs spasmodically in our own writing, with such usages as $
for dollar, but in cuneiform it is a regular feature that can produce
problems of its own.
The working cuneiform syllabary that a middle-grade professional
would need to command varied in number, but was usually probably
less than 100. The full range was well in excess of 600 signs (plus their
values); the recent sign list of Borger (2003) in fact itemizes 907 discrete
signs. The sum was probably not familiar to many scribes, although
there were always explanatory reference lists to hand, and there are
contexts in which learned teachers or writers took the opportunity to
use clever writings and show off, as discussed below.
From the very onset of their training scribes were immersed in the
two unrelated languages, both of which could be recorded traditionally,
and sometimes in varying and far from obvious ways. Their education
centered on the polyvalence of the signs, and the correct ways in which
strange byways in cuneiform writing 11
words were spelled. These assorted phenomena, magnified by perpetu-

ally interwoven strands of Sumerian and Akkadian words, grammar and
literature meant that all but the least adept scribes were programmed
to treat writing with flexibility, ingenuity and complexity.
Such potentially creative intellectual strands were, however, ruth-
lessly suppressed in the schools. Education, dominated by endless
curricular lists of words, exercises on them and the free application
of the stick, served to produce regimented word-crafters, qualified
to produce reliable and readable writing on a variety of levels. All
were anonymous workers in a long line of scribes whose duties were
backward-looking, and whose primary job was to pass on accurately
the given texts entrusted to them for transmission. Individual thinking,
and written proof of it, is accordingly rare in cuneiform.
Nevertheless, throughout the long history of cuneiform records,
certain unusual or singular scribal practices do emerge, and it is high-
lights from these that are briefly looked at in the present article. Some
(Group 1) exist on a formal or state level, others (Group 2) represent
the idiosyncratic work of a particular scribe at a particular time. These
latter phenomena are perhaps correctly seen as a momentary rebellious
break-out against the straight-jacket of the great tradition.
State Level
Sign substitution: UD.GAL.NUN
later
The unappetizing term UD.GAL.NUN is applied by Assyriologists to

a remarkable group of early Sumerian tablets, mostly from the site of
Ab Salbkh in southern Iraq, that were first published and identified
by the Chicago Assyriologist R. D. Biggs in 1974. They date from the
late Early Dynastic period, in or around 2600 bc, and caused a buzz
on publication since some contained Semitic personal names, and oth-
ers were evidently true literary texts, in which stray words and themes
could soon be identified. The texts were as much interesting for what
they did not contain as what they did, in that the first editor observed
that certain of the most common cuneiform signs simply did not occur.
Chief among these was the sign AN, used as well as syllabically
12 irving finkel
for an to write the word god, the word heaven, and as an unpro-
nounced determinative before the name of any deity. These related
uses between them make the AN sign a staple in any kind of literary
or religious composition in cuneiform, and its absence, once pointed
out, was extraordinary.
The explanation was forthcoming only after serious coruscations,
which demonstrated by use of parallel texts that certain Salbkh
scribes could indulge in a devilish form of sign substitution, writing
one conventional cuneiform sign in place of another. Once suspected,
the phenomenon was brilliantly confirmed by Joachim Krecher, who
realized that a small cuneiform tablet in Jena dating to the Old Akkadian
period (a good 300 years later) contained a parallel list of Semitic per-
sonal names written in UD.GAL.NUN (left) orthography and normal
orthography (right), as in the following three cases:
UB.SU.UD me-ni-an
UB.NUN.NUN me--gal
UB.udNM.NUN.gal me-den-ll-gal
It became established that the sign UD, for example, which has many
values and uses of its own, is substituted for AN (which disappears
entirely), and (a) adopts all its usages, and (b) abandons its own:
Sign AN (Labat: 13; Borger: 10)
later
Basic conventional uses: an (above, heaven, sky, An), dingir

(god)
Determinative use: GOD
is replaced by
Sign UD (Labat: 381; Borger: 596)
later
Basic conventional uses: ud (sun, day), bar6, babbar, dg, hd and

zalag (white, shining, bright etc.)
Determinative use: DAY
As it turns out, gradually, there is a whole other system that need to be
painstakingly uncovered from fragmentary source material, and much
work is yet to be done. Some forty-five UD.GAL.NUN signs have been

identified, and their values established, even if they are not explained. In
some cases an UD.GAL.NUN sign can be shown to have more values
than the substituted sign. For example:
Sign NUN (Labat 87; Borger: 143)
later
Normal values: nun, zil/sl/sil

UD.GAL.NUN values: , ll, gal, mu, nu
This is especially remarkable in that all five of the UD.GAL.NUN values
for NUN are common in the writing of Sumerian, and have nothing
in common between them, whereas NUN is not really a common sign
in conventional usage. The traditional Mesopotamian weakness for
polyvalence holds true.
How is this phenomenon to be interpreted? Significantly, in these
early tablets UD.GAL.NUN is only used to write literary texts in
Sumerian. Whether or not this style of orthography originated in a
single city, its use is now attested at three southern Mesopotamian
sites, Salbkh, Fara and Nippur. This means that the system cannot
be interpreted, as was initially proposed, as a secret code to protect the
jealous creations of one scribal center. A code as such has no place in
early third millennium bc writing when writing itself was in its early
days. Readers and writers of any kind were an extreme minority in the
population, then as later.
Can it be that the inception of cuneiform script was harmonious and
free from rivalry? Probably not. The developed complex of signs and to
some extent its literature, once established, was everywhere maintained
and transmitted in the Mesopotamian heartland. Local variants and
free inventions do not pop up all over the place. The process is thus
likely at some early stage to have been controlled by an acknowledged
authority, who saw beyond the immediate, and strove to forestall chaos.
Perhaps UD.GAL.NUN represents a true variation of what became the
central agreed system, that held out precariously before falling out of
use by dint of scribal pressure?
Be that as it may, knowledge of its usage was preserved, and far
beyond the Old Akkadian list mentioned above. Scribes writing colo-
phons to literary texts right at the end of the first millennium bc can
14 irving finkel
show scribal deviousness at its worst. One or two of the truly crypto-
graphic writings found in Seleucid-period colophons seem likely to
preserve knowledge of UD.GAL. NUN matters.
DIRI Writing
Diri writing is something particularly Mesopotamian named after the
first line of a large lexical composition DIRI = watru. Perhaps a similar
phenomenon can be documented elsewhere, but it seems in very essence
a cuneiform matter. The essential point is that two or more individual
signs can be written in sequence to produce a whole new giant sign,
where the phonetic value is unconnected with those of the individual
components, i.e., A + B (+ C . . .) = D. Note the following points:
The component signs often have nothing to do phonetically with the end
product: the signs MA + G + GR
written in sequence, spell the word idigna, the Sumerian name of the River
Tigris (Bab. idiglat, Heb. hiddekel). MA, G and GR have their own
individual range of sounds and meanings, but none is a part of idigna.
One part of the component signs can be itself phonetic:
the signs UD + KIB + NUN
spell the word buranun, the Sumerian name of the River Euphrates (Bab.
purattu, Heb. peros). The sign NUN here probably originates as a phonetic
complement to the preceding cluster.
Part, or indeed all of the components can be semantic:
the signs + KI + S + GA
in combination write the word gd, birds nest (Bab. qinnu), and can
be plausibly understood as grass-put-in-a-place.
Certain city names can be seen to be formed of Diri compounds with
semantic or phonetic elements built round variants of a sign that depicts
a central shrine or temple,
SHRINE (AB) later

or UNUG (complex AB) later
and such principles probably underpin many Diri compounds.

Examples:
UNUG.KI = Uruk
complex AB; the unadorned sign for what was probably the most impor-
tant cult centre + place determinative.
UD.AB.KI = Larsa
semantic UD, used because the same sign means Utu, the sun god who
lived at Larsa, + plain AB (later complex AB) + place determinative, used
to convey Utus shrine + place determinative.
E.AB or UNUG.KI
= Urim, Ur
the sign URI5 which stood for the moon god Nanna + plain AB (or
sometimes complex AB) + place determinative, used to convey Nannas
shrine+ place determinative.
Certain Diri writings probably preserve very ancient traditions, such
as bird totems, that might underlie the writing of city names.
Here follows a serious pair of Diri entries from the series section
Tablet IV: 6768:
en-ku-um EN.PAP.SIG7.NUN.ME.EZENxKASKAL enkummu

n-en-ku-um NIN.PAP.SIG7.NUN.ME.EZENxKASKAL ninkummu
16 irving finkel
The structure of the long compound signs are explained within the list,
as for example, with enkum:
en pa-ap <i>-gi-gu-nu-u nun me i-zi-na-ku ks-kal-la i-gub,
en (plus) pap (plus) gunified [extra wedges added] igi (i.e., SIG7) (plus)
nun (plus) me which has ezen with kaskal standing inside it
There are hundreds of Diri compounds, which the scribes laboriously
collected together for us on lexical tablets, bequeathing us at the same
time the correct readings. Most compounds are complex and elaborate,
many are rare, and perhaps the majority at present of obscure origin.
As a student one is told that Diri writings exist, and that you just
have to learn them; it is evident, however, that none of the writings
can be accidental, and eventually they should yield to analysis a much
broader understanding of how they came to be in the first place.
Number Substitution
During the first millennium bc more than one system of number-for-
sign substitution arose, for which we still have only patchy evidence.
Each individual cuneiform sign could be equated with a number or
numbers. We know of this from an important sign list, Syllabary A, in
which the backbone signs of the cuneiform syllabary were ordered for
easy learning, the same sign being repeated as often as was necessary
to represent possible varied pronunciations. Rare manuscripts that
exemplify this list exist where each sign is matched with a number in
cuneiform. Important points are:
Each repeating sign has only one number; signs that occur several
times in the parent list are usually reduced to one attestation.
The order of the numbers has absolutely nothing to do with the
well-attested order of the signs in the parent list.
A particularly choice manuscript from Babylon includes, in addi-
tion to the Syllbary A sign in contemporary script together with its
number-equivalent, a reconstruction of the original pictographic
form of the sign from the outset of Mesopotamian writing (i.e., 2500
years earlier!).
Use of such number-substitution is attested in omen literature, as
in the protases (If . . . .) of certain late astrological omens (Hunger
1969). A learned Seleucid learned commentary from Babylon exists
in which, in contrast, the apodoses (then . . . .) were written with dif-
ferent types of number substitutions (Pearce 1982: 6980).
200 <:> LUGAL : 27 : MAR : 10 : mu-tu : SI- UB : -ru-ur- GI6.GI6-ma

200 : KING : 27 : MAR : 10 : death: its SI will UB: its radiance will
darken
There are other related phenomena. The names of important gods,
for example, could be written with a personal number (e.g., 20 for the
sun god, 30 for the moon god). The motive behind number substitu-
tion, if single motive there was, was evidently not true cryptography.
Or was it?
True cryptographic writings occur in the colophons to scholarly texts,
where scribes were at liberty to show off their ingenuity under the excuse
that secrecy was involved. Rare values abound, and sometimes names
and patronymics can be written with a single sign in repetition.
Individual Level
The natural employment of rebus writings that underlay cuneiform from

the first experiments by the earliest scribes probably evolved into a kind
of intellectual wedge gene. Puns resurface at various periods ever after,
sometimes in the most unexpected contexts. Sample the following:
A Restless Book-Keeper
Thousands out of what must have been hundreds of thousands of
tablets survive from the temple administration of the so-called Ur III
period, around 2000 bc. They represent arduous book-keeping of a
charmless kind, persistently embodying the very reason why writing
had been invented more than a thousand years earlier. They are almost
always neatly dated, using official year formulae that commemorated a
significant activity or achievement. One formula in particular, which
itself must have been written out uncountable times, looks like this:
mu si-mu-ru-umki lu-lu-buki a-r 9-kam-ma-a ba-hul
Year in which Simurum and Lullubum were destroyed for the ninth time.
The year in question is the forty-second year of Shulgi, King of Ur
(20942047 bc). There is one broken envelope known with this date
formula (once brought into the British Museum by a visitor) in which
the normal name lu-lu-bu(-um) is written HI-HI-bu-um instead:
18 irving finkel
The remaining signs in the date are just as usual. There is no other
evidence to suggest that the sign HI can be pronounced lu, so the
mysterious HI.HI has to go Assyriologically-speaking into capital
letters.
The explanation is groan-inducing. The sign , HE, is matched
by another, that can have the same pronunciation: . While
the primary value of this second sign is kam or kan, the value he2 is
quite commonplace.
In Sumerian, he2- is part of the verbal system which, placed before
a verbal root, means may it be that . . ., let it . . . In Akkadian, the
corresponding grammatical particle with the same meaning is lu-.
Therefore, the scribe has punningly written he-he- instead of he2- he2-,
drawing on the underlying Akkadian equivalent lu-lu-, even though
he is writing in Sumerian!
He-he indeed. He must have rubbed his hands in glee, wriggling
temporarily out of his conventional straitjacket and producing a conun-
drum for his fellow clerks and for us at the same time.
The writing testifies to more than boredom in a record-keeper,
however. His cleverness reveals something about his own education. It
proves that he must have studied comparative Sumerian and Akkadian
grammar, where the equation he2 = l was a primary fact that had to
be learned by heart by every pupil tackling the two languages.
A Wicked Schoolboy
An interesting article by Cavigneaux (1979), makes available a collec-
tion of Late Babylonian school and other tablets found at the site of
Uruk. They include, as usual, many curricular exercises. One (no. 127,
5) has the following unappetising entry:
That on the left, the Sumerian, can be made out as gi-gigir, chariot (GI,
determinative for wood, followed by a box sign + small inset marker).
The signs on the right which should express the Akkadian equivalent are
clearly identifiable, but obscure in meaning. So we have the equation:
gi-gigir = D.IDIM
20 irving finkel
The Akkadian word for chariot is narkabtu, a feminine noun from

the root rakbu, to ride. Can D.IDIM spell this word?
The Sumerian sign D means river, which in Akkadian is nru.
The second sign, IDIM, has many Sumerian readings and Akkadian
equivalents, but one is kabtu, heavy, respected. So, D.IDIM turns out
to be a pair of punning logograms to spell nar-kabtu. Such a chariot
rides roughshod over normal scribal sensibilities. The word narmaku,
lotion, has now been found written nar(D)-ma-ka in a roughly con-
temporary medical text from Babylon, echoing this crafty idea of the
school-boy. All sorts of things were happening at that period.
Secretive Doctors
Doctors have always favoured professional secrecy. Some medical
spellings in Akkadian are likewise non-transparent, although perhaps
for different reasons.
Not long ago the pair of signs was shrouded in fog. The
two signs are clear, and obviously Sumerian, k-gur, but they do not
make a recognisable logogram. It represented an item used in fumiga-
tions by doctors, but again had to be left in capitals, K.GUR.
In Akkadian texts K is normally never read as ku, but only as one
of the Akkadian equivalents of Sumerian K. The Sumerian word GUR
is well known to equate the Akkadian verb tru, to return. Eventually
it was realised that the correct reading was k-tru, in which one part
is phonetic Sumerian, the other logographic Akkadian, together spelling
the word qutru, incense.
When the smoke had cleared another medical puzzle was solved,
the troublesome sequence
TAR.PA.
came under reconsideration. TAR has the common Akkadian phonetic
value qut, while the Sumerian PA can equate Akkadian ru, frond.
The result is a similar hybrid, to be read qut-ru, for the same word
qutru, incense.
In a recent article noted below Stefan Maul has collected certain
unorthodox or crafty writings. A few more can be mentioned here:
In a magical text (Kcher 1964), the word sissiktu, fringe, in the

stock phrase ina sissikti-ka, in your fringe, is uniquely written
si-KU-ka, because the sign KU (among many other values) can
(sometimes) stand for sktu, powder, leading neatly to si-sikti-ka.
In a Late Assyrian omen text the name of the second millennium King
Warad-Sin (who ruled at Larsa, 18341823 bc), is cryptographically
concealed in a way which fooled Assyriologists for a century, so that
they read it *Karaemmebbe, until a new study by Ann Guinan. The
signs are:
m
R[not KA]-a-e-em-me-b-be
m
indicates personal name is following (conventional).
R [the sign which is on the tablet] is the Sumerian ideogram for
slave, read wardu, or warad (slave of . . .) in Akkadian (conven-
tional).
a-e-em-me-b-be is a multi-level highly unconventional spelling,
representing the orthodox spelling a-m-babbar, a by-name of Sin
the Moon God, in which the phonetic rendering a-e-em-me of the
Sumerian divine name is followed by b-be, which, using a value
rare in Akkadian, b (TUM), reflects the Akkadian ebbu, pure, for
which BABBAR is a plausible Sumerian equivalent. For the final part
of the name, therefore, the reader has to supply the Sumerian from
the Akkadian!
A final medical example, for the connoisseur, is truly outrageous. There

is an Akkadian plant name called supirnu, or asupirnu. It is prob-
ably the same word as English saffron, and is one of a small class
of Akkadian words that occurs with and without the initial a-. There
was a Babylonian doctor-scribe once who spelled this plant name as
with two signs:
su-GETIN,
that is part phonetic Akkadian sign, part Sumerian logogram. GETIN
is a well-known old Sumerian word meaning wine. The Akkadian
equivalent with the same meaning is karnu. So someone suggested
that the word might be understood as *sukarnu, which would be a
totally new plant name, of a shape similar to supirnu.
22 irving finkel
This proves to be a deadly double-pun, and perhaps the only one

so far identified. Taking the Akkadian word karnu, it is possible to
divide it up into the elements ka and ranu (ranu exists neither as a
real phonetic sign or a real word). When one recalls that the Akkadian
equivalents to the Sumerian sign KA, head, include the word p and
also p, mouth, it becomes possible to disentangle this spelling as a
double pun:
su- GETIN su-karnu su- pi (KA)- ranu
Fun with NAB and MUN

As mentioned above, the sign AN when read dingir, Akkadian ilu,
means a god, it was also used to write the chief god An, heaven,
and, as a determinative, signalled that a following word was the name
of a god. The pantheon was ample, so this is probably the most com-
mon use of the AN sign.
In the construction of early cuneiform, signs could be doubled, or
even trebled, to produce a new sign. Three AN signs together make a
real star; Sumerian mul, Akkadian kakkabu. At first they were more
strung out, but were tidied up later:
AN AN + AN + AN
It is interesting that two AN signs were tried out together quite early
on in the third millennium bc:
NAB
This AN + AN produced a syllabic sound, nab, but, remarkably, there
was no Sumerian word nab to go with it.
It is surely impossible that a sign should be invented for a sound
for which there was no meaning? NAB occurs in early Uruk, however,
and was no late invention.
It is thus interesting that in Elamite, spoken over the border in
Iran, nap or napir was the word for god. There were certainly very
early connections between Sumer and Elam, and Elamites were early
experimenting with a complex script of their own, usually called proto-

Elamite. It looks as if there was Iranian input at the Iraqi summits in
3000 bc where new signs were being proposed, accepted or rejected.
Later we can see that there was actually an Elamite loanword, nabu,
meaning god, borrowed into Akkadian. A second pronunciation ilan
for the sign NAB found in the lists is derived from Akkadian dual form
iln, a pair of gods, a literal interpretation of the original sign.
Perhaps this has further implications. As yet, Proto-Elamite is not
understood, and the underlying language is unidentified, although this
new evidence suggests that it is a form of later Elamite. Early Sumerian
and proto-Elamite numerical systems are, however, directly related.
This makes it intrinsically probable that there is a direct relationship
between the early Mesopotamian and Iranian sign systems, even though
they look as if they are completely unrelated. Perhaps they just took the
Mesopotamian signs and made up a completely fresh set of drawings
to stand for them.
This sign NAB has another twist. In Sumerian, grammar is expressed
by verbal chains in which the root VERB is preceded by preformatives,
prefixes and infixes. One sequence that analyses as *mu-na-b-VERB,
he did VERB for him, is very commonly found.
In usual orthography it is spelled as:
mu-na-ab-VERB.
Very rarely indeed, once or twice in about 2300 bc, the spelling is:
mu-nab-VERB
Similarly, and equally seldom at the same period, the Sumerian structure
*mu.n.VERB, he did VERB, can be found written with the similar
CVC sign MUN, as:
mun-VERB (instead of the inevitable mu-un-VERB)
This process also must reflect the deliberate tendency on the part of
certain influential scribes to control and rationalise the script. It means
that NAB and MUN were at that point being used to write abstract
grammar. What is interesting is that the infixed elements b or n
are there in the Sumerian language and have been identified by modern
grammarians, but they were always un-writeable by Sumerians without
an alphabet. Normally the elements have to blend into fuller spellings,
but the rare outbreak writings nab and mun show that there was an
understanding of the individual particles that later evolved into true
grammatical thinking.
24 irving finkel
References and Further Reading
Biggs, R. D. 1974. Inscriptions from Tell Ab Salbkh. Oriental Institute Publications

99. University of Chicago Press.
Black, J. A. 1984. Sumerian Grammar in Babylonian Theory [Second Edition]. Studia
Pohl. Vol. 12. Pontifical Institute, Rome.
Borger, R. 2003. Mesopotamisches Zeichenlexikon. Alter Orient und Altes Testament
vol. 305. Ugarit-Verlag, Mnster.
Civil, M. 2004. The series DIRI = (w)atru, Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon Vol. 15.
Pontifical Institute, Rome.
Damerow P. & R. K. Englund 1989. The Proto-Elamite texts from Tepe-Yahya. American
School of Prehistoric Research Bulletin. Vol. 39. Cambridge, MA.
Daniels P. T. & W. Bright (eds.) 1996. The Worlds Writing Systems. Oxford University
Press.
Edzard, D. O. 1980. Keilschrift. Reallexikon der Assyriologie, Vol. 5, 7/8: 544568.
Englund, R. K. 1998. Texts from the Late Uruk Period. In P. Attinger and M. Wfler
(eds.), Mesopotamien. Spturuk-Zeit und Frhdynasticshe Zeit, Orbis Biblibcus et
Orientalis 160/1.
Glassner, J.-J. 2003. The Invention of Cuneiform. Writing in Sumer. [Translated from
the French by Z. Bahrani and M. van de Mieroop] The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Gong, Y. 1993. Studien zur Bildung und Entwicklung der Keilschrift. Antiquitates vol.
7. Verlag Dr. Kovac.
Green M. W. & H. J. Nissen, with P. Damerow and R. K. Englund 1987. Zeichenliste
der Archaischen Texte aus Uruk. Archaische Texte aus Uruk. Vol. 2. Gebr. Mann,
Berlin.
Guinan, A. K. 2002. A Severed Head Laughed: Stories of Divinatory Interpretation. In
T. Abusch and A. K. Guinan (eds.), Magic and Divination in the Ancient World, pp.
740. Ancient Magic and Divination II. Brill: Leiden.
Hunger, H. 1968. Babylonische und assyrische Kolophone. Alter Orient und Altes
Testament. Vol. 2. Butzon & Bercker, Kevelaer
. 1969. Kryptographische Astrologische Omina, lin mithurti. Alter Orient und
Altes Testament. Vol. 1. Neukirchen.
Krebernik, M. 1998. Die Text aus Fra und Tell Abu Salbh. In P. Attinger and
M. Wfler (eds.), Mesopotamien. Spturuk-Zeit und Frhdynasticshe Zeit, Orbis
Biblibcus et Orientalis 160/1. Part 2:237427.
Krecher, J. 1978. Sumerische Literatur der Fara-Zeit; Die UD.GAL.NUN Texte (1).
Bibliotheca Orientalis 35:155160.
Labat, R. 1976. Manuel dpigraphie Akkadienne. Nouvelle Edition. Paul Geuthner,
Paris.
Lambert, W. G. 1976. Review of R. D. Biggs, Inscriptions from Tell Ab Salbkh.
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 39:428432.
. 1981. Studies in UD.GAL.NUN. Oriens Antiquus 20:8197, with Studies in
UD.GAL.NUN: ADDENDUM, Oriens Antiquus 20:305.
Lieberman, S. J. 1987. A Mesopotamian Background for the So-Called Aggadic
Measures of Biblical Hermeneutics? Hebrew Union College Annual 58:157225.
Matthews, R. J. 1993. Cities, Seals and Writing: Archaic Seal Impressions from Jemdet
Nasr and Ur. Materialen zu den Frhen Schriftzeugnissen der Vorderen Orients.
Vol. 2. Berlin.
Maul, S. M. 1999. Das Wort im Worte, Orthographie und Etymologie als hermeneutische
Verfahren babylonischer Gelehrter. In G. W. Most, Commentaries Kommentare,
Aporemata. Kritische Studien zur Philogiegeschichte. Vol. 4. Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, Gttingen.
Nissen, H. J. & P. Damerow & R. K. Englund 1993. Archaic Bookkeeping. Early Writing
and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East. University
of Chicago.
Oelsner, J. 1995. Number Syllabaries, das Keilschriftsyllabar A mit Zahlwerten. In
M. Weippert & S. Timm (eds.), Festgabe Donner, pp. 154163. Wiesbaden.
Pearce, L. E. 1982. Cuneiform Cryptography: Numerical Substitutions for Syllabic and
Logographic Signs. PhD Thesis: Yale University.
. 1983. Cuneiform Number-Syllabaries. Iraq 45:136137.
Walker, C. B. F. 1987. Reading the Past. Cuneiform. British Museum Publications.
SCRIPTS AND SHAPES: THE INTERPLAY OF CHINESE
CHARACTERS AND JAPANESE SYLLABARIES IN
EARLY MODERN JAPAN1
Margarita Winkel
Adoption and Adaptation of Chinese Writing in Japan
The Japanese writing system is based on Chinese characters. The

semantic and phonetic qualities of Chinese characters resulted in two
methods of adopting the Chinese system of writing. Chinese characters
(called kanji in Japanese) were used either for their meaning or for their
phonetic value. The Japanese, besides using kanji, also developed syllabic
scripts, called kana. Kana are abbreviated forms of Chinese characters
that represent specific sounds. There are two forms of kana; hiragana
and katakana. The hiragana syllabary is a cursive form of the original
character, while katakana is a part of the character. The borrowing of
Chinese characters for writing Japanese is thought to have started as
early as the third century ce. The development of kana was probably
some centuries later.2
Modern Japanese writing uses a combination of kanji and kana,
resulting in a style called kanjikana-majiribun (mixed kana/kanji).
Chinese characters are now used almost exclusively for their meaning
and may have alternative ways of pronunciation. Hiragana are mainly
used to indicate verbal endings and grammatical markers. Katakana is
generally used to write non-Chinese loan words, onomatopoeic words
or words from dialects, foreign names, and for emphasis. There were
originally 48 signs representing Japanese syllables. These were derived
from various Chinese characters. At the beginning of the twentieth
century the government standardized the kana. The following list (ill. 1)
shows 46 kana (two are now obsolete) in their modern, standard form,
together with the characters from which they originated. From this list
1
I am very grateful to Jeroen Wiedenhof, who has dissected the illustrations used
in this article in a way I could not have done by myself. I also like to thank the editor
and anonymous readers for their helpful comments.
2
For general information on Japanese scripts and writing, see ONeill, P. G. &
S. Yanada (1987) An Introduction to Written Japanese, Seeley (1991) A History of
Writing in Japan.
28 margarita winkel
Illustration 1: Hiragana, katakana and their original characters.
it is clear that the majority of modern hiragana and katakana have been
derived from the same characters.
Since hiragana is a cursive form of the original character and kata-
kana employs a part of the original, the results are obviously different.
The following table (ill. 2) shows how the hiragana and katakana forms
of the first ten sounds of the syllable system relate to the character they
were derived from.3
3
For a full overview of the 48 kana, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hiragana_
origin.svg and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Katakana_origine.svg. The examples
in illustration 2 are adopted from those charts.
scripts and shapes 29
Illustration 2: Examples of the origins of hiragana and katakana signs.

30 margarita winkel
Scripts and Writing in Early Modern Japan
Before the official standardization of katakana and hiragana at the

beginning of the twentieth century, a specific syllable in Japanese
could be represented by various Chinese ideographs or their cursive
kana forms. The cursive forms of non-standard characters that were
formerly used to represent syllabic sounds are now called hentaigana,
kana derived from unusual (not standard) characters. The emergence of
kana is usually associated with the Manysh, an eighth-century poetry
anthology which used Chinese characters for their phonetic value, that
is, to represent Japanese syllables. As a way to write texts, Manygana
was too cumbersome, but the use of Manygana remained popular, as
a form of calligraphic decoration, for example, as puns, or as playful
elements in a picture. Premodern Japan knew many more forms of
writing, each used in a specific context. The writing styles varied from a
Japanese way of writing classical Chinese (kanbun), used in relation to
Confucian or Buddhist for official texts, to special polite ways of writing
letters (srbun) that combined kana, characters and typical epistolary
constructions derived from Chinese, to popular writing styles. Kanbun
(Chinese used in a Japanese context) became the standard language for
scholarly, governmental, and religious writing. Early modern popular
fiction on the other hand was based on a predominant use of kana and
a reproduction of vernacular language. The degree of Chineseness to
Japaneseness of these texts, however, could vary considerably. Kanbun
texts have Chinese characters organized according to Chinese syntax
that is very different from Japanese syntax for which sometimes
reading aids (kundoku) were employed to help readers read the text
as if it were Japanese.4
Especially in Early Modern Japan, with its highly developed urban
popular culture, sophisticated woodblock printing techniques facilitated
mass communication. Here I will focus specifically on the interplay
between mass-produced books and prints and the writing system. The
following examples illustrate some of the ways in which the new urban
population, dominated by merchants and artisans who were economi-
cally important but politically marginal, appropriated writing and script
4
As Christopher Seeley points out, it is not always possible to know whether a
kanbun text was meant to be read as Chinese or as Japanese. Seeley (1991: 25).
in the development of a new urban life-style in which wit and humour

played an important role.
Kanji and Kana in Woodblock Printing
Japans Early Modern Period (16001868), is also known as the Edo or

Tokugawa period, after the name of the capital Edo (now Tokyo) or
the name of the family that then ruled the country as military leaders
(shgun), the Tokugawa family. It was a period of prolonged peace
and a bustling urban culture developed. Improvements in woodblock
techniques facilitated mass-printing. An important characteristic of
the specific form of woodblock printing that developed in Japan in
this period was that writing signs were not type-set, but woodblocks
of entire pages directly reproduced manuscript form. Books, leaflets,
games, etc. were now produced for a large audience. Writers and artists
explored the wide range of shapes of the various scripts and made good
use of the possibilities of the interplay between Chinese characters and
Japanese syllables. Kanji and kana were not only vehicles for transmit-
ting information through text, but were also used for decoration, for
games, amusement, satire, and (word)play. The world of commercial
woodblock printing that developed reflected a highly sophisticated
literary and pictorial culture. Printed matter varied from simple pam-
phlets containing promotional announcements, guide-books, manuals
and fiction written in kana to scholarly books in Chinese, as well as
elaborately designed full-color woodblock prints. Many of those com-
bined script and pictures, sometimes playfully blurring the boundaries
between the two. An early example are moji-e, literally script-pictures.
Moji-e are illustrations made on the basis of the forms of kana or
characters that represent a word or a sentence, referring to the object
or individual depicted. This was a popular form of word-play. The
following examples are from a booklet called Moji-e zukushi (1685),
a series of script-pictures.5 They illustrate the variety of script forms
that could be used to represent a sound or a meaning in Japanese. The
5
Little is known about this publication or about its author Enkatei Yoshikuri. See
Inagaki (1988: 9899). Also Inagaki (2006: 241). The booklet is rare and Inagakis
illustrations are from an 1836 reprint (courtesy M. Oikawa-Simon). An original edi-
tion of Moji-e zukushi is in the possession of the Tokyo Municipal Library. For more
information on moji-e and other forms of playful writing in Early Modern Japan, see
Simon (1998) and Inagaki (2006).
32 margarita winkel
Illustration 3: Manjya, script-picture (moji-e) of a manj roadside stall.
kanji and kana used to construct the picture appear again in the upper
part of the illustration. Besides the manj (bean-jam bun) seller and
the itinerant bookseller lending and selling books, depicted below
(ill. 5), the book contains similar images of various artisans, roadside
shops or pedlars, and entertainers. It is an early example of a publication
that is firmly rooted in a new urban setting dominated by merchants
and artisans.
Above is a depiction of a Manjya, a seller of manj, a traditional
Japanese sweet that consists of a steamed flour-dough bun filled with
bean-jam. The word manjya appears on top as well as as part of the
design and is a combination of kana and kanji. Ma+n+chi+u+ya. The
kana used here is chi with nigori, reading aids in the form of two
commas, indicating the voicing of the original sound; hence chi in a
voiced form becomes ji. Ji+u is read here as the combined sound j.
These sounds are all represented by kana. The final ya, however, is the
character , a suffix used for both a shop/business or its owner. Below
the picture, the signs in the illustration are represented by themselves,
together with their readings: (a) represents the individual signs as they
appear in the picture, (b) shows these signs as they normally appear in
text; the way they appear both on the picture and in the upper part of
Illustration 4: Left, text on the narrow side of the table lantern depicted in
illustration 3.
the print, (c) is a modern printed form of the kanji or kana sign, and
column (d) the alphabetic transcription of the sound.
The ma on top and worked into the illustration differs from the ma
on the side of the lantern that stands on top of the table (ill. 4, left).
Two different characters are used in this picture to represent the same
syllable, a legacy from manygana. The ma on the lantern (a) is
(b). The modern Sino-Japanese reading is man. The ma (c) that is part
of the composition of the figure, and in the upper part of the illustra-
tion, is derived from (d) matsu in modern Sino-Japanese. The kana
derived from matsu , is the current standard form. Hence, the kana
that is a cursive form of man , represented in (a), is now considered
a hentaigana, a form that is no longer in use. In Edo Japan, however,
this was an alternative, and commonly used, way to indicate ma.
In the next moji-e (ill. 5), the text that is part of the design of the
figure of the book pedlar is also represented in the upper part of the
picture. Column (a) represents the individual signs as they appear in
the picture. Column (b) shows these signs as they normally appear
in text; the way they appear on top of the text as well. Column (c) is
a modern printed form of the kanji or kana sign and column (d) the
alphabetic transcription. Here shi is voiced. The voicing is indicated
by the two small commas (nigori) at the upper right of the character
and is pronounced ji. The text here reads fu+ji+no+maru+ya, or fuji-
nomaruya. This is not a profession, but a business-name: Fujinomaru.
The alternative ways of writing that the Japanese writing system offers
are used here to include the character for maru. Using the complete
character was an option that obviously better suited the designer of the
print than to use kana for ma and ru. On the other hand, the sound
ya here is not represented by the character for , which is the usual
ending of the name of a business as in the previous example, but by a
kana ya that also happens to be the modern standard form, and
originates from the character .
34 margarita winkel
Illustration 5: Fujinomaruya, moji-e of a book pedlar.
Calendar Prints
Calendar prints, egoyomi, were privately issued and distributed as New

Year gifts, for example, by poetry clubs, or by shops. These privately
commissioned egoyomi concealed basic calendric information, such as
long and short months and the corresponding zodiacal signs, as part
of their design.
The Japanese lunar-solar calendar was based on a sixty year cycle
that corresponded with the Chinese system of twelve animal signs of
the zodiac and ten celestial stems, and was adopted in Japan in 604
ce. It remained in use until 1783 when Japan switched to the Gregorian
calendar. Based on a system normally of twelve lunar months in a year
and sometimes an intercalary thirteenth month, the year in a lunar-solar
calendar was divided into long (thirty days) and short (twenty-nine
days) months. The order of long and short months for the next year,
and the occurrence of an eventual intercalary month, was officially
established for each year by a government office. Only publishers with
Illustration 6: Calendar print with the short months of Tenmei 6 (1786).

Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
an official licence were allowed to produce and distribute calendars.

The calendar print above was made for the year that corresponds with
1786 ce. The names of the short months for that year, the 1st, 3rd, 5th,
6th, 8th and 11th month () are worked
into the design of the upper garment. Hobby-horse riding was a typical
New Year pastime. Its appearance here also indicates the zodiacal sign
for that year: the Year of the Horse.6
6
The original print is part of the collection Goslings, now in possession of the
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. See: http://www.collection-goslings.nl/afbeeldingen/
sur151200/sur151175/s164.html. For more information on surimono and ukiyo-e
see The Hotei Encyclopedia of Japanese Woodblock Prints (2005) esp. pp. 4774 and
221224. Also, for example, Carpenter Reading Surimono (2008) and Forrer Egoyomi
and Surimono (1979).
36 margarita winkel
Popular Fiction
Brothels and theatres were important aspects of the demi-monde of

early modern Japan. A popular type of book especially in vogue in
the last decades of the eighteenth century was the so-called kibyshi
(yellow-cover booklets). The relationship between image and text was
critical. The one could not be read and understood without the other.
Kibyshi would satirize aspects of modern life. A particularly popular
theme was the lure of the brothel district, and how this could ruin the
wealth and reputation of rich, long-standing and important merchant
families. One of the most famous authors of popular books was Sant
Kyden (17611816), who was also a print-designer. Kyden was very
well-known for his creative way of using illustrations, script and writing.
His Shingaku hayasomegusa, (the title means something
like Learning of the Mind (or Heart) in Fast Dyes) was published in
1790. The two pages illustrated here show on the left (ill. 7) a good
soul (zendama) identified by the character zen (goodness, virtue)
in the circle of his face, tied to the character wazawai (trouble,
problems) hanging in the air. The other picture (ill. 8) shows three
bad souls (akudama) identified by the character (badness, vice) in
the rounds of their faces, who are tugging and pulling the protagonist
of the story, the merchant Ritar, towards the licensed brothel quarter
Yoshiwara in Edo. Ritar is identified by the character ri , the first
character of his name, on his kimono. The reference to good and bad
souls in this story and the title of the book refers in a satirical way to the
then popular school of Mind (or Heart) Learning (shingaku), a moral
teaching that was aimed at the urban merchant and other commoners,
which stresses moral practices and virtues like frugality and diligence
to ward off evil tendencies in human nature.
The text surrounding the images contains both a general descrip-
tion of events and direct rendering of text spoken by the protagonists.
Popular books in Edo Japan, in particular this form of yellow-cover
booklets, were written almost exclusively in kana.7 Yet the simplicity
is deceiving. For a good understanding of the various levels of play
and satire in texts and illustrations, an up-to-date awareness of cur-
7
An English translation of Shingaku hayasomegusa as Fast-Dyeing Mind Study,
appears in Early Modern Japanese Literature (2002), Shirane (ed.): 711729.
scripts and shapes
37
Illustrations 7 and 8: The pages from Shingaku hayasomegusa (1790).

38 margarita winkel
Illustration 9: Tski suigoden (1789) a Chinese introduction with

Japanese reading marks.
rent events as well as knowledge of Chinese and Japanese classics in

literature and history was necessary.
Sometimes Chinese characters and Chinese writing are used very
consciously as a parody, as is the case in Tski suigoden (1789), again
by Sant Kyden. In Tski suigoden the author likens the exploits of
famous Japanese playboys who were regular Yoshiwara brothel patrons
to the heroes of the famous Chinese novel Shuihu zhuan (Japanese
Suikoden, English Water Margin). Written in the fourteenth century
and set in the Northern Song Dynasty (9601125 ce), the story of the
108 legendary outlaws of Mount Liang was retold in various forms
in Japan, and, as Suikoden, became particularly popular in the late
Tokugawa period.8
Above (ill. 9) is Kydens mock Chinese, kanbun introduction.
Kyden uses various kanbun reading aids that change the Chinese
syntax to a Japanese one. The kaeriten (resembling the katakana re )
is a sign indicating that the preceding and succeeding characters should
8
The first English translation of Shuihu zhuan appeared in 1933 as All men are
brothers (Peral S. Buck). In 1963, J. H. Jackson made a new translation called Water
Margin. Kydens Suigoden is available online as part of the database of the Waseda
library: http://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/he13/he13_02132/he13_02132_0057/
he13_02132_0057.html. On the Suikoden in Japan, see Klompmakers (1998) Of Brigands
and Bravery.
be reversed in reading. Numerals used as reading signs ( (1),

(2), etc.) indicate the order in which parts of the sentence should be
read. Thin vertical lines between characters indicate that the characters
above and below the line should be read together in direct succession.
Contrasting the feel of an elegant, learned Chinese text, however, is
the reading gloss ( furigana or rubi), to the right. This indicates the
Japanese pronunciation and adds other information like particles that
are not represented by Chinese characters. Kyden repeats sentences
with slight variations, an element of elegance in the composition of
kanbun texts. He juxtaposes, for example, many quasi-homonyms, like
ggen (allegory, fable) vs. mgen (reckless remarks, thoughtless words),
and suikoden (Water Margin) vs. suigoden (Words of Taste). According
to the furigana, the text, in Japanese, reads:
mukashi S no Rysanpaku ni amata no gishi ari.
ima hori no sanbashi ni amata no yshi ari.
kare wa ten ni kawatte michi o okonai.
kore wa gu ni kaette iki o okonau.
sono gketsu wa hyakuhachinin.
Kono daits wa jhachinin.
sore mo ggen kore mo mgen.
koko ni oite, kano suikoden ni hishite, suigoden to daisu to iu.
Rysanpaku, Mount Liang, mentioned in the first sentence, is the
famous stronghold of the 108 heroes of the Chinese vernacular novel
Shuihu zhuan. sanbashi was the name of the pier along a moat called
Sanyabori, from where boats departed to the Yoshiwara brothel district.
Also, the rest of the text is a juxtaposition of them and there in past
times: the 108 heroes of the Suikoden in Song China, and us and here
in our modern times: the 18 Grand Connoisseurs of Edos pleasures,
rich merchant-playboys who could afford to display and enjoy good
taste and large expenses in the cities brothels and theatres. Their life
and exploits are likened to the life and exploits of the Chinese Mount
Liang gang:
Long ago, at the time of the Song, on Mount Liang, there were many
chivalrous men,
Nowadays, at the big pier along the moat, there are many playboys,
There, they change rules pursuing the right way,
Here, they lose their good sense striving for the right spirit and wit,
Those were 108 grand heroes;
these are 18 grand connoisseurs,
There, a parable; here, reckless remarks;
set off against their Water Margin, this (book) is entitled Words of Taste.
40 margarita winkel
Illustration 10: An ukiyo-e print of a teahouse.
The humor lies in the discrepancy between a kanbun text that was
associated with scholarship and officials, and the context of a booklet
about brothel visitors. On the one hand, using Chinese is in line with
the Chinese origin of the original story of the heroes, while on the other
hand the Japanese readings suggested by the author in the gloss point
to a very different Japanese appropriation of the story.9
Ukiyo-e: Print of a Teahouse
The calendar prints discussed earlier were often privately published

prints of various sizes and subjects. These were different from the
commercially produced prints depicting famous courtesans, actors, or
landscapes that were for sale in shops and were standardized in subjects
and print sizes. The last example (ill. 10) is an ukiyo-e print that, like
many popular novels, takes the floating world, that is, the transient
pleasures of urban life, as its subject. This print is an example of how
9
A perceptive and extensive treatment of the Japanese writing system and the use
of furigana or rubi in literature is Ariga (1989).
script could be used for its meaning as well as its beauty in the context
of daily life.
Above is a woodblock print by Ippitsusai Bunch (fl. c.17551790)
depicting two women at a tea house (chaya). The script on the curtain
and lantern is shown in detail below. From right to left: (a) the two
characters on the curtain read yama+moto, (b) shows these characters
in a printed form of yama and moto. These same characters yama
and moto reappear in a more cursive form on the right side of the
lantern (c). The four characters on the other visible side of the lantern
(d) also read yamamoto in the form of ya+ma+mo+to. Here the com-
plete characters are used to represent syllables in manygana style. The
meaning of the characters is irrelevant. Their use here has an aesthetic
and a practical purpose to decorate the lantern as much as to indicate
the name of the teahouse: Yamamoto. The characters they represent
are given in printed form to the left of the lantern (e).
The title in the cartouche reads: Azuma hakkei niken chaya no bosetsu
(Eight Views of the Eastern Capital: Evening Snow at a two-ken tea-
house). Azuma (East) refers to the shogunal capital Edo, Eastern is
used here in contradistinction to the (Western) Imperial capital Kyoto.
The eight views suggests that this print was originally designed as one
print in a series of eight. This is also implied by the use of bosetsu,
Evening Snow. Again, this is a direct reference to a Chinese example:
the traditional Chinese Eight Views on the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers.
The text in the cartouche consists of characters with furigana as a read-
ing aid. The upper right part of the picture here contains an enlarged
version followed by the printed forms of both the characters and the
furigana that indicate how the title should be pronounced. The furigana
does not represent all character readings; apparently the print makers
did not considered some too obvious to add this type of reading aid.
On the other hand the furigana does give the grammatical article no
that is not included in the characters. Furigana use is not always con-
sistent and may also be dictated by available space in the cartouche,
readability or aesthetic requirements.
Conclusion
The wide range of possibilities in writing Japanese, combined with a

lively popular culture and a blooming printing business that catered
to a large public, has produced a creative interplay between prints and
forms of writing in early modern Japan. At that time a writing system
42 margarita winkel
like manygana was long obsolete; the use of manygana did not end
with the dissemination of kana as the standard common form of writ-
ing. However, while Manygana became obsolete not long after its first
use in the Manysh, the influence of this writing system remained
important in the popular world of the big cities, as a sign of beauty, cul-
ture, and education. It lived on as part of the design of various objects;
as an aesthetic device as well as to indicate sound. Thus, although the
role and status of various script forms in Japan has changed over time,
older or more formal ways of writing proved resilient as they were
employed in new contexts. Merchants and artisans, placed in the lower
levels of the feudal classification system, appropriated earlier forms of
writing and script in the development of a new urban life-style in which
they played a dominant role. Their use of older, high-status, elegant
categories and of Chinese examples was at the same time a reference
to tradition and sophistication, a form of play, and a way to display
wit, distinction, and education. Although kana became the dominant
mode of writing in the popular world of Tokugawa Japan, and appears
deceivingly simple, understanding the layers of satire in this new ludic
and aesthetic context requires a good insight into current events and
sensibilities. How script, traditionally a very status-sensitive device,
played a role in uprooting traditional elite values and in establishing
a new cosmopolitan life-style that centered on new urban classes, is a
topic that deserves still more attention in the future.
References
Ariga, Chieko. 1989. The Playful Gloss: Rubi in Japanese Literature. In: Monumenta
Nipponica 44: 309335.
Carpenter, John T. (ed.) 2008. Reading Surimono: the interplay of text and image in
Japanese prints, Leiden.
Forrer, Matthi. 1979. Egoyomi and Surimono. Amsterdam.
Inagaki, Shinichi. 2006. Les jeux dcriture lpoque dEdo. In: Du pinceau la typo-
graphie: regards japonais sur lcriture et le livre. Paris: 231259.
. 1988. Moji-e. In: Edo no asobi-e. Tokyo: 96115.
Klompmakers, Inge. 1998. Of Brigands and Bravery: Kuniyoshis Heroes of the Suikoden.
Amsterdam.
Newland, Amy Reigle (gen. ed.) 2005. The Hotei Encyclopedia of Japanese Woodblock
Prints. Leiden.
ONeill, P. G., & S. Yanada. 1987. An Introduction to Written Japanese. rev. ed. London.
Seeley, Christopher. 1991. A History of Writing in Japan. Leiden. Shirane, Haruo (ed.).
2002. Early Modern Japanese Literature. An Anthology 16001900. New York.
Simon, Marianne. 1998. Un cas particulier destampes ludiques: les images en criture
de lpoque dEdo. In: Extrme-Orient Extrme-Occident n 20 (Du divertissement
dans la Chine et le Japon anciens): 111133.
SUBSTITUTION, SUBSTITUTION, SUBSTITUTION:
THE MANY FACES OF MAYA WRITING
Erik Boot
Introduction
The Maya writing system originated and evolved in an area currently

covered by south-eastern Mexico (states of Tabasco, Chiapas, Campeche,
Yucatan, and Quintana Roo), Belize, Guatemala, and the western parts
of Honduras and El Salvador. At present, the origins of the writing sys-
tem can be traced back to circa the second century bce (Late Preclassic
period). The sign inventory of the writing system as a whole evolved
progressively in time.1 During the Classic period (ca. 250900 ce),
some 650 to 700 different signs can be identified. Some signs were used
frequently, while others are rare or even unique. The Maya writing
system was in use up to and after the conquest by the Spaniards in the
sixteenth century. The latest texts drawn up in the Maya writing system
may date from the seventeenth century and probably were produced in
the years just prior to the final conquest of the island capital Nohpeten
(now the town of Flores) of the Itza Maya kingdom in 1697 ce.
In Mayan languages of the recent past and today, the verb with the
meaning to write is tzib, a verb which also means to paint (Kaufman
2003: 5657; compare to Dienhart 1989: 737738). Painted texts on
Classic Maya ceramics from the central Maya area frequently included
a reference to tzib write, paint. Individual artists even signed their
work (Stuart 1987: 18). Incised and carved texts from northern Yucatan
contain references to writing through the word wojol character, letter;
sign (Stuart 1990: 220, Figure 7df ).2 According to a Spanish colonial
1
For an in-depth study on the development of Maya writing, see Grube (1990). One
of the earliest Maya texts may be incised on a small stela now in the collection of the
Museum of Ethnology in Antwerp (Boot 1999a, 2006). This small stela, made of greyish
sandstone, is actually very close in both style and contents to the visual narrative of
La Sufricaya Stela 1 (Estrada-Belli 2002: Figure 39). For a study on the earliest Maya
texts, specifically on portable objects, see Mora-Marn (2001).
2
See Barrera Vsquez et al. (1980: 925), entry woh. In Yucatec Maya, woh is also
the root of a verb with the meaning to paint.
44 erik boot
source from the seventeenth century the letters or characters were

invented by the god named Itzamnah (Cogolludo 1971 [1688]: Vol. 1,
254 [Book 4, Chapter 8]).3 A reference to a god named Itzamnah at the
site of Xcalumkin (Campeche, Mexico) provides him with the titles aj
kin priest and aj tzib painter/scribe (Boot 1996: 144).
The decipherment of Maya writing started more or less with the dis-
covery, description, and publication of important texts in the nineteenth
century. Maya texts, for instance, were found in the city of Palenque,
but also in an indigenous screenfold book that was guarded in the
Royal Library, Dresden. Using only (sometimes very poor) drawings
of a small number of then known inscriptions and a small section of a
single screenfold book, it was Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Smaltz
who in 1832 was able to determine that the inscriptions at Palenque
and the writing in the screenfold book represented the same writing
system. Rafinesque also identified the correct values of Maya bar-and-
dot numerals (dots for units of one, bars for units of five), and
he was the first to suggest that the language represented in the script
was the one still spoken by the living Maya (Coe 1992: 91, G. Stuart
1989: 16). At present there are some five to six million speakers of
Mayan languages, of which there are thirty-one or thirty-two variants.
Some languages have several hundreds of thousand of speakers (e.g.,
Yucatec Maya), others only a handful (e.g., Itza Maya). Foremost among
the later studies was the 1880 publication by Ernest Frstemann, an
accurate chromophotographic facsimile of the above mentioned Maya
screenfold book, which is now known as the Codex Dresden. In later
studies Frstemann identified the mechanism of the Maya base twenty
or vigesimal numerical place notational system as well as the Maya
calendar (Coe 1992: 108).4
For decades scholars concentrated their efforts on the calendrical
portion of the surviving inscriptions. The attempts by scholars like Abb
Charles tienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, Cyrus Thomas, and Benjamin
3
In this passage Itzamnah, who invented the letters or characters, is identified as
the son of the most important god among the Yucatec Maya (and who had the same
name). In the Classic period, Itzamnah was the most important god and he is found
as supervisor of a mythical enthronization in Palenque (Temple XIX).
4
Of special interest are Frstemann 1880, 1886, 18871889, and 1904. The Maya
calendar is correlated with the Christian calendar through a correlation constant of
584,285 (Lounsbury 1982). Although many other correlations have been proposed
(Edmonson 1988), this particular constant is generally accepted and applied among
Mayanists.
the many faces of maya writing 45
Whorf at the decipherment of the remaining portion of the inscriptions

(and the screenfold books) were met with great scepticism and were
not generally accepted (Coe 1992: 106, 116122, 135139). It was in
the 1950s that a young Russian scholar named Yuriy Knorozov found
an entry into the actual decipherment of the Maya writing system (Coe
1992: 145152). Basic to his decipherment was an illustration from
an important colonial Spanish manuscript written by Fray Diego de
Landa.5 This manuscript was discovered in the nineteenth century and
published for the first time in 1864 by Brasseur de Bourbourg. In this
colonial manuscript, Landa illustrated an alphabet of Maya signs
(Figure 1). Based on this alphabet and three explanatory examples
from the same manuscript (Figure 2) and his intimate knowledge of
other writing systems, Knorozov concluded that the alphabet actu-
ally represented a series of (mostly) syllabic signs, signs that did not
represent a single letter and sound (as suggested by for instance
Brasseur and Thomas), but a combination of sounds. The alphabet
was thus a partial syllabic sign inventory. In his research he ultimately
identified Maya writing as a logosyllabic system, a system which employs
discrete graphs as either logographic signs (representing morphemes,
sometimes complete words) and/or syllabic signs (part of morphemes).
As Mayan languages possess a specific patterning of sounds to shape
words (CVC and CVCVC), logographic signs can have the shape CVC
(Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) or CVCVC, while syllabic signs are of
the shape CV (Consonant-Vowel).6 Working mainly with examples
from three screenfold books,7 Knorozov further determined that the
basic word order of a Maya text was verb-object-subject (as also was
suggested by Whorf ).
5
The title page of the Landa manuscript carries the date 1566, but it is actually a
summarized copy made by various hands in the late seventeenth century (Brasseur de
Bourbourg 1864), a part possibly even copied in the early eighteenth century (Restall
& Chuchiak IV 2002).
6
At present I consider all syllabic signs to be of the shape CV, thus including those
signs that other epigraphers identify as V or representing a single vowel (a, e, i, o, u).
Thus: a, e, i, o, u. This I base on the frequent use of these vowel signs to stress
or spell the final // or glottal stop of a word (e.g., u-KABA-a > ukaba, TE-e >
te, TZI-i > tzi, mo-o-o > moo, tu-u > tu). Compare Bricker (2004: 10471049).
Also see note 13.
7
At the time Knorozov did his research there were three Maya screenfold books
available, the Codex Dresden, the Codex Madrid, and the Codex Paris. The fourth
screenfold book is the Codex Grolier (Coe 1973); this book does not contain hiero-
glyphic texts.
46 erik boot
Figure 1. The Landa alphabet (Landa 1566: fol. 45r).
Knorozovs decipherment and research method were tested in subse-

quent research by both American and European scholars. Although,
at first, there was some strong opposition, presented by the British
scholar J. Eric S. Thompson (Coe 1992: 123166), in the years after his
initial publication, Knorozovs method has been proven to be correct.
Decipherment of Maya writing has since progressed, with basic and still
referenced contributions written in the 1960s and 1970s, and a large
number of contributions on discrete decipherments of individual signs
written in the 1980s and 1990s (Coe 1992: 167274).8
At present, students of Maya writing identify it as a logosyllabic writ-
ing system. Its inventory of discrete writing symbols or units are referred
to as hieroglyphs, hieroglyphic signs, or simply glyphs.9 A single sign
can function as the main sign of a composite sign group (also referred
to as glyph block, glygher [sic], compound, or collocation); a sign can
be affixed (and sometimes infixed) by other discrete signs. The affixed
signs can be either logographic or syllabic, depending on what the Maya
scribes intended to write. Signs can be partially hidden by other signs;
this phenomenon can be referred to as overlap or superposition. Certain
signs can have three appearances: a basic (sometimes called abstract)
8
Many of the important contributions from these periods recently were published in
a compilation edited by Houston, Chinchilla Mazariegos & Stuart (2001). An overview
of epigraphic studies of the 1970s and 1980s can be found in an introductory study
by Houston (1989), while a review of the epigraphic contributions of the 1990s can be
found in a more recent contribution by Houston (2000).
9
Two of the very first researchers to systematically use these labels in relation to Maya
writing were McCulloh in 1828 and Rafinesque in 1832 (compare to cited passages in
Coe 1992 [pp. 8991] and Stuart 1989 [especially text contained in his Figure 4]).
Figure 2. Three examples in Landas explanation of the script (Landa 1566:

fol. 45r): a) e-le-e-le (e-le-e-le), to write le noose, b) a-ha (actually a-che-ja),
to write ha water c) ma i n ka ti (ma i-ne ka ti), to write ma in kati
I do not want to.
variant, a cephalomorphic or head-shaped variant (either anthropo-

morphic or zoomorphic), and a full-body or animated variant (either
anthropomorphic or zoomorphic).10 In many studies on Maya writing,
individual signs are referred to with so-called T-numbers (e.g., T501).
These numbers refer to a sign inventory or catalog developed and pub-
lished by Thompson in 1962.11 A more recent sign inventory or catalog
10
These last variants are also referred to as full-figure variants. For these particular
variants, I employ the term somatomorphic body-shaped.
11
Thompson based his catalog on an inventory of signs from both the monumental
inscriptions as well as the three Maya screenfold books. Another important catalog
was published by Zimmermann (1956), but his inventory of signs was based only
on those occuring in the Maya screenfold books. Recently a new catalog appeared,
edited by Macri & Looper (2003). This new catalog arranges the hieroglyphic signs
in different catagories (Animals, Birds, Body Parts, etc.), and that is an advantage.
However, this catalog is only concerned with monumental inscriptions of the Classic
period, not the Maya screenfold books, and that is a disadvantage. But the greatest
disadvantage, according to me, lies in the way hieroglyphic signs need to be referred to:
Thompsons T671, the hand sign for the value chi, becomes MR7, Thompsons T218,
the hand sign for TZUTZ, becomes MRB. Thus letter and letter-and-number codes
to refer to CV, CVC, and CVCVC based Maya signs. This can only lead to confusion
in glyph analysis.
48 erik boot
by Macri and Looper, the first volume of which was published in 2003,
may replace this older catalog in years to come. In epigraphic studies,
Maya writing signs or units are transcribed12 into their respective values
as logogram or syllabic sign (or syllabogram)13 employing alphabetic
letters representing the sounds common to lowland Mayan languages:
(glottal stop), a, b, ch, ch (glottalized variant of previous consonant),
e, h (glottal aspirate or glottal voiced fricative; /h/ as in English house),
i, j (velar aspirate or velar voiced fricative; as in Spanish, e.g., joya),
k, k, l, m, n, o, p, p, s, t, t, u (as in English oo, e.g., mood), w, x
(pronounced as English /sh/), and y. The general modus operandi is
to employ bold face uppercase letters for logographic signs and bold
face lower case letters for syllabic signs.14 Examples of transcriptions
are BALAM-ma, ba-la-ma, YAX. In transcriptions, hyphens present
the break between individual signs within a composite sign group or
collocation; a blank space may be used between separate sign groups or
collocations. Transliterations, in which individual values as identified
through transcription are combined into meaningful words and phrases
(sentences), are generally written in italics. Examples of transliterations
are balam, yax. Translations, which are based on comparative and
detailed linguistic research and analysis, are in regular type letters and
generally are placed between quotes.15
12
This is in contrast to the study of other writing systems (cf. Daniels & Bright
1996; Woodard 2004), in which transliteration denotes the one-on-one transposition
of a written text into the signs of another writing system (in our case, in alphabetic
letters), while transcription is the interpretation of a written text that supplies infor-
mation not explicit in the text. I am familiar with only two recent studies in Maya
epigraphy in which transliteration and transcription are used according to these last
specific terms (cf. Vargas de la Pea, Castillo, Borges & Lacadena Garca-Gallo 1999;
Lacadena Garca-Gallo 2003).
13
In the transcription of Maya signs, most epigraphers would make a clear and
sharp distinction between logograms and syllabic signs (or syllabograms). However,
this distinction seems somewhat artificial and the line between the two main catego-
ries of signs probably was not that clear. As such, I agree with Coe (Coe & Van Stone
2000: 161). Specifically note the examples to be discussed below in the section Signs
for i, u, ti, and ya.
14
Early studies, like Lounsbury (1989: 74, note 4) (but written at an earlier stage),
already hint at this epigraphic notational system, which was described in greatest detail
by G. Stuart (1988) to standardize the transcription and transliteration of Maya texts.
Unfortunately, a recent study by Bricker (2004) employs a different system, as do Macri
& Looper (2003) in their catalog.
15
At present, there are various introductions to Maya writing available. Good and
well-illustrated introductions can be found in Coe & Van Stone (2001), Montgomery
(2000), and Kettunen & Helmke (2004). A recent work edited by Wichmann (2004)
In general, the individual signs within a composite sign group are

to be read from left to right and top to bottom (of course, there are
exceptions to this rule). A sign group can contain two signs, but also
more than eight signs. The actual order, as identified by an epigrapher
based on comparative research, is made apparent in transcription. A
Maya inscription is read in paired columns from left to right and top
to bottom. Columns are generally designated by a capital Roman letter,
lines are designated by an Arabic numeral. If an inscription has four
columns, each with two vertical lines, the reading order would be A1-B1-
A2-B2 after which follows C1-D1-C2-D2. There are also (among others)
inscriptions with single columns, L-shaped texts, T-shaped texts, and
single horizontal lines (especially along the rim of painted, incised, or
carved ceramics). In rare cases an inscription (and associated iconogra-
phy) is intentionally mirrored and has to be read from right to left (e.g.,
Yaxchilan, Lintel 25). Maya texts can be found on various portable and
monumental, perishable and non-perishable materials, such as sculpted
in stone (stelae, altars, lintels, cornices, stairway steps, statuettes, etc.)
and wood (lintels, jambs, statuettes), carved and incised (jade, bone,
ceramics), molded (stucco, ceramics), and painted (ceramics, murals,
cave walls, screenfold books). The shortest text contains a single sign
or composite sign group (providing an individual name or title, or
identifying the proper name of an object); the longest text contains
some 1,250 composite sign groups (Copan, Temple 26, Hieroglyphic
Stairway) (providing the citys dynastic history).
Patterns of Substitution
In this essay I present several examples of Maya writing in which Maya

scribes provided both simple and complex sign combinations to record
specific name phrases of local kings.16 The same name could be recorded
brings together the latest research results on the linguistics on Maya writing. The first
fully illustrated dictionary of Maya glyphs was published by Montgomery (2002).
16
The high lord and ruler among the Classic Maya was known as ajaw; this word
is translated as rey, king, in Spanish colonial documents and vocabularies. It should
however be noted that such a translation does not imply that the Maya king functioned
as its European counterparts in either the past or the present. I define king as a male
paramount lord who rules a specific sovereign territory (kingdom), whose supreme
position has become institutionalized and hereditary, generally through primogeni-
ture in the male line, and whose position is measured from and legitimized through
a historical or mythological founder. The title ajaw may be analyzed as aj + aw, the
50 erik boot
in various ways, sometimes with only subtle differences, at other times

employing a different set of common signs or rare and sometimes even
unique cephalomorphic or somatomorphic signs. Substitution, the
conditioned interchange of graphically different signs with the same
value, is common to Maya writing. These patterns of substitution, as
identified by epigraphers, have proven to be a pivotal entry into the
decipherment of Classic Maya writing.
Signs for Jaguar17

The written renditions of the names of several kings during the Classic
Maya period included the sign for jaguar,18 the most powerful land
predator in the area. In Mayan languages, there is more than one word
for jaguar. Most common is the word balam, while alternatively, hix
can be found (Dienhart 1989: 357359; Kaufman 2003: 594). Also, the
item bolay may refer to a jaguar or a feline in general (Barrera Vsquez
et al. 1980: 62). In Maya writing, signs can be found which contain the
full body or just the head of a jaguar (Figure 3). Without any other
clues to its pronunciation it would be difficult to determine which word
for jaguar would be correct.
The somatomorphic animal sign (Figure 3a) represents a jaguar,
indicative of which are the feline characteristics and, specifically, the
spotted skin. The same applies to the jaguar head (Figure 3b). These
animal signs could be read either balam, hix, or bolay, all words that
refer to jaguar. To rule out ambiguity, Maya scribes came to employ
so-called phonetic complements, affixed syllabic signs of the shape
CV, which spelled part of the logographic main sign. In some cases a
sign was prefixed (CV-CVC[CV]), in other cases a sign was postfixed
(CVC[VC]-CV).19 In the present case the scribes attached a small sign
general agentive prefix aj and aw, the root of the verb aw to speak, to shout; ajaw
would thus literally mean he who speaks, shouts.
17
The examples in this Figure 3 were compiled by Peter Mathews and have served
him for many years to explain the principles of phonetic complementation and syllabic
substitution (cf. Mathews & Zender 1998: 23).
18
Among the kings that contained the Maya equivalent of jaguar in their name
are Yopat Balam (two kings at Yaxchilan, one being the founder), Yaxun Balam (four
kings at Yaxchilan), Itzamnah Balam (three kings at Yaxchilan; king at Dos Pilas),
Kinich Tzik(?) Balam (king at Copan), Kuk Balam, Kan Balam, Kinich Kan Balam,
and Kinich Kuk Balam (kings at Palenque).
19
Most common was a postfix, less common a prefix. In rare cases a logographic
sign is both prefixed and postfixed, e.g., tu-TUN-ni, yo-YOTZ-tzi (cf. Boot 1999b).
This phenomenon can be defined as full phonetic complementation.
Figure 3. Examples of Jaguar in Classic Maya name phrases a) Jaguar

Body (somatomorphic variant), b) Jaguar Head (cephalomorphic variant),
c) BALAM-ma (phonetic complementation), d) BALAM-ma, e) ba-la-ma (full
syllabic substitution), f) ba-la-ma (drawings by various artists, after Mathews
and Zender 1998: 23; with adjustments by the present author).
to the bottom of the jaguar head, a postfix (Figures 3c&d). Both signs
represent the value ma and can be compared to the syllabic sign ma
that Landa employed in the phrase ma inkati (spelled ma i ne ka ti)
(Figure 2c). The only Maya word for jaguar that would end in -m is
balam and thus both examples can be transcribed BALAM-ma. The final
vowel of such a phonetic complement would be left unpronounced.20
20
Based on the original principles as proposed by Knorozov, this is correct. A
phonetic complement was there to stress the final consonant of a logographic sign,
the vowel was in general vowel harmonic to the root vowel and was not pronounced.
However, for instance Justeson (1989: 35) noted exceptions to this principle, namely
certain phonetic complements that were not vowel harmonic or pairs of syllabic signs
which had a contrasting vowel selection. Justeson suggested that the principles or
norms need(ed) refinement and elaboration and added that [s]pecial phonological
and grammatical conditions appear to have affected vowel selection in regular ways
52 erik boot
Maya scribes not only used the full-body variant of a jaguar or a jaguar
head (either with or without ma as a suffixed phonetic complement),
but they also employed fully transparent syllabic spellings (Figures
3e&f ). Here the scribes employed a composite sign group that can be
transcribed ba-la-ma.21 Also in this sequence of signs, the final vowel
would be left unpronounced, thus ba-la-ma leads to balam jaguar.
Signs for i, u, ti, and ya

There are two common expressions in calendrical context that contain
a high level of substitutions. These expressions are now transcribed as
i-u-ti and u-ti-ya (Stuart 1990) (Figure 4).22 The first column presents
examples of the spelling i-u-ti or i-ut and then happened, while the
second column provides examples of the spelling u-ti-ya or ut-iy hap-
pened (long ago).23 Most common are the signs for u in examples a-e
and w-z; other signs that substitute for u may actually be signs which
are close homonyms. In examples g-k and a-e the head of an animal is
used; the animal is either a reptile or a fish, it may even be a composite
creature.24 There is a particular reptilian creature which is known as
(Justeson 1989: 35). In recent research it has been suggested that the so-called dishar-
monic spellings provide regular principles through which Maya scribes provided infor-
mation on the quality of the root vowel of nouns, adjectives, and derivitative suffixes
(cf. Houston, Stuart & Robertson 1998). Another study suggests that these spellings
indicate the vowel of the most common -Vl suffix (cf. Kaufman 2003). It has to be
noted that there are several other alternative proposals. The present author has tested
the various proposals and even has developed his own alternative. Unfortunately, the
matter is too complicated to discuss in sufficient detail in this note.
21
The spelling ba-la-ma in Figure 3e can be found in the inscription on a late Classic
monument (probably a wall panel), dated to 864 ce. An individual named Chilkay
Balam is named twice; once the part balam is written with a logograph (a jaguar head,
without a phonetic complement), once the part balam is written ba-la-ma. This monu-
ment was looted in the early 1960s and is now part of a private collection (allegedly in
Switzerland). It is generally referred to as the Randell Stela, after the New York gallery
which once displayed the monument.
22
In this article David Stuart provided the epigraphic evidence for the substitution
patterns as discussed in this section of the present essay. The specific interpretations
and value assingments in relation to the animal head, male lunar deity, and spider
monkey head are mine.
23
Yet another problem arrises in the translation of these expressions. Some epig-
raphers would make a distinction between incompletive (i-ut) and completive (ut-iy),
others consider both to be in the completive. Based on my own research, at present,
I tentatively identify both expressions as completive. The full argument for this iden-
tification has to await a future occasion.
24
The inscription of the bench inside the House of the Bacabs at Copan employs
both abstract and full-body or somatomorphic hieroglyphic signs. In this inscription
serpiente voladora or flying serpent; in the Eastern Mayan languages

(spoken in the Guatemalan Highlands) of Awakateko and Sakapulteco
this creature is referred to as juuj (Kaufman 2003: 640).25 None of the
colonial or present-day lowland Mayan languages seems to contain a
comparable word, but if correct, this sign representing a (composite)
fish-like animal was chosen as a close homonym to represent the sound
u- in i-ut and ut-iy. The examples o-q and h contain the portrait head
of an anthropomorphic entity. It may portray the head of a male lunar
deity.26 The word for moon for the greater lowland Mayan languages
can be reconstructed as *uuh.27 Again, for its closeness in sound this sign
is employed to represent the sound u- in i-ut and ut-iy. The examples
r and i are most interesting; these examples depict the head or the
full body of a spider monkey. There is no word for spider monkey in
Mayan languages that contains the sound u.28 In this case, the Maya
scribes did not want the word for spider monkey itself, but the short
howling sound a spider monkey produces, u (pronounced as oo, as
in English mood). These are rare examples in which Maya scribes
targeted an onomatopoetic term or word formed after or imitating a
natural sound.29
the somatomorphic variant replaces the animal head (Webster 1989: Fig. 15, Glyph
F); the creature depicted has some clear fish characteristics (for instance scales and a
tail). However, a rattle (like the rattle of a rattle snake) also seems to be a characteristic
of this creature.
25
Close in sound to this word juuj for flying serpent is the word for iguana in
several lowland Mayan languages, which has been reconstructed as *huuj (cf. Kaufman
2003: 642 [with present-day reflexes]; compare to Dienhart 1989: 350351). Are the
two words in some way related (or did the word enter these Eastern Mayan languages
through a process of diffusion)?
26
In Maya cosmology and mythology the deity associated with the moon is female;
however, there are various examples of male lunar entities or deities (cf. Milbrath
1999: 135156; Taube 1992: 6469). The female lunar deity is considered to be the
companion of the creator god Itzamnah (note the visual narrative on a Classic Maya
vessel cataloged as Kerr No. 0504). Stuart (1990: 219) describes the human head as a
sacrificial head.
27
This reconstruction can be found in Kaufman (2003: 500), with present-day
reflexes; compare to Dienhart (1989: 424428).
28
The word for spider monkey in many Mayan languages is max (Dienhart 1989:
424; Kaufman 2003: 561).
29
The text on a small bowl also contains a sign for u- based on an onomatopoetic
word or term (Boot 1999b: note 4 [p. 42]). The scribe employs the head of a howl-
ing dog; the common word for dog is tzi (Dienhart 1989: 189192; Kaufman 2003:
573574). Also this scribe targeted a natural sound, namely the sound a howling dog
produced, (h)u.
54 erik boot
Figure 4. The signs for i, u, ti, and ya (a-l, drawings by David Stuart [1990:
Figure 4]; examples to the left of l, drawings by Mark Van Stone [Coe & Van
Stone 2000: 157]).
The various examples also present common and rare variants for the
signs for i, ti, and ya. Next to example l one can find two additional
examples for the syllabic sign i. These signs represent a hawk pluck-
ing the eye of either a feline or canine. The word for a certain kind of
hawk is i or aj i (Barrera Vsquez et al. 1980: 261, as ah i).30 In total,
in Figure 4 there are eight different signs for u, two for i, two for ti
(head variant and full body variant represent a vulture), and two for ya
(not counting small graphic differences due to different scribal hands or
styles). Within Mayan languages the sound u- is of great importance;
as a word, u- is the third person pronoun (in verbal context as well as
possessive context). The majority of Maya inscriptions is in the third
person. With that particular sound u- frequently being employed, Maya
scribes developed a large number of different signs to represent the
sound u-. Many of these signs, as far as our present knowledge goes,
can be transcribed straightforward as the syllabic sign for u, but oth-
ers that are employed in this context may actually be transcribed in a
different manner, perhaps as logographs.31
The Name Phrase Yaxpasaj Chan Yopat

The sixteenth king of the city of Copan, in the southeastern Maya area
(now western Honduras), was named Yaxpasaj Chan Yopat and he
reigned between circa 763(post)810 ce (Martin & Grube 2000: 206,
209212). The decipherment of his name, which occurs frequently in
the Copan inscriptions, has taken more than twenty years.32 Here I
have chosen to compare four examples of his complete name phrase
(Figure 5ad).
His name phrase opens with the sign YAX, which, in three examples, is
written with an abstract sign, but which in the fourth example is written
30
The name of this kind of hawk (or more neutrally, a bird of prey) seems to be an
onomatopoetic word formed after the high pitch sounds this bird produces, that is iii.
31
The process of phonological reduction or acrophony, the process through which
both logographic and syllabic signs came into existence, is in many cases difficult to
reconstruct. Many signs seem to have developed through this process of acrophony,
in which, for instance, the final consonant was dropped to arrive at a CV syllabic sign.
It is, as such, not possible to identify all signs here used to represent the sound u- as
simply a CV syllabic sign with the value u.
32
The first in-depth study on this name phrase was written by Floyd Lounsbury
(1989). In this study he provided thirteen examples and most of his readings of indi-
vidual signs are more or less correct, except for the value of the syllabic sign now known
to be sa (which was established in later epigraphic research by David Stuart).
56 erik boot
Figure 5. The name phrase Yaxpasaj Chan Yopat at Copan, a) Stela 8 (Lounsbury
1989: Figure 61), b) Temple 26, Southwest Corner (Lounsbury 1989: Figure 66),
c) Temple 11, South Side, Step 5 (Lounsbury 1989: Figure 69), d) House of
the Bacabs, Las Sepulturas, Carved Bench (Martin & Grube 2000: 210).
with a full-bodied or fully animated anthropomorphic variant (note

the human head, the arms, and lower body). The next sign in the first
example is a logographic sign that depicts the sun positioned between
the sky and the earth.33 While each separate sign has a fixed value (KIN
33
This composite sign is generally referred to as sun-at-horizon. Lounsbury (1989:
84) suggested PACAH, while in recent studies PAS is preferred (specifically based on
the decipherment of the sa syllabic sign).
sun, CHAB/KAB earth, CHAN/KAN sky), the combination of

the three signs is a distinct sign itself and is now deciphered as PAS.
In the second example, one can find three syllabic signs following
the YAX sign, namely pa, sa, and ja. In the third example, another
logogram is employed to spell PAS, followed by an anthropomorphic
head variant of sa (a human head with an earth sign on the mouth),
and ja. In the fourth example, the sign for pa is held in the arms by
the full-body variant of YAX,34 followed by the full-body variant of sa
(note the human head with the earth sign on the mouth, now with a
complete animated human body).
In the first and second example, the next signs represent the sky or
CHAN/KAN with an abstract sign na as a phonetic complement. There
is no sign for sky in the third example, but one can find the sign for a
serpent head, also CHAN/KAN. As a phonetic complement, it also has
a sign na, but in this case it is a female head (the word for mother in
many lowland Mayan languages is na).35 The fourth example illustrates
a full bodied serpent, with its mouth wide open. Its tail is covering a
small part of the abstract sign for na. In lowland Mayan languages,
the words for sky and serpent, as well as four (in other examples
employed to substitute for either sky or serpent) are homonyms
or close homonyms. The reconstructed items in proto-Mayan are
*kanh sky, *kaan serpent, and *kaanh-ib four;36 in present-day
Chorti, an eastern lowland Mayan language, the reflex of all three
items is chan.37
The sequence of signs in the first example terminates with a composite
sign group that can be identified as YOP?-AT-ti. The first sign is read
YOP, after a suggestion by David Stuart that it represents a leaf, yop
34
In a recent contribution I identified the cephalomorphic or head-shaped variant
of YAX (Boot 2004). As such, the sign YAX can be found employed in a full range of
variants: as a regular (or abstract) sign, a cephalomorphic variant, and body-shaped
or somatomorphic variant.
35
See reconstruction in Kaufman (2003: 91), with present-day reflexes; compare to
Dienhart (1989: 431433).
36
See reconstructions in Kaufman (2003: 468, 636, 1470), with present-day reflexes;
compare to Dienhart (1989: 576578, 588590, 776779).
37
It was Stephen Houston (1984) who first discussed in detail the substitution pat-
tern between sky, serpent, and four and described them as close homophones.
It is of interest to note that present-day Chorti refers to all three as chan. The related
Chorti and (extinct) Cholti languages are now considered to be instrumental in the
understanding of the evolution of the language(s) of the Classic period and the writ-
ing system that represented it (Houston, Robertson, and Stuart 2000). Compare to
Lacadena and Wichmann (2002).
58 erik boot
in, for instance, Chol, a western lowland Mayan language.38 The added
query (in regular type) indicates that a certain degree of doubt still
remains on its identification. The sign transcribed here as AT depicts
the phallus, at in many lowland Mayan languages.39
The second example provides the spelling YOP?-AT-ta. There is a
difference in the final sign, ta instead of ti. The third example can be
transcribed YOPAT-ta; in this case a cephalomorphic sign has been
employed. Ultimately, the fourth example employs the full-body vari-
ant of YOPAT and the sign for ti (as in the first example). The final
full-body sign illustrates the portrait of a god related to lightning. The
four examples can thus be summarized in transcription as follows:
Example 1: YAX PAS CHAN-na YOP?-AT-ti
Example 2: YAX pa-sa-ja CHAN-na YOP?-AT-ta
Example 3: YAX PAS-sa-ja CHAN-na YOPAT-ta
Example 4: YAX [pa]-sa CHAN-na YOPAT-ti
In these transcriptions the signs for sky and serpent are transcribed as
CHAN only. This name phrase can be found at an archaeological site
the larger area of which at present is associated with an eastern lowland
Mayan language (Chorti). An ancestor of this language was probably
associated with this area during the Classic period;40 as such, chan is
more probable than kan (although without a prefixed phonetic comple-
ment one can never be certain). The four examples of this name phrase
can be transliterated yaxpasaj chan yopat, which can be paraphrased
Yopat (yopat) Who First (yax) Opened (pasaj) the Sky (chan).41
38
It is Martin (2001: 4, note 5) who refers to this decipherment. According to Martin,
Stuart made this suggestion in 1999. Compare to Chol entres in Aulie and Aulie (1978:
143, yopmal, yopol). More regularly this sign (cataloged by Thompson as T115) simply
operates as the syllabic sign yo. If indeed the syllabic sign yo is derived from yop leaf,
this would be a good example of the process of acrophony in which the final consonant
was dropped to arrive at a CV syllabic sign. If the sign also operates as YOP, it shows
the fluidity of some sign values still present in Maya writing.
39
For reflexes and cognates in most Maya languages, see Kaufman (2003: 385);
compare to Dienhart (1989: 485486).
40
See note 37 for the derivation and evolution of the reflexes.
41
The word yax has various meanings in Mayan languages. Commonly it refers to
the color green(-blue) (Kaufman 2003: 225228), it also means first in, for instance,
Yucatec Maya (e.g., Barrera Vsquez et al. 1980: 971). By extension, yax may also
metaphorically refer to unripe, as it is often contrasted to or paired with kan yellow;
ripe; precious. The verb pas- means to open; to dawn in various Mayan languages.
A more literal translation would be First-Opened Sky Yopat [Lightning God].
The Name Phrase Kak Tiliw Chan Yopat

Located close to Copan one can find the city of Quirigua. The cities
of Copan and Quirigua, based on a few inscriptions, seem to share a
common ancestry, while one of the later kings of Quirigua captured the
king of Copan named Waxaklajun Ubah Kawil Eighteen are the Heads
of Kawil (formerly known as 18 Rabbit). The name of the Quirigua
king was Kak Tiliw Chan Yopat (Figure 6), who reigned circa 724
785 ce (Martin & Grube 2000: 218222). Here I present two examples
of his name phrase. The first example opens with a sign that depicts a
smoke scroll, which stands for KAK fire.42 The same smoke scroll can
be found in the second example of his name phrase.
The first example continues with a sequence of syllabic signs, ti-li-wi
for tiliw. The second example provides the simple sign for ti, just below
the cephalomorphic variant for li. The spelling ti-li is an abbreviation43
and also leads to tiliw. The root of the verbal expression tiliw is til-,
which means to burn (Kaufman 2003: 524; compare to Dienhart
1989: 9495). The ending -iw (or -Vw) possibly indicates an antipas-
sive construction,44 probably with object-incorporation (kak fire).
In the first example, it is followed by a composite sign group spelled
CHAN-na, which can be found in the second example spelled just
CHAN. In this case, the head and body of an anthropomorphic full-
body variant of CHAN can be found; the head of this variant, however,
seems to combine both avian and reptilian facial characteristics. Note
that in this example there is no sign na.
The first example terminates with a composite sign group spelled
YOP?-AT-ti, which, in the second example, is substituted by the full-
body variant of YOPAT, illustrating thus the full-body portrait of a
god.45 However, in this example, the YOPAT full-body variant does not
42
The smoke scroll sign (T122) can be found prefixed and postfixed with the syl-
labic sign ka as well as fully substituted with the syllabic pair ka-ka. This phonetic
complementation and syllabic substitution indicate that the smoke scroll sign is
logographic KAK fire. On fire as kak, see Kaufman (2003: 512514); compare to
Dienhart (1989: 243246).
43
Most common abbreviations occur in relation to final -l and -n, but also other
consonants can be abbreviated, as research by Marc Zender and Alfonso Lacadena has
shown (e.g., -, -h, -j, -w). Only through a significant and sufficient number of examples
abbreviations can be recognized.
44
It was Alfonso Lacadena who first identified antipassive constructions in Classic
Maya inscriptions.
45
To my knowledge it was Matthew Looper who first identified this god in visual
narratives on Classic Maya ceramic vessels (Looper 2003: 45, Figure I.4).
60 erik boot
Figure 6. The name phrase Kak Tiliw Chan Yopat at Quirigua, a) Quirigua,
Stela I (Looper 2003: Figure I.3a), b) Quirigua, Zoomorph B (Looper 2003:
Figure I.3b).
take a syllabic sign ti (or ta). These two examples can be summarized
in transcription as follows:
Example 1: KAK ti-li-wi CHAN-na YOP?-AT-ti
Example 2: KAK ti-li CHAN YOPAT
In these examples, different signs have been employed for CHAN, the
simple or abstract sign for sky and a full-body variant. The god YOPAT,
again a full-body variant, could also be written with the collocation
that spelled YOP?-AT-ti. The possible antipassive expression could be
spelled in full ti-li-wi, but could also be abbreviated as ti-li. The two
examples of this name phrase can be transliterated as kak tiliw chan
yopat, which can be paraphrased as Yopat (yopat) Who Fire-Burns
(kak tiliw) the Sky (chan).46
46
A more literal translation would be Fire-Burns Sky Yopat [Lightning God].
Writing and Iconography: The Name Phrase Kak Tiliw Chan Chak
Maya scribes provided a reasonable large corpus of variant spellings of

the name of kings. This is not strange as the majority of hieroglyphic
texts from the Classic period from all over the lowland Maya area
record the exploits of individual Maya kings. The longer a king lived
and ruled a city the more frequent his name phrase would be recorded.
Through substitution, including full-body variants, the amount of
internal variation of sign use in his name phrase could become greater.
The name phrases of Maya kings not only appeared in glyphic texts
(either sculpted, carved, molded, incised, or painted), to identify a
king, his glyphic name phrase occasionally would be integrated into a
visual narrative.
Within the Maya area, there are several examples of kings and other
dignitaries, whose glyphic name phrases can be found integrated into
their headdresses. One of the best known examples is found at the site
of Naranjo (Figure 7).47 Naranjo Stela 22 illustrates the king of the city,
seated upon a large cushion covered with symbols of his high rank
(note the jaguar skin pattern and the small signs for po placed upon the
visual representation of a woven fiber mat). The inscription opens with
a date in the year 702 ce. The kings name is recorded in the inscription
at A4-A5. Although slightly damaged, his name can be transcribed as
KAK-TIL-wi CHAN-na-CHAK for kak tiliw chan chak, which can
be paraphrased as Chak (chak) Who Fire-Burns (kak tiliw) the Sky
(chan). The elaborate headdress contains all pertinent sign elements
of his name phrase so no doubt (of course, as long one can read the
signs) can remain on the identity of the powerful king. In front of his
headdress one can find the enlarged sign KAK fire. Within the head-
dress itself one finds the conflated signs ti-li, to be combined with wi,
below which one finds the sign CHAN sky. Directly below the sign
for sky, one finds the elaborate portrait head of the rain god CHAK.
The sign sequence in his headdress reads KAK ti-li CHAN CHAK,
a variant of the sequence of signs in the accompanying inscription.48
47
This example is also described and illustrated in Martin & Grube (2000: 77).
48
For comparative reasons I have added a line in the drawing in Figure 7 between
the large iconographic head of the rain god Chak and the glyphic representation of
his portrait head in the single column text.
62 erik boot
Also this sequence can be transliterated kak tiliw chan chak for Chak
Who Fire-Burns the Sky.49
The above four sections illustrated and discussed a small number
of examples of name phrases in which Maya scribes employed a vari-
ety of signs to arrive at the same name phrase. Within this variety of
signs, the scribes explored different kinds of variation. There could be
variation in a standard sign, ever so minute and subtle, depending on
the skill of individual scribes (or sculptors). Abstract signs were most
commonly used. An abstract sign could be substituted by its cephalo-
morphic variant, a similar or sometimes even rather dissimilar sign,
in the shape of a head. This head-shaped variant could have either
anthropomorphic or zoomorphic characteristics. On rare occasions, the
Maya scribes explored the possible variation of signs even further and
employed fully animated anthropomorphic and zoomorphic bodies to
generate a specific sign.50
Versatility: Classic Maya Hand Signs
The Maya sign inventory contains a certain category of signs the com-
plexity and diversity of which is unique to this writing system. This
category contains the signs that depict the human hand. In a recent
study I discussed 45 different hand signs. At present, more than fifty
49
A more literal translation would be Fire-Burns Sky Chak [Rain God]. The three
name phrases of kings discussed in this essay all are descriptive names of particular
manifestations of gods, in these case the lightning god Yopat and the raingod Chak.
In, for instance, ancient Egypt and Assyria, kings associated themselves with particular
gods through references in (part[s] of) their name or full nominal phrase. As recently
discussed by Pierre Robert Colas (2004: 304), nearly 23% of the now known Classic
Maya male names are god names. Most common are names referring to aspects of the
gods Yopat, Chak, and Kawil. All three are related to lightning, thunder, and rain.
50
The employment of fully animated anthropomorphic and zoomorphic bodies to
generate specific signs was the hallmark of the most accomplished scribes and sculp-
tors. Classic Maya texts executed in part or completely in fully animated signs are
quite rare; examples can, for instance, be found in the inscriptional corpus at Copan,
Quirigua, Yaxchilan, and Palenque. A recent study shows that the Oval Palace Tablet
at Palenque was carved by nine or more distinctive artists; only one artist worked on
the full-body signs (in six large composite sign groups) in this text (of, in total, 262
sign groups) that represented the introductory calendrical statement (Van Stone 2000).
Was this artist the most accomplished and well-versed? Relative to these fully animated
texts, in some cases even the most accomplished and well-educated epigrapher has
difficulties in identifying each and every sign employed, due to either the uniqueness
of the animated sign, the interaction of individual signs, or the presence of damage
through erosion to pertinent detail.
Figure 7. The name phrase Kak Tiliw Chan Chak at Naranjo: Naranjo Stela
22 (drawing by Ian Graham [Graham & Von Euw 1975: 55]).
64 erik boot
hand signs can be identified, each with a distinctive value. There is no

other writing system that contains so many different signs that depict
the human hand (Boot 2003a). Some of the hand signs occur frequently;
depending on their skill, individual scribes and sculptors provided
personal variation. Other hand signs are rare or even unique.51 Here I
only illustrate a small sample of more easily recognizable hand shapes
and gestures (Figure 8).
The human hand is a versatile instrument and the Classic Maya seem
to have explored many of the possible postures and gestures. Most
common are hands as fists, flat hands, and raised hands, each
with different values (although there are some cross-overs). Many of
the values attached to these signs are derived from Maya words that
describe the actual action performed by the hand. For instance, the sign
for cha may be derived from chach, which means handful in Yucatec
Maya. The sign for ka may be derived from kab, which means fist;
closed hand in Yucatec Maya, which exists next to the word kab,
hand, common to nearly all Mayan languages.52 Other hand signs are
C-shaped; the C-shaped hand can be turned up or down. Additionally
there is a variety of human hands holding different objects, most of
these signs are rare or even unique. A most intriguing sign is the hand
holding a brush pen, or more neutral, a writing implement. This hand
sign may be identified as TZIB, as suggested by various researchers
(e.g., Stuart 1987: 23, Figure 3b). Sometimes Maya scribes became
confused, employing the incorrect hand sign. In the Codex Dresden
(Page 21, Section B3), the scribe wanted to write the word ibach arma-
dillo and targeted a spelling i-ba-cha. The syllabic sign cha is a hand
sign; he employed a visually very close sign, but which represented the
value ka (see Figure 8).
51
Of the set of 45 signs cataloged, 22.2% of the signs depict the left hand, 26.7%
of the signs depict the right hand, 37.8% of the signs employ both hands, while in
13.3% the hand used could not be identified properly (Boot 2003a). In another essay
I discussed left- and right-handedness in Classic Maya writing-painting contexts; in a
survey of Maya scribes and painters as depicted in visual narratives on Classic Maya
ceramic vessels, 19% are left-handed and 81% are right-handed. These percentages fall
within the average percentages for left- and right-handedness all over the world (Boot
2003b). In recent research, the work of left-handed writer-painters has been identified
in the painted murals within Structure 1 at Bonampak.
52
If correctly identified, these syllabic signs also evolved through a process of
acrophony.
Figure 8. Classic Maya hand signs (after Boot 2003: Table [with correction])
(drawings in the table by various artists).
Final Remarks
In this essay I presented various examples in which the substitution of

different signs with the same value could be identified. Sometimes the
sign was substituted by another comparable simple or abstract sign (note
the signs for ma, Figure 3cf), but, specifically in the context of name
phrases Maya scribes sometimes employed distinctive cephalomorphic
and full-body anthropomorphic and zoomorphic variants. For instance,
the sign for YAX could be an abstract sign. It could be replaced by an
66 erik boot
anthropomorphic full-body variant, which can be identified as such,

only based on a structural analysis of the name phrases themselves.
Maya scribes not only provided variation in the sign inventory as
employed in the name phrases of kings in hieroglyphic texts, hiero-
glyphic signs were also integrated into the iconographic portraits of
a king to identify him without any ambiguity. Stela 22 at Naranjo
provided a well-known example among Mayanists. The name of the
king could be found twice, once (in one variant) in the hieroglyphic
text and once in the headdress.
Substitution was thus an important part of Maya writing, through
which individual scribes and sculptors could display their masterful and
versatile knowledge of both the language (e.g., through homonyms and
other kinds of word play) and the writing system (e.g., graphic variation
as well as full elaboration). In the case of the full-body or fully animated
anthropomorphic and zoomorphic variants within the name phrases of
kings, the Maya scribes and sculptors may even surpass their Egyptian
counterparts. While individual Egyptian hieroglyphic signs could be
playfully carried or taken in the hand by either a human or animal
entity (e.g., examples at Deir el-Bahari, Abu Simbel, and Dendera; cf.
Kaper 2005), none of these examples obtains the fully animated in-
motion and lively character of their energetic and interactive Maya
counterparts.
Versatility in Maya writing could also be found in a specific category
of signs, the signs that depict the human hand. No other writing sys-
tem possessed or possesses such a large amount of signs depicting the
human hand in such a range of different natural postures, gestures, and
intricately related distinctive logographic or syllabic values.
Maya writing may have been recorded in stone, murals, ceramics,
and screenfold books for some 1900 years. Specifically during the late
Classic period (circa 700900 ce) Maya scribes and sculptors developed
alternative ways to record the names of their kings and associated
events. Writing thus became an act in which experienced, educated,
and individually brilliant scribes and sculptors could boast of their
knowledge of both language and writing. Through intricate graphic
variation as well as skillful homophonic- and onomatopoetic-based
sign substitution, these scribes and sculptors presented the many faces
of Maya writing now known to us.
Acknowledgments
I thank Alex de Voogt for his kind invitation to participate in the first
seminar named The Idea of Writing: Play in Writing. Also I thank
two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this
essay. Any remaining mistakes or fallacies are the sole responsibility of
the author. As always, unless otherwise noted, the opinions expressed
in this essay are mine.
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LOANWORDS
FROM GROUP-WRITING TO WORD ASSOCIATION:
REPRESENTATION AND INTEGRATION OF
FOREIGN WORDS IN EGYPTIAN SCRIPT
Egyptian writing is traditionally a system which renders only conso-

nants. As long as it uses words known to the readers and has enough
mechanisms to avoid ambiguities, this is not likely to cause serious
problems for the reader. Problems tend to arise, however, when new
and unknown words appear. One area in which this is particularly
likely to happen is foreign words, be they lexical items borrowed or,
even more frequently, names of places and persons.
Such items did not have a fixed traditional orthography. Since they
appeared normally after the fixation of the Egyptian orthography, we
would expect them to make use predominantly of one-consonantal signs
in order make them easiest to recognize. Actually, this is the case only
to some extent, whereas other factors additionally come into play.
It is useful to separate the evidence chronologically, since during
different times, quite different solutions were adopted. For the earlier
periods, lexical loanwords are not distinguishable by their orthogra-
phy from original Egyptian vocabulary so much so that it is indeed
disputed whether to consider some items as early loans or not. This
is due to an actual debate raging about the phonetic correspondences
between Egyptian and the Afro-Asiatic languages in general. Some
crucial sounds are evaluated completely differently in the traditional
school (e.g., Takcs 1999) and the Rlerian school (e.g., Quack
2002a, Schneider 2003b). The last one supposes, among other things,
that Egyptian corresponds etymologically to the voiced dentals of the
Semitic languages and only developed its quality as a laryngeal shortly
before or in the Middle Kingdom. If one accepts this, word pairs show-
ing a correspondence between Egyptian and Semitic and having a
high-quality semantic fit could be picked up as Middle Kingdom loans
(e.g., Schneider 2003: 194), whereas the traditional school would con-
sider them to be genuinely Egyptian and proof against Rlers ideas.
Apart from those disputed cases, there is one fairly plausible loan-
word singled out recently. The word k.t leek corresponds to Semitic
74 joachim friedrich quack
yaraq, but the root is otherwise attested in Egyptian as w to be

green, and the initial sound is typical for the north-west Semitic
shift w > y (Peust 1999: 108). The orthography iatK _ of the word

is quite ordinary-looking, so much so that it took more than 150 years
before anybody suspected it not to be genuinely Egyptian. It is written
with one-consonantal signs but there are no two-consonantal signs
that could have been used anyway. It is written with the appropriate
determinative of an herb.
Much more frequent, for the older times, are cases involving names.
The question of how to write names from foreign languages might be
almost as old as Egyptian writing itself. Actually, some people suspect
that the famous palette of Nar-Meher, with its depiction of the triumph
of the king over an enemy, already uses a combination of two hiero-
glyphs for writing his name. One of them is a two-consonantal sign
(w ) mainly present in the Egyptian word for one and its derivatives.
If the sequence is to be read phonetically, as w , in contrast to a pos-
sible inner-Egyptian interpretation as harpoon-lake or one of the
lake, it could not be connected with any known root of the Egyptian
language and so would be likely to attest the writing of a foreign name
(cf. Morenz 2004: 183f.).
With the later Old Kingdom, we are on safer ground. There we have
names of non-Egyptian, probably Nubian, derivation on execration
figurines (Abu Bakr & Osing 1973, Osing 1976, Quack 2002). Most of
the signs used are just the one-consonantal ones, but some are more
notable. Two-consonantal signs appear, even if relatively sparingly,
and, in some cases, even Egyptian determinatives are used after sound-
sequences that could stand for Egyptian words typically determined
with such a sign. For example, we have a sequence r-s determined
[
by the sign normally used in the Egyptian root rs to be awake. A
preliminary check indicates that the pluriconsonantal signs are used
about to the degree realistically possible. Their rarity is not due to a
conscious rejection, but to the basic fact that the sound sequences of
the foreign names are too different from the normal Egyptian ones to
allow for the possibility of using one out of the restricted amount of
pluriconsonantal signs (of which by far not all theoretically possible
combinations actually do exist in the Egyptian writing system).
In a few cases, short Egyptian words consisting of only one sign are
6
written as part of the name by using the ideogram stroke this is made
very transparent; e.g., for nw or for rw (Abu Bakr & Osing 1973:
104). In rare cases, longer Egyptian words are also used. We have a name
from group-writing to word association 75
SauaaaaaatSi hwwhsi. which incorporates 1
as its first part the name of the constellation Orion, Eg. h.

One group, the sign combination i or i that originally stands for
the interjection | oh!, is attested several times already in this corpus
and likely to be one of the earliest cases where an inherent fixed vowel
is intended to be represented; this group has a very long tradition in
the Egyptian orthography of foreign words. Altogether, we have still a
very low degree of precise indication of the vowels. The writing is not
systematically different from that of Egyptian words and names; rather
any difference is due almost exclusively to the fact that certain sound
sequences that are normal in Egyptian are less normal in the foreign
language and vice versa.
Much less secure is the interpretation that Schneider has proposed
concerning a deity occurring several times in the pyramid texts and
mentioned in connection with Byblos. It is written as hy-tw, using
two-consonantal signs with normal phonetic complements. Even though
it does not use any specific determinatives, it would be theoretically
possible to analyze this sequence simply as Egyptian he who appears
burning. Schneider has proposed that it is a phonetic rendering of
Semitic attaru reinterpreting it as Egyptian language (Schneider 2000).
Such a case would be of considerable theoretical interest, given that it
is a recurrent cultural tendency to adapt loan-words, if they can thus
be given a seemingly normal derivation from within the borrowing lan-
guage. A famous case is the German word Hngematte, which sounds
like a derivation from hngen (to hang) and Matte (mat), but is, in
fact, via the English hammock, derived from some American Indian
language. Nevertheless, I remain a bit sceptical concerning Schneiders
etymology; with the correspondence of h to and to t he has to pos-
tulate, even in the best of cases (with Rlers theories not only correct
for the etymology but even valid for the actual pronunciation during
the Old Kingdom) that there would be two fluctuations between voiced
and voiceless consonants.
For the Middle Kingdom at least, we have a considerable body of
foreign personal and place names, especially from the so-called exe-
cration texts, which list the potential enemies of Egypt (Sethe 1926,
Posener 1940, Posener 1987, Koenig 1990), but also from a lot of minor
1
The transliteration is based on the reasonable assumption that the group
stands for a (pseudo)-pluralic w, not for .
aaa
monuments (Schneider 2003a: 112176). They are from the Nubian

as well as the Asiatic area; the first group, however, is more difficult
to analyze because we lack a reliable basis for independent linguistic
analysis; it is also in most cases the less numerous one.
As a special treat, we even have some dogs names attested on a stela
of king Antef II (Schneider 2006). Some of them even have a transla-
tion into Egyptian. Again, we have mainly one-consonantal signs, but
also two-consonantal ones with full regular complements, so the writ-
ing is not essentially different from the way an Egyptian name would
be written.
Trickier are the identifications proposed by Schneider (2002) for
designations of rulers in the Middle Kingdom attested in the story of
Sinuhe. If correct, that would make them the earliest Egyptian ren-
d
derings of Hurrian and Luwian words. I am a bit sceptic because his
identification of the writing m' as the city of Qatna involves
a semantic difficulty. According to the text of the Sinuhe story, this is
a place to which Sinuhe turns back after having been at Byblos; and
the verb hsi used in the text is otherwise known to have been used
when the turning point of an expedition had been reached and it was
returning to Egypt (Gardiner 1947: vol. 1, 159*). Applying this to the
Sinuhe text would indicate the city is found to the south of Byblos, but
Qatna is definitely to the north.
In the corpus of Middle Kingdom renderings, one-consonantal values
are more frequent, but a remarkably large amount (about 25) of two-
and three-consonantal signs, mostly with phonetic complements, are
present and actually used for sequences of two or three consonants (Sass
1991: 1117, Hoch 1994: 487501). In some cases, it seems, complete
Egyptian words are used. One disputed group is worthy of special note.
It is written like the Egyptian root pr equip, including the typical sign
g with its phonetic complements. According to the most likely hypoth-
esis, this sequence has become established for writing the Semitic word
abd servant, with the typical Middle Kingdom equivalence Egyptian
r = Semitic d (See lastly Schneider 1992: 6668; Schneider 1998: 35;
Hoch 1994: 6365, Zivie 1997: 120 versus Ryholt 1997: 127.).
Besides those signs where all original consonantal values of the
Egyptian sign are conserved as such, we also have some cases with
signs containing a weak sound (half-vowel) as second element. In them,
the second part ( or w) served for the rendering of vowels. Similarly,
those two signs, and w, as one-consonantal signs not only served to
render the corresponding Semitic consonants, but also the vowels, with
normally standing for a, e and i, and w for u and o. Even within the
body of such a system with a wide margin of applicability of the vowel
indicators, the reliability, or at least the predictive force of those indica-
tions, seems relatively low. We have cases where Egyptian w seems to
correspond to Semitic i or e, and also Egyptian for Semitic u. Besides,
even if we suppose that a as the most neutral (and in many languages,
including Semitic, actually the most frequent) vowel is a default set-
ting not in need of indication, we have neither a mark for each non-a
vowel nor for the absence of a vowel. Consonantal sequences written
with pluriconsonantal signs, unless they can be interpreted as specific
Egyptian words with fixed pronunciation, would defy any attempt to
indicate the vowels by their very nature, since such signs are, by the
very system of the Egyptian writing, not exclusively used for any spe-
cific vowel (Schweitzer 2005: 5963). Thus, any reading of the names
exclusively on the basis of their writing without outside knowledge
would give only a very poor imitation of the way they were actually
to be pronounced.
Summing up the evidence for the earlier periods, we can note that the
writing of loan-words, as such, is so inconspicuous that no consensus
has been reached by scholars to identify any certain case, although it
would be most unlikely that none at all occurred. For names of places,
peoples, and dogs, we have a writing system that uses mainly one-
consonantal signs, but does not shy away from two-consonantal ones
whenever it is practical to use them. Short and sometimes even longer
Egyptian words are used as parts of the writing and might be condi-
tioned by a total or near-total similarity of sound. Otherwise, vowel-
indication is relatively sparse and mainly reduced to occasional hints
of an i or u, which would set a as the default vowel. By the very signs
they use, there is nothing in the writing which makes these names prima
facie stand out very consciously against normal Egyptian words.
In some ways, the New Kingdom is the high point of writing for-
eign words or at least of modern discussions about their writing.
It shows considerable change as compared to the Middle Kingdom,
and most of the formative phases must have taken place during the
Second Intermediate Period and the early eighteenth dynasty. The
amount of words and names written in this orthography is fairly high
many hundred different items are on repertoire for the Asiatic area
alone (Schneider 1992; Hoch 1994). A large number of place-names
are attested in well-known monumental lists; school-texts sometimes

abound in exotic vocabulary, and also the everyday vocabulary contains
items of unquestionably foreign origin. For the analysis of the graphic
system, at the moment only a part of them are useable, namely those
connected with the north. This is due to the fact that, for the south,
we have no independent tradition for the localities and personal names
which would allow us to establish their pronunciation. Equally, for
northern loanwords from non-Semitic languages other than Hittite or
early Greek, we normally do not understand the donor languages well
enough to make an independent analysis.
Besides the single words, we now have even longer texts written in
foreign language. One famous school text, the so-called satirical letter
preserved, e.g., in pAnastasi I, has a few Semitic expressions and even
a whole sentence. By far the most substantial of the foreign-language
texts, however, come from magical handbooks, in which some spells
make use of phrases or even complete incantations, some probably in
Semitic languages (Schneider 1989; Steiner 1992), others purportedly
in Cretan (Haider 2004). Their understanding is still far from perfect.
There is evidence that the Egyptians actively studied foreign languages.
At least in the case of Akkadian, this happened typically in the medium
of cuneiform writing (Izreel 1997).
The use of determinatives for foreign words is normally quite in line
with their real semantic area. It has gained little scholarly attention.
For personal names, we have quite often the specific determinative

of the throw-stick , plus of course the seated man or woman. For
place-names, the throw-stick combined with the sign ' for desert,
foreign country is usual. For lexical loans, the determinative is chosen
according to its meaning. There is one notable point, however, when it
comes to transcribing whole sequences of foreign text. In those case,
where we can be by no means sure if the Egyptian scribe understood
the semantic meaning of what he said, different procedures were used.
In the spell written in Cretan language, hardly any determinatives at all
are used and the only ones occurring are visibly derived from the asso-
ciation of short Egyptian words serving to write parts of the phonetic
sequence. In the spell from the magical papyrus Harris, we have the
sign of the throw-stick followed by a slash as a unique determinative
B
( ) no longer serving as a signal of specific meaning, but only as a
word-divider plus an indication that this is foreign.
Much more studied is the phonetic side. The so-called syllabic
writing is at the heart of all recent contributions. Basically, we have
a system of writing which no longer uses the long-established one-
consonantal values which are normal for ordinary Egyptian words.

Instead, we have totally new sets. On the one hand, they use original
two-consonantal signs where the second consonant is weak. Mainly,
the weak sounds are , and w here we have an important difference
form the earlier systems in that the sound , which was still a strong
sound in the Middle Kingdom (used for rendering Semitic r and l), lost
its consonantal value by the New Kingdom. Thus, e.g., the sign Q ,
originally a two-consonantal sign for , came to be used for followed
facultatively by a vowel. In cases where no two-consonantal sign exists,
the one-consonantal sign can be combined with the one-consonantal
sign of the weak sound in question (most frequently with ), thus, e.g.,
2a , originally h, simply for h an important and often-overlooked
part of the system of syllabic orthography. For this set, it is possible
to establish a complete inventory where every possible sound of the
Egyptian language can be combined with any of the weak consonants.
We also have writings that by themselves could serve to express short
Egyptian words. Highly notable is that the use of pluriconsonantal signs
for foreign words drops dramatically. We still have some (plus some
cases where complete words rather than pluriconsonantal signs with
complements might be involved), but their use is sparse and most of
them are attested only once or twice (Helck 1989: 138143).
Since this writing is considerably different from what is normally
used for indigenous Egyptian words, and since it uses generally
more signs, it should be possible to include added information, and
this information should concern specifically the vowels. There are
indeed some writings that can easily be identified and that encour-
age an inquiry in these lines. We have, for example, the expression
y d
}ar YE pr yt, which is likely to cor-
respond to Hebrew sopher yodea and probably even a trans-
lation of the Egyptian expression sh .w spt hr knowledgeable scribe
that occurs otherwise in the same text (Fischer-Elfert 1986: 152). This
would show that the vowel o is rendered, at least facultatively, by the
Egyptian w, and e by Egyptian .
In reality, things are far from easy. We have some highly promising
and suggestive writings as well as many that are less convincing or even
downright contrary to the theoretical assumptions. Scholarship has been
on a zigzag course for decades. Sometimes people preferred the neat-
ness of the possibilities and looked for helping hypotheses in order to
get away with the problems, sometimes they verged towards declaring
the system as simply not working. Some notable scholars have tried
to establish the rules (e.g., Albright 1934; Helck 1971: 539575; Helck
1989), and theoretically-minded scholars were keen to save them and
put them into theoretical models (e.g., Schenkel 1986), while others
saw the counter-examples and wanted to abandon the idea of reliable
vowel indications for many groups in question (e.g., Edel 1966: 6190;
Schneider 1992: 360402; Zeidler 1993).
Some scholars have even had the courage to study details of Canaanite
morphology of the later second millennium from these Egyptian ren-
derings (Sivan & Cochavi-Rainey 1992; Hoch 1994: 438459). Still, in
those studies we sometimes get remarks in the line of the u of the
group tu, although misplaced, is characteristic of the passive (Hoch
1994: 130). While admittedly, it is challenging to do such studies, and
would enrich our knowledge of Early North-West Semitic considerable,
I reluctantly point out that these very specialists who have undertaken
these morphological studies have not sufficiently addressed the crucial
issue of how unambiguously the Egyptian orthographies can be inter-
preted as far as the vowels are concerned.
The most theoretically detailed interpretation was given by Schenkel
(1986). He tried to establish three different principles at work in the
writings. The first is the Devanagari principle. Here, Schenkel assumes
that, as in Indian writing, a basic group stands for the consonant with
either the vowel a or no vowel, or a reduced in a closed syllable.
Other vowels are marked by adding specific signs (originally for the
semi-vowels) to this group.
The second is the cuneiform principle where signs (especially short
Egyptian words) are given a fixed syllabic value. E.g., the sequence n-w
ii} , originally a question particle, has the value of nu. Finally, there is
the consonantal writing where no vowel at all is indicated. The coex-
istence of three different systems obviously creates confusion, especially
as several groups could be interpreted in different ways depending on
which principle would be considered relevant for the actual word. The
main problem of all this is that even the most elaborated theoretical
model will ultimately fail to produce a predictive reading, i.e., one
which would allow the reader to pronounce in an approximately cor-
rect fashion a word he did not know beforehand.
In order to illustrate the supposed functioning of the syllabic writing
system, I will present the possible indications of vowels in a syllable
beginning by a b which is expressed in hieroglyphs by the sign of the

leg . According to the Devanagari-system, you could add , , or
w as vowel indicators, thus a for ba, Yia for be,Y for

bi,} for bu. But according to the cuneiform system, for bi you

would use (derived from the Egyptian word bi soul) while this
same group, if used in the Devanagari-system, would count as an
alternative way of writing ba.
Helck has tried to establish a coherent set of rules for all groups used,
but he had to use some basic assumptions which make his system flawed.
According to him, unstressed syllables are so reduced in pronuncia-
tion that almost any vowel would be acceptable for them; and besides,
metathesis of vowels should be a relatively frequent phenomenon;
e.g., the well-known Levantine city of Ugarit should, according to his
theories, have been pronounced as *Akurit by the Egyptians (Helck
1989: 129134).
Rather disappointing results also came to light by the recent studies
of Schneider (1992: 360402), who concentrated on personal names,
and Zeidler (1993), who looked for Coptic renderings of words written
in syllabic writing in the New kingdom. Both came to the conclusion
that only a very limited amount of the groups actually used could be
given a clear vocalic value. We have still to see whether this is the final
word or whether studies, which are more fine-tuned chronologically, or
which are prepared to accept more variants as secondary scribal error,
will finally re-establish more successful principles of vowel rendering
in the Egyptian New Kingdom syllabic orthography. The question of
chronological development might end up being of special importance
because, in the Later New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period,
important shifts in the pronunciation of the vowels came about in the
Egyptian language and they would obviously affect any system of writ-
ing aiming at rendering vowels.
One important point has to be stressed: While the syllabic writing
is used in most cases for foreign words (loans or transcriptions of
names), not all foreign words are affected by syllabic writing nor is
syllabic writing confined to them. On the one hand, several words of
obvious Semitic derivation are written in traditional Egyptian orthog-
raphy with ordinary one-consonantal signs even in the New Kingdom.
We have, however, to reckon with the possibility that quite a few of
them are actually early loans, e.g., from the Middle Kingdom, which
only now are positively attested in the preserved record. On the other
hand, some Egyptian words also came to be written in the syllabic writ-
ing. Opinions are still debated as to whether those were only the ones
which, for some reason, felt foreign to the Egyptians, those for which
the traditional orthography was lost or had never existed, or whether
the scribes simply had a fancy for syllabic signs and wanted to impress
their teachers (cf. e.g., Janssen 186566: 443444; Ward 1981: 371373).
I personally have some suspicions that, at least in some cases, there were
deep-seated reasons for applying the new orthography.
I would like to single out a verb occurring mainly in Late Egyptian
school texts and written syllabically as Qa mJ (-m). Originally,
this has been considered to be a verb of its own with the meaning to
whirl around. Later, reasons were brought forward to consider it, in
fact, as a rewriting of the traditional Egyptian word m to go (cf.
Ward 1981: 371373; differently Tacke 2001: 64f.). However, I do not
see it as a simple fancy orthography but as a deliberate choice in order
to make an important point. In the verb m, during the New Kingdom,
some irregular phonetic progress brought about the dropping of the m,
e.g., in Coptic we have the form . However, some demotic writings
with alphabetical signs convey clearly that there was a high-register
pronunciation of the word that artificially retained the m (Smith 1987:
91; Smith 1993: 61). The New Kingdom syllabic orthography is likely
to be understood the same way, that is to show the scribes intention
at marking specifically this slightly antiquated pronunciation (Quack
1994: 145).
So we are left with the well-known open questions. The New Kingdom
system is by no means completely new. Occasional cases of using short
Egyptian words, or reducing the second part of a two-consonantal sign
to a vocalic value if it was a weak half-vowel, are positively attested in
the Old and Middle Kingdom. Also, the use of the one-consonantal
signs of the weak consonants for vowel indication already occurs by
then. But there it is a comparatively rare phenomenon, whereas it is
much more frequent in the New Kingdom, so much so, that for this
period, it produces a notable difference in writing. Even if Egyptian
words also came to be written in it, syllabic writing is so much more
frequently attested with foreign words that the normal reaction of a
scholar who encounters a difficult or unknown word rendered by it
would be to look up the Semitic dictionaries for possible candidates.
We can suppose that such an elaborate system did not come about by
a whim, and, by far the most logical assumption is that its intent was
to provide a better indication of the vowels. However, it might have
failed by its desire for perfection, which made it create too many sub-
rules and which overburdened the scribes with requirements that most
of them could not implement.
The Late Period poses quite different problems, although by no means

less interesting, even if much less intensely debated. One point is to be
noted immediately: Many of the old syllabic writings with original
two-consonantal signs having a weak second consonant have become
the origin of the basic one-consonantal signs in free use in the Demotic
script. As such, they obviously are no longer in any way fixed to a par-
ticular vocalisation. Since such a state is likely to have had a prehistory
of development, this in itself might go some way towards explaining the
problems in the analysis of New Kingdom syllabic writing. The system
was not stable in itself, but changed over time, and excluding late mate-
rial, especially from texts of post-dynasty 20, should be imperative for
any serious study of the New Kingdom syllabic orthography. This new
development means that contrary to the state in the New Kingdom,
the difference between hereditary Egyptian words and foreign loans is
no longer hinted at by the graphic system itself.
One particular case in the Late Period are texts written in demotic
script but exclusively for rendering a foreign language. The most
famous demotic text of this type is pAmherst 63 (See, e.g., Vleeming
& Wesselius 1982; 198384; 1985; Nims & Steiner 1982; Steiner &
Nims 1984; Steiner 1991; Kottsieper 1997a; Kottsieper 1997b.). This
is a text in demotic script but Aramaic language. Such a constellation
creates interesting phenomena. On the one hand, several important
phonetic distinctions cannot be rendered at all, especially in most
cases the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants. On the
other hand, several distinctions, namely that between h and h as well
as that between and not expressed in regular Aramaic script, turn
up consistently in this text and thus show that they were still present
in the spoken language.
In general, the text uses the normal demotic one-consonantal signs,
but there are about 20 non-alphabetic groups present. Most of them are
actually short demotic words. A question that has not yet been verified
by any scholar but that would certainly be worth a try is whether any
of them can be fixed to a specific vowel corresponding to that of the
demotic word in question. At least, it would seem a bit surprising if
they were used without such a reason. We have, for example, the group
for silver (Demotic h) of which the actual pronunciation should be
about *het,2 or the god Mn for which a form *mn can be assumed.
2
This is supposing that the dialect of the demotic relevant here is closer to Akhmimic
than to Saidic in the vocalism.
Some groups are a bit more complicated, such as one interpreted by

Nims and Steiner as originally being hn, but used mostly for simple h
(Steiner & Nims 1984: 9092), while Kottsieper thinks that it is a ligature
of h and r, which, due to the fact that Egyptian r in final position was
dropped from pronunciation, could also be used for the combination
of h and vowel (Kottsieper 1997b: 399406). I cannot follow Kottsieper.
Firstly, the Demotic writing does not use such a ligature. Secondly, an
original Egyptian r dropped from pronunciation would no longer be
written with an r-sign in Demotic orthography.
Equally problematic is the proposal to interpret a highly disputed
divine name in the text. It is written as if it is a combination of demotic
and the group for the god Horus.3 Kottsieper has proposed to inter-
pret this as writing for El. According to him, it would be modelled on
the demotic writing of the preposition r before a suffix as r-hr or -hr,
whereas the phonetic realization was something like er or el (Kottsieper
1988: 225f.; Kottsieper 1997a: 54f.). While I admit that I do not have
any better positive proposal, and even though I concur with him in the
refusal of Zauzichs effort (1985) to interpret the writing as Jahwe, I
cannot accept his argumentation. In the first place, the Demotic writing
of the preposition uses only the form of the word face, never that
of the divine name Horus, which has a distinctly different form in
Demotic.4 Secondly, it is followed by no suffix at all. Finally, never in
demotic orthography would the first sign of this combination be written
as instead of or r. No one trained in Demotic orthography would
ever have guessed that he had to pronounce such a group as *El.5
Among the vowels, the signs for i and e are fairly easy to identify
and correspond to the normal demotic groups, but there is one huge
problem. One of the most frequent signs in the text is the one that
in demotic serves to write . In demotic writing, this has no longer
a consonantal value. It is probably used for the indication of vowels,
especially for a and e, and occurs as such in the demotic renderings of
Greek words. However, most Semitists are not happy with the results
of applying this to papyrus Amherst 63, because they think that such an
3
In my opinion, the group can only be analyzed as the writing of the gods name,
not as that of the word hr face or wh to add.
4
Kottsieper 1997a, 55 no. 115 cites Erichsen 1950, II 76 as example, but there
Erichsen gives only a phonetic transliteration without indicating the form of the
groups.
5
Actually, the evidence of the Coptic dialects would even indicate that the original
form of the preposition before the suffix was *ar rather than *er.
interpretation would run counter to all received theories about Aramaic

pronunciation in the fourth century bc. Up to now, only Kottsieper
has tried to take the all vowel indications seriously.
Additionally, we have determinatives. One of them, in principle the
sign for the man with the hand to his mouth, serves regularly as a word-
divider. Others are fairly rare, but seem, at least in part, to be due to
phonetic similarities between the Aramaic word and an Egyptian word
typically written with this determinative (Steiner & Nims 1984: 91).
A magical charm against scorpions written down in Early Demotic
script in the Wadi Hammamat (Vittmann 1984) might contain a similar
writing system, although it is still disputed to which extent it can really
be read as Semitic (thus Steiner 2001) or might also contain purely
magical gibberish (cf. Vittmann 2003: 119).
Semitic loan-words in Demotic do occur, but it is likely that quite
a few are not recent borrowings but are handed over from the New
Kingdom (Vittmann 1996). Their writing is quite consistently alpha-
betic and with the appropriate determinative for their semantic class.
The same goes for Persian words and names (Azzoni & Lippert 2000;
Vittmann 2004).
There is a fairly large corpus of Greek personal names rendered in
Demotic script, especially from the Ptolemaic Period onwards. They
permit to establish rather regular sets of correspondences between
Greek sounds and demotic renderings (Clarysse & van der Veken
1983: 133165).
Vowel indication in those name-renderings is rather sparse. Only
the vowels i and u are marked in the majority of the cases by demotic
y and w. This does not even constitute a really special case for the for-
eign words because in Demotic words written with one-consonantal
signs, specifically for long i and u, indicating them by those signs is
an optional possibility.
Normally, those names are written exclusively with the one-consonantal
signs of the demotic script, but there are exceptions. In demotic, we
have the word ngn vessel, Greek that uses as a first element
the two-consonantal group n (actually used in the word again). One
case in hieroglyphic writing has recently been proposed where a name
actually standing for Zenon would be written as snn by using the two-
consonantal sign sw or the two-consonantal sign sn followed by the
group of three nw-vessels (Engsheden 2006).
For loan-words other than names, we have a rather limited amount
of Greek loan-words. A study arrived at an amount of a bit fewer than
a hundred items, but it has to be stressed that the number is likely to

have been substantially higher during the Roman time, especially as two
technical texts with a large number of loanwords, one magical, the other
medical, were deliberately excluded from the count (Clarysse 1987).
Rarely are demotic foreign words written with the group for an
indigenous word used as part of it. There is only one very notable
case: The rendering of the Greek relative that was used as
a high title at the Ptolemaic royal court. This was sometimes written
using the demotic group for sn brother, followed by writing gns with
standard one-consonantal values (Spiegelberg 1917: 128f.; Clarysse
1987: 15). The literal meaning brother of the first element certainly
contributed to its choice in preference to a simple phonetic rendering
of the first syllable.
Even more remarkable are other forms of this word attested mainly
in contemporary hieratic texts, but exceptionally also in demotic. There,
we have a rendering as sn n mhw.t brother of the family (Mller 1913:
24* no. 156). This might seem obvious enough as a semantic rendering
but is likely to be inspired by the phonetic form of the Greek word. Even
more freely adapted are renderings as sn-nsw the kings brother.
Among the non-Greek loanwords in the demotic texts, we can point
to the frequent word kwr as a designation of the Nubian ruler which
is generally identified as Meroitic kore (Sauneron & Yoyotte 1952:
183187; Verhoeven & Derchain 1985: 37). In older Egyptian texts,
this is treated like any normal loan-word. In Demotic, however, it is
typically written with the one-consonantal sign for k followed by the
group for wr the great one. We can suppose that the appropriateness
of such a semantic association contributed to its use.
In all those cases, loanwords are not immediately recognizable from
their writing. The great preponderance of using only one-consonantal
signs obviously makes them a bit special, but such an orthography is
equally possible for original Egyptian words. If anything, their phonetic
structure can render them conspicuous.
A special case, quite apart from the rest, are Demotic renderings in
late-demotic magical manuscripts. In those, we have an intense fluc-
tuation in language and script (see Quack 2004; Dieleman 2005). Very
often, incantations are transposed into the medium of demotic script
from a model written in Greek regardless of the ultimate origin of
the formulae, which can be Egyptian or Greek or Semitic or, mostly, a
mingling of all of them. But regardless of their linguistic origin, most
are treated as loans, i.e., transcribed phonetically on the basis of their
Greek spelling. They adhere much more slavishly to their model than
the Ptolemaic renderings, e.g., the aspiration of word-initial Greek ,
or of the sounds and , is practically always indicated. There is a
system of rendering of even the vowels in their actual pronunciation
that makes this quite like a one-to-one correspondence, i.e., from the
Demotic form, the Greek form can be inferred even when it is not given
as a supralinear gloss (in most cases, it is). Notable is the handling of
the determinatives. In this papyrus, we have practically all of the words
in question with a final divine determinative as if they were felt by the
Egyptian scribe to all represent the names of higher powers even
though not all of them actually do in an etymological sense.
Much rarer are Greek loanwords in Graeco-Roman hieroglyphic temple
inscriptions. This has given rise to some discussions as to whether this
was a deliberate purism, perhaps with a political prejudice against the
Greeks (cf. Peust 2000: 251; Knigge 2004: 7072). More probably, this
is simply due to the fact that most of those texts, even though written
down in the Ptolemaic Period, are based on much older archetypes
from a time before contacts with Greece and its vocabulary became
really intense.
There is, however, one often-commented upon word, namely rk-wr,
which designates a metal and is generally assumed to be derived from
Greek silver (Wilson 1997: 167f.). The Egyptian orthography
makes use of purely Egyptian words for the rendering, and the writing
could be interpreted as something like great bend one. If this really
is derived from Greek, it would be a clear case of inner-Egyptian re-
analysis including a phonetic shift that introduced the at the beginning
of the word (a sound which does not exist in the Greek language).
Concerning the mechanisms at work in creating special systems
for writing foreign words, I would like to comment systematically on
one point that might easily get lost on modern-day man. One of the
driving factors of developing a system of writing for foreign words
with efforts at indicating the vowels was magic, or at least ritual in a
wider context. Of the earliest renderings of foreign names on a large
scale, most came from execration figurines used by the Egyptians in
official magical rituals. In the New Kingdom, the longer sequences of
purely foreign words occur in magical handbooks, and this becomes
even more pronounced in the late demotic papyri. There is a logical
reason for it. The system of magic relied to a large extent on the cor-
rect use of formulae, tending to circumscribe ever more closely what
to use if one wanted to succeed in ones endeavour. Strangeness of the
formulae in itself was not a liability; it even could become an asset.

For example, in a spell aimed at producing visions of the gods deliv-
ering messages, reciting a weird formula several times, often in dark
rooms heavy with smoke of incense, would help to produce an altered
state of mind actually resulting in visions. In magic, there never were
prejudices against foreigners as such; rather a deep-seated suspicion
that foreigners might be better at it (Koenig 1987). Thus, on the one
hand, borrowing foreign formulae was encouraged; on the other hand,
such borrowings often entailed preserving them in their original state
of proven efficiency, not to translate them with the risk of destroying
their power. This, more than anything else, would have been a driving
force behind efforts to create a writing system capable of rendering also
the vowels in an unambiguous way.
All that I have presented up to now concerns cases where the foreign
word was adapted to the writing in the Egyptian script; and this is cer-
tainly what the norm was. There is, however, one important group of
texts where things are quite different. In the ostraca from Narmouthis
(nowadays Medinet Madi) in the Fayum, which came from the late sec-
ond and third century ad (Bresciani, Pernigotti, Betro 1983; Gallo 1997;
Menchetti 2005), we have a percentage of Greek words in the demotic
texts that far surpasses that of any other Demotic texts probably a
question of the historic development of the Demotic language, which
absorbed many Greek loanwords in the Roman Imperial time. Those
are not adapted to the Egyptian writing system. Instead, they retained
their original Greek writing and as such stood out very much against
the rest of the text including the different direction of writing. That is,
of course a short and transient state. Finally, the Greek writing, which
is here still the isolated odd word, dominates, and we get Coptic with
a basically Greek writing (plus a few taken from Demotic for sounds
not present in Greek), which again uses the same alphabet for Egyptian
words and Greek loans.
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WHAT IS BEING BORROWED?
LANGUAGE AND SCRIPT CONTACT IN TAIWAN1
Henning Klter
Introduction
Many terminological distinctions applied in loanword studies go back to

Einar Haugens (19061994) analysis of the behavior of North American
bilinguals (Haugen 1950). Citing an earlier study by Paul (1886), Haugen
claims that [f]or any large-scale borrowing a considerable group of
bilinguals has to be assumed. The analysis of borrowing must therefore
begin with an analysis of the behavior of bilingual speakers (1950: 210).
In the case of bilinguals, paths of borrowing are bidirectional, from
language A to language B and vice versa. The analytical dimensions of
linguistic borrowing turn out to be much more complicated when a
multilingual community and the written representation of loanwords
are taken into consideration. Multilingual speakers have a high degree
of fluency in more than two languages, and they may be educated in
different scripts.
A case in point for this scenario is Taiwan, an island-state located off
the southeastern coast of the Chinese mainland. Many people in Taiwan
have a high degree of fluency in two or more languages and are famil-
iar, to different degrees, with at least three different scripts. Whereas
lexical borrowing between Taiwans languages has been analyzed in a
number of previous studies (e.g., Chang 1995, Chung 2001, Hansell
1989, Li 2003, Yo 1992), the effects of multiscriptualism on writing
behavior and the interplay between language and script contact have
largely been neglected. This article claims that this neglect has, in turn,
led to terminological insufficiency whenever the analysis of loanwords
is integrated with issues of loanword writing. This article neither deals
with one particular script nor with one particular language. Instead,
by inventorying types of borrowing evidenced in language and script
1
I would like to thank Sachiko Matsumoto, Heinz Lohmann, Tiun Hok-ch and
Tiun Hak-khiam for providing some of the examples discussed in my paper and Jeroen
Wiedenhof for his valuable comments on an earlier draft.
94 henning klter
contact situations in Taiwan, it attempts to provide an empirical basis

for terminological refinement.
My analysis of linguistic borrowing is placed in the sociolinguis-
tic context of the languages and scripts analyzed. Contact between
languages and contact between scripts occur under specific sociolin-
guistic conditions. The coexistence of two or more different languages
in one linguistic community is one important condition for languages
to attain contact. Coexistence of language does not necessarily entail
script contact. One obvious reason is that not all of the languages in
contact are necessarily written languages. Another possible reason is
the exclusion of an existing script from official language planning.
If a script is not being spread through educational institutions, it is
unlikely to become established within a linguistic community. The
claim that coexistence of languages does not entail script contact may
also be reversed: borrowing of a script does not require coexistence of
languages within one linguistic community. For instance, alphabetic
writing was brought to Taiwan by Western missionaries as early as in
the seventeenth century. Since then, it has been used in various sources
to write local languages. Various directions of language contact and
patterns of script contact in Taiwan are introduced in the first two
sections of this article. This is followed by an introduction to existing
loanword terminology. Finally, different types of borrowing are distin-
guished on the basis of loanwords and their written representation in
twentieth century Taiwan.
Patterns of Language Contact
The situation of Taiwan in the twentieth century can best be described

as a multidirectional web of language and script contacts. The reasons
for this multidirectionality can be found in Taiwans complex linguistic
setting, its disputed political status, and in changing conceptualizations
of its cultural belonging. According to the Ethnologue database, Taiwan
is home to twenty-two living languages (Ethnologue 2006). Most of these
are Austronesian languages spoken by Taiwans indigenous peoples, also
referred to as Formosan languages (Li 2000: 45). Through the influx of
Chinese settlers after the seventeenth century, Austronesian ethnicities
have become marginalized. According to Ethnologue figures, seven of
the sixteen living Formosan languages are nearly extinct. Speakers of
what is being borrowed? 95
Formosan languages now comprise less than two percent of Taiwans

population.
The overwhelming majority of the population are speakers of one
or several Sinitic languages. Of these, Taiwanese Southern M n (here-
after: TSM) is the most widely spread. According to most sources, the
proportion of TSM speakers is about seventy-three percent (GIO 2005,
Huang 2000, Tsao 1999). Speakers of Hakka dialects, the second major
Sinitic dialect group, constitute about fifteen percent of the popula-
tion. This would leave a ten percent portion of first language speakers
of Mandarin Chinese. Considering that Mandarin has been the only
official language and the dominant language of education since 1945,
this figure seems questionably low. It is rather likely that Mandarin has
replaced TSM and Hakka as first language to a much greater extent.
This claim, however, cannot be substantiated on the basis of recent
sociolinguistic surveys.
Another language that has left its traces in Taiwan is Japanese.
Japanese and Chinese are genetically unrelated languages. The spread
of the Japanese language to Taiwan was brought about by Taiwans
colonization in 1895. For the following fifty years, Taiwan was a part
of the Japanese empire. The Japanese colonial government not only
declared Japanese the national language, but colonial authorities also
enforced the active use of Japanese through the newly established public
education system and the media. During the final decade of Japanese
colonial rule, the public use of local Taiwanese languages like TSM and
Hakka in public was suppressed. As a result of this policy of mono-
lingualism, many Taiwanese spoke, read and wrote modern Japanese
when Japan ceded its colonies in 1945. It is noteworthy that during
the period of Japanese colonial rule, Mandarin was hardly spoken in
Taiwan. The first official attempts to promote a standard Mandarin
pronunciation had no effect on the situation in Taiwan, as the island
was part of the Japanese empire during the 1920s. Various Taiwanese
intellectuals became conversant in Mandarin when they lived and stud-
ied in Northern China. Their number was, however, too small for us to
consider Mandarin one of Taiwans languages before 1945. In 1945, after
the end of the Second World War, Taiwan reverted to the Republic of
China (ROC) and Mandarin replaced Japanese as the official language
and the language of education. Ever since, written Mandarin has been
the focus of literacy education. As Taiwan has not adopted PRC script
reforms, traditional Chinese characters remain the essence of Mandarin
96 henning klter
literacy. The spread of Mandarin received a boost in 1949, when, after

its defeat in the Chinese civil war, the ROC government and millions
of Chinese immigrants withdrew to Taiwan. Among these immigrants,
Mandarin was widely used as a lingua franca.
Since the 1980s, with the inflow of foreign popular culture and the ris-
ing popularity of foreign language learning, loans from donor languages
such as Japanese (again) and English found their way into Taiwan. The
contact between Taiwans Sinitic languages and Japanese has, in other
words, taken place in two different sociolinguistic contexts. Before
1945, Japanese, as the official language and language of education, was
at the top of the linguistic hierarchy. Since the 1980s, Japanese, now
largely lacking communicative utility, is one donor of slang expressions
associated with foreign pop culture (Hsieh & Hsu 2006).
An attempt to integrate all of Taiwans languages into an analysis of
linguistic borrowing would be beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I
only consider those languages for which I have been able to collect data
that distinguish the maximal number of types of borrowing. Therefore,
Hakka and Formosan examples have not been taken into consideration.
Even within this simplified framework, the multidirectionality of lan-
guage contact in Taiwan will become obvious. As shown in Figure 1,
nine different directions of borrowing can be considered.
As can be seen, many TSM loanwoards come from Japanese, English
and Mandarin. Zhng Gungys dictionary (Zhng 2005), with its
more than thirty thousand entries, is a comprehensive source for these
loanwords. In one instance (1), the direction of borrowing is indicated
with a dotted arrow. This indicates that borrowing has not been reported
in sources and can be expected to be rather limited. It is conceivable
time 1895 1945
languages (a) Japanese Mandarin
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
languages (b) TSM

9
8
languages(s) (c) Japanese English
Figure 1. Directions of language contact in Taiwan.

that Japanese residents of Taiwan2 who had achieved some proficiency

in TSM used TSM loans in Japanese conversations with compatriots.
I have, however, thus far not found any mention of this direction of
borrowing. Arrow 3 stands for indirect borrowing from Japanese into
Mandarin via TSM. The frame encircling languages (a) and (b) sepa-
rates languages spoken in Taiwan from foreign languages. Japanese
appears twice: as the official language, it occupied the highest level of
Taiwans linguistic hierarchy before 1945. As a foreign language associ-
ated with foreign pop culture, Japanese has now little communicative
utility in Taiwan. As can be seen, the general direction of borrowing
is from high varieties (the official languages Japanese and Mandarin)
to low varieties, here represented by TSM. Due to a lack of descriptive
research, dimensions of borrowing from TSM to Mandarin and vice
versa cannot be assessed in quantitative terms. My personal impression
is that TSM spoken by younger speakers has absorbed a high number
of lexical loans from Mandarin. The number of TSM loans in Mandarin
seems to be smaller.
Directions of Script Contact
Analogous to Haugens loanword analysis, analysis of script borrowing

must assume a considerable group of biscriptuals or multiscriptu-
als, i.e., users of two or more scripts. In the case of script borrowing,
sociolinguistic constraints make the direction of borrowing more pre-
dictable than in the case of language contact. In the case of Taiwan,
only dominant languages are linked to written traditions and subject of
literacy planning. Conversely, script users are only exposed to scripts
culturally linked to dominant languages. In the case of Taiwan, three
different scripts associated with the two dominant languages, Japanese
and Mandarin, have been in use during the twentieth century. In
addition, alphabetic writing has been used as a script imported from
outside. The directions of script borrowing are summarized in Figure 2.
The frame separates scripts associated with Taiwans national languages
from alphabetic writing, which has no footing in a national language.
Two scripts are culturally linked to the writing of modern Japanese,
viz. characters originating from China known as kanji ( Chinese
2
According to Davidson ([1903] 1992: 560594), about 19,000 Japanese lived in
Taiwan in 1900.
98 henning klter
script Japanese kana Japanese kanji Chinese characters MPS
language Japanese Mandarin
language TSM
script alphabetic writing
Figure 2. Directions of script contact.
hnz) and the two kana syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. The former
is typically used for particles, auxiliary verbs, and the inflectional affixes
of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Katakana is used in contemporary
texts to write foreign names and loanwords, onomatopoeic and mimetic
words, exclamations, and some specialized scientific terminology
(Smith 1996: 212). In other words, in a written Japanese sentence, all
scripts may co-occur, and each encodes a different kind of linguistic
information (for details, see Seeley 1991, Shibatani 1990, Smith 1996).
Written Mandarin in Taiwan is likewise associated with two scripts:
Chinese characters, known as hnz , and Mandarin Phonetic
Symbols (zhyn fho , hereafter: MPS). MPS are currently
taught at Taiwanese schools as a stepping-stone to character reading
and as an input method for word processing systems. In contrast to
Japanese writing in which three scripts co-occur, MPS only have aux-
iliary functions, indicating the reading of the character to which they
are attached. The treatment of Japanese kanji and Chinese characters as
two different scripts is admittedly not uncontroversial. Both scripts are
logographic,3 and they have a high number of characters in common.
However, because Japan has its own set of locally developed kanji, I
treat kanji and Chinese characters as two different scripts. The Roman
alphabet is the only script in Taiwan which has gained acceptance with-
3
In logographic writing systems, a written graph has a semantic link with the word
or morpheme it represents. The categorization of Chinese writing as logographic is not
uncontroversial, as it is well known that the pronunciation of the represented word has
likewise been an important factor in the development of Chinese writing.
out being linked to a national language. Its use for writing Mandarin
is restricted to street signs and other public boards.
TSM has never been subject to orthographic standardization and
literacy education. There have been, however, various attempts by
Western missionaries and local language revivalist groups to establish
a written TSM standard. Closely linked to socio-cultural debates on
the status of authentic Taiwanese culture (for details, see Klter 2005:
Chapters 4 and 5, Klter 2009), these attempts involve the use of vari-
ous scripts, which in turn explains why TSM has been written with all
of the scripts that have ever been brought to Taiwan. To be sure, as
a Sinitic language, TSM is culturally linked to the Chinese character
script. Classical Chinese texts written in characters have a local, albeit
almost forgotten, recitation convention in Southern M n. Moreover,
many speakers, when asked about a particular TSM expression, tend to
explain its meaning in terms of characters cited from classical texts or
written Mandarin. However, the links between TSM and the Chinese
character script are limited. As estimated by Cheng (1978), about five
percent of TSM morphemes, most of which are frequently used function
words, lack an appropriate established Chinese character. The lack of
such characters is one reason why written TSM has made use of auxiliary
scripts like MPS or romanized transcriptions. The ideological dimension
behind the selection of scripts is another reason for the widespread use
of alphabetic TSM writing in recent years.4 In the course of Taiwans
ideological and political de-Sinification movement, alphabetic TSM
scripts have been heralded as a symbol of cultural non-Chineseness.
Terminological Considerations
As stated above, a description of borrowing processes between lan-

guages lacks appropriate terminology when both words and their
written representation are taken into consideration. Western linguistic
terminology sufficiently describes morphemic, phonemic, and semantic
4
TSM language revivalist groups advocating the use of the traditional missionary
romanization system have become increasingly influential. In September 2006, the
Ministry of Education decided that TSM textbooks for elementary schools will use an
alphabetic orthography (Zh 2006). Since 2001, two weekly hours of local language
learning (i.e., in TSM, Hakka or an Austronesian language) has been compulsory for
Taiwanese elementary school students. Most elementary schools offer TSM classes
only (Klter 2006).
100 henning klter
changes occurring in the process of borrowing from the donor language

to the recipient language. Most analyses (for example, Hock & Joseph
1996, Lehiste 1988) employ terminological distinctions introduced by
Haugen (1950), who distinguished between loanwords, loanblends,
and loanshifts. A loanword, according to Haugens definition, refers
to expressions in which speakers have not imported only the mean-
ing of the form but also its phonemic shape, though with more or less
substitution of native phonemes (1950: 213f.). Phonemic substitution
is the rule rather than the exception. For instance, when used as a loan
in Dutch, the French word restaurant /rst'r/ restaurant becomes
/resto'rant/. A loanblend is defined as morphemic substitution as well
as importation (Haugen 1950: 215). An example is German chatten
communicate interactively via computers, which is combination of the
borrowed English verbal stem chat and the German infinitive ending
-en. A loanshift has the two subtypes, loan translation (also known
as calque) and semantic loan. A loan translation is a compound
expression with a new meaning (Haugen 1950: 214). The meaning
and the structural pattern of the loanword are direct renderings of the
original expression, as English power politics < German Machtpolitik
(power+politics). In the case of a semantic loan, the donor language
induces a semantic shift of a word already existing in the recipient lan-
guage, e.g., American Portuguese humoroso capricious > humorous
(< American English humorous).
As I have argued above, these terms are unspecific about the written
representation of loans. Questions of spelling, for instance the issue of
orthographic assimilation vs. preservation of original spellings (e.g.,
Dutch <kado> vs. <cadeau> gift), find little attention in studies on
linguistic borrowing, but is, rather, discussed in orthography studies
on particular languages (e.g., Johnson 2005 on German, Upward &
Pulcini 1996 on Italian).
In Chinese and Japanese terminology, we find the reverse situation.
Here terminological distinctions are centered on written graphs. At the
same time they are rather unspecific when it comes to identifying types
of morphemic, phonemic, and semantic differences between a bor-
rowed word and the original word in the donor language. For example,
semantic borrowing in Japanese is associated with the term kun (or its
Mandarin equivalent xn) gloss, meaning. According to Coulmas
(1989: 123), kun refers to a meaning-based way of using Chinese
characters, e.g., the Japanese reading hito of the character man,
person. The meaning man, person of the graph is derived from
Chinese sources where the same character has the Mandarin reading
rn (< MC nyin < OC *njin man, person). The reverse sound-based
type of borrowing is associated with the Japanese term on (Mandarin
yn) sound. On readings refer to Japanese approximations of the
original Chinese character reading. For example, the Japanese reading
nin man, person of the character is derived from an earlier form
of Mandarin rn (MC nyin < OC *njin) man, person. Another term
associated with borrowing in a broader sense is Chinese jiaji ,
which Norman & Mattos translate as loangraph (2000, Chapter 9).
According to their English translation of Qi Xgus (1995) definition,
a loangraph is a homophonous or nearly homophonous graph bor-
rowed to write another word, e.g., the use of the character for c
horse whip for the semantically unrelated word c register, book
(Qi 1995: 203, 209, tr. Norman, Mattos 2000: 261, 268). Loangraph
in the sense of the Chinese term jiaji , to be sure, does not refer
to borrowing between different languages, but to an internal process
within the Chinese writing system: an unwritten expression receives a
character on the basis of an established word-graph association. The
Japanese kun and on terminology likewise do not distinguish processes
of borrowing but instances of character reading.
This look at language through the written character, aptly character-
ized by William Wang (1996) as Hanzi filter (hnz Chinese
character), is quite common in traditional Chinese philology. It is note-
worthy that the Chinese term z itself is not clearly defined as either
a unit of the spoken or the written language. The definition written
graph is implied in the division of dialect expressions into two groups:
those having sounds and having characters (you yn you z
), i.e., dialect expressions with an established Chinese character, and
those having sounds but no characters (you yn w z ),
i.e., dialect expressions lacking an established Chinese character. In the
field of Chinese etymology we find a similar terminological focus on
characters. Linking etymological verification to the search for written
characters, etymological research, as defined by traditional Chinese
philology, involves the search for original characters (bnz ).
Commenting on the methodological implications of this character-
focused approach to etymology, Branner writes (2000: 35):
[T]he use of beentzyh [bnz] leads people to see the characters as absolute
symbols of the Common Chinese morphemes underlying all dialect forms.
This is one of the implications of the Chinese writing system that has both
helping and misleading results. Many field-workers in China apparently
102 henning klter
elicit dialect morphemes mainly as monosyllabic character-readings, which

causes confusion. For instance, one may easily fail to distinguish between
real words and mere learnd forms that are artefacts of literacy.
In summation, an attempt to describe the many facets of the interplay
between language and script in the process of borrowing has to deal
with deficient terminology. Previous attempts to fill the gaps have
arguably not provided feasible solutions. One example is the term
graphic loans, introduced by Novotn (1967) and employed in many
later studies (e.g., Hansell 1989, Kuiper 1993). Novotns definition of
a graphic loan runs as follows (1967: 614):
The graphic shape together with the meaning of a word of the giving
language is introduced into the borrowing language. The phonemic shape
of this loan is formed on the basis of the phonemic system of the borrow-
ing language according to the phonemic values which the applied graphs
possess, irrespective of the phonemic shape of the model. This technique
of borrowing is possible only between languages using ideographic writ-
ing where the meaning of the morpheme is not entirely dependent on
the intermediary function of its phonemic shape, but can be displayed
directly by the grapheme.5
On the one hand, this definition seems appealing, as it nicely links
morphemic and phonemic aspects of borrowing to the issue of graphic
representation. But, on the other hand, it remains unspecific with regard
to the question whether the term graphic loan actually implies graphic
innovation in the recipient language. Graphic innovation seems to be
suggested by the explanation the graphic shape [. . .] is introduced into
the borrowing language. Novotn furthermore argues that [t]here are
numerous instances of graphic loans in modern Chinese from Japanese
without any, or any essential change in the morphemic shape of the
borrowed word. Only a Chinese phonemic shape is supplied (1967:
616). Two of her examples are Chinese kf overcome, conquer
< Japanese kokufuku and shoux procedure < tetsuzuki
. The linguistic innovations in Chinese are the linguistic forms
kf and shoux and their meanings overcome, conquer and proce-
dure respectively. The individual graphs , , , and cannot be
5
As Coulmas points out, ideographic writing is often used interchangeably with
logographic writing. He also correctly remarks that the two should be carefully dis-
tinguished. Ideograms in the strict sense of the term are non-linguistic symbols which
express concepts such as numbers. By contrast, logograms are signs which express
units of a language (1999: 309).
considered innovations, as all of them were in Chinese use long before

the words kf overcome, conquer and shoux procedure were bor-
rowed from Japanese. The only new aspect on the graphic side is the
sequence of characters in and , but as this sequence reflects
and is determined by the structural pattern of the borrowed words, the
term graphic loan for this type of borrowing seems misleading. This
is not to refute the notion that the characters play an important role
in the process of borrowing. After all, as visible and easily recogniz-
able indicators of the morphological structure of borrowed Japanese
words, characters may ease a loans way into the Chinese recipient
language. Still, as a label for a specific process of borrowing I find the
term graphic loan misleading, as it may suggest that new characters
are added to the existing stock of Chinese characters. This is by no
means the case.
Another weakness of Novotns definition is the categorical exclusion
of script mixing as a possible type of graphic borrowing. This exclu-
sion conceals a widespread instance of language and script contact. For
example, the common spellings of the loans dwid DVD and xd
CD are <DVD> and <CD> respectively. As shown below, the insertion
of foreign graphic items into the Chinese script is by no means
uncommon. One may argue that most of such spellings are not recog-
nized by orthographic authorities. Still, I claim that an orthographic
bias conceals many aspects of how speakers of a language and users of
a script accommodate foreign elements. Therefore, going beyond the
scope of orthographically sanctioned writing, many of the examples
treated below are selected from informal written contexts, such as
roadside billboards, shop signs, cartoons, or television subtitles.
Types and Subtypes of Borrowing
The central question of my analysis of borrowing types is: what is bor-

rowed when languages and scripts are in contact? Haugens distinction
of loanword types focuses on two aspects of linguistic analysis: form
and meaning. Form refers to the phonological form of speech units,
and, by definition, not to the graphic representation of words in writ-
ing. In other words, if issues of loanword writing are integrated into
the analysis, graphic representation must be distinguished from the
linguistic form as a third aspect. The question what is being borrowed
thus refers to form, meaning and graphs of loanwords. It determines
104 henning klter
which of these three aspects enter the process of borrowing, and which
emerge from the borrowing process as innovations in the recipient
language. The plus and minus signs in my formulae for types of bor-
rowing indicate whether an aspect is maintained (+) or dropped ()
in the borrowing process.
Type 1: [+ form, + meaning, + graph]

Loanwords of this type retain the linguistic form, the meaning, and
the graph(s) of the original word. As mentioned above, retention of
linguistic form does not exclude phonemic substitution.
type 1
Example 1: donor language recipient language
Japanese Taiwanese
form chko > tiong1-koo2
meaning used, second hand > used, second hand
graph >
In the case of example 1, the Japanese form chko is assimilated into

the phonology of TSM, resulting in tiong1-koo2. According to Chang
(1993: 143), TSM developed a set of phonological rules to assimilate
Japanese loanwords systematically (phonological aspects of Japanese/
TSM are also treated in Tsao 2000, Hsieh 2006). Type 1 of borrowing
is quite common in twentieth century Taiwan. Example 2 shows that
the TSM loan tiong1-koo2 used, second hand has induced lexical
innovation in Mandarin. Example 3 is the common TSM word for toilet.
It is very likely of Japanese origin, as Southern M n dictionaries from
the PRC, like the one compiled by the Ximn University (1993), do
not list pian7-soo2. Examples 411 are recent Mandarin loans used by
younger TSM speakers. Due to these speakers high exposure to spoken
and written Mandarin at all levels of education, in the media, and in
literature, Mandarin loans are gradually replacing TSM native vocabu-
lary. Older speakers would use chin3-cheng5 instead of TSM chi1-cheng5
before, prior to (ex. 4), si3-ke3 everywhere instead of to3-chhu3 (ex. 5),
tai7-seng1 instead of siu2-sian1 at first (ex. 6), liam5-pinn1 instead of
ma2-siong7 at once (ex. 7), chhin3-chhai2 instead of sui5-pian7 as you
like (ex. 9), bat4 instead of chan5-keng1 have already, exp and siong7
ho2 instead of choe3 ho2 the best (ex. 11). The transfer of the Chinese
characters from Mandarin to TSM expressions in examples 411 is
self-evident, as the representation with other Chinese characters is

simply inconceivable.
Table 1. Examples for type 1 of borrowing

Ex. Donor language Recipient language
2. TSM tiong1-koo2 used, second > Md. zhnggu old, second hand
hand

3. Jp. benjo toilet > TSM pian7-soo2 toilet

4. Md. zhqin before, prior to > TSM chi1-cheng5 before, prior
to

5. Md. dochu everywhere > TSM to3-chhu3 everywhere

6. Md. shouxin at first > TSM siu2-sian1 at first

7. Md. mashng at once > TSM ma2-siong7 at once

8. Md. shnbin at ones > TSM sun7-pian7 at ones
convenience convenience

9. Md. subin as you like > TSM sui5-pian7 as you like

10. Md. cngjng have already, exp > TSM chan5-keng1 have already,
exp

11. Md. zu hao the best > TSM choe3 ho2 the best

Type 1 is certainly not restricted to borrowings from donor languages

using logographic scripts. As mentioned above, English loanwords as
dwid DVD <DVD> and xd CD <CD> are common in Chinese
texts. Some English loans have two possible spellings: the original
spelling is either maintained or replaced by Chinese characters. These
different renderings in writing may reflect different degrees of phone-
mic substitution in the donor language, as in <cool> cool cool vs.
k cool and <hello> hello hello vs. hlu hello. As I claimed
above, the widespread use of English loans keeping their original spell-
ings contradict the claim that graphic borrowing only occurs between
languages using the same writing system.
106 henning klter
Type 2: [+ form, + meaning, graph]

This type refers to all words which are borrowed without graph(s). A
look at the initial and final points of the borrowing process reveals that
there are many different reasons why a graph is not borrowed into
the recipient language and also many different ways to fill the missing
gap [ graph] in the recipient language. When considering both the
reasons for not borrowing a graph and the solutions for the resulting
gap, various subtypes of type 2 can be distinguished. These subtypes
are summarized below.
The first division distinguishes instances of borrowing in which an
established graph of the donor language A is dropped in the process
of borrowing (2.1) from instances of borrowing in which an unwritten
word enters the process of borrowing (2.2). In case of the former, three
different solutions to the gap [ graph ] in the recipient language B
can be distinguished (subtypes 2.1.12.13.). These can be summarized
as follows:
(2.1.1) The loanword remains unwritten in the recipient language, as

its use is restricted to spoken contexts. The gap [ graph ] is,
in other words, not filled with a graph from the script of the
recipient language. The claim that loanwords of this subtype
remain unwritten does not imply that they are intrinsically
unwritten. Ad-hoc spellings of unwritten loans in an auxiliary
script can certainly be found. Such solutions are, however,
perceived as improvised dummy spellings by script users.
(2.1.2) Graph from the script of the recipient language B is used to
write the loanword. The loanword and its written representation
thus have different donors. The graph is selected on the basis
of phonological similarity between the borrowed word and the
reading of the character. I refer to these characters as phonetic
loan graphs.
(2.1.3) The only difference with type 2.1.2 lies in the selection of graph
. In type 2.1.3 it is selected on the basis of phonological and
semantic links between the chosen character and the loanword.
I refer to these graphs as phonosemantic loan graphs.
When an unwritten loanword enters the process of borrowing (type

2.2), the responses to the gap [ graph ] in the donor language seem
to differ from (2.1.1)(2.1.3). I have found no example for an originally
Table 2. Subtypes of type 2 [+ form, + meaning, graph]

Language A Language B
2.1 graph(s) 2.1.1 no graph , or graph(s)

2.1.2 graph(s) (phonetic loan graph)
2.1.3 graph(s) (phonosemantic loan graph)
2.2 no graph no graph , or graph(s)

Note: Graph is from a script linked to language A, graph from a script linked to
language B, and graph from an auxiliary script (MPS or Roman alphabet).
unwritten loanword that came to be written with characters without

losing or changing its original meaning. Like loanwords of the type
2.1.1, their written status is in a grey zone between unwritten and
occasionally written with graph(s) of an auxiliary script such as MPS
or the Roman alphabet. The subtypes of type 2 of borrowing are sum-
marized in table 2.
type 2.1.1
Japanese TSM
form tomato > tho2-ma2-tooh4
meaning tomato > tomato
graph >
In colloquial TSM, tho2-ma2-tooh4 tomato is a common expression,

yet it lacks an established spelling. In the Japanese donor language, the
spelling for tomato tomato is in katakana. In TSM reference
works of the period 18951945 compiled by Japanese linguists work-
ing for colonial government, a modified katakana syllabary is used for
TSM expressions (for details, see Klter 2005: 133152). This system
has, however, never gained any currency outside Japanese government
publications. Note that the Japanese word tomato is itself a loan from
English. As TSM borrowed the word from Japanese, I treat Japanese
as the donor language.
type 2.1.2
Japanese TSM
form obasan > oo1-ba2-sang2
meaning aunt, old lady > aunt, old lady
graph >
108 henning klter
In the case of example 13, the original Japanese expression obasang

aunt, old lady is represented in hiragana. Hiragana has never been
used for writing TSM. The TSM spelling is quoted from a
contemporary TSM dictionary (Dong 2001: 964). The characters are
chosen purely for their phonetic values, i.e., oo1, ba2, and
sang2. Semantic links between the meaning of the characters black,
name of an ancient state, and mulberry tree and the meaning
of the loan aunt, old lady cannot be established.
type 2.1.3
Japanese TSM
form tempura > thian1-pu2-lah4
meaning tempura > tempura
graph >
The example under discussion refers to Japanese batter-dipped seafood

and vegetables. The main difference between this example and the
former lies in the motivation behind the selection of characters. Other
than in the case of , the characters establish an associa-
tion with the meaning of the loanword: the Japanese tempura dish is
envisaged as sweet and not hot. TSM very likely borrowed the Japanese
word tempura as thian1-pu2-lah4 during the Japanese colonial period.
After 1945, TSM thian1-pu2-lah4 was in turn borrowed as tinbl into
Mandarin. Borrowing into Mandarin came along with the semantic
reinterpretation tinbl sweet and not hot. This reinterpretation must
be ascribed to Mandarin, as TSM *tinn1-be7-hiam1 for sweet and not hot
can hardly be linked to Japanese tempura. The loanword TSM thian1-
pu2-lah4 has, in other words, different sources: the form thian1-pu2-lah4
and the meaning tempura come from Japanese, and the characters
, together with the semantic reinterpretation sweet and not hot,
were later re-borrowed from Mandarin.
type 2.2
TSM Mandarin
form keng1 > keng1
meaning demure, reserved > demure, reserved
graph >
When used in colloquial Mandarin, the TSM loanword keng1 demure,

reserved does not undergo phonemic substitution. Lacking an estab-
lished Chinese character, it is mostly represented with the phonetic

symbols [g] in writing, as, for instance, in the title of the
book nnrn nrn du hn keng1 Men and
women are all demure (Wijn & Mq r 2003). Such improvised
spellings are not restricted to phonetic symbols. Another widespread
donor script is the Roman alphabet. An example for a TSM loanword
used in Mandarin and spelled with a Roman letter is khiu7 <Q> sticky,
viscous. The English reading [kju] of the letter <Q> resembles the
form khiu7 of the loan.
Type 3: [ form, + meaning, + graph]

In this type of borrowing, the graph and the meaning of the original
word are preserved and the foreign linguistic form is replaced by an
unrelated native form. I have not been able to find an example which
unambiguously qualifies for this type. Example 16 must be taken with
a grain of salt, as I explain presently.
type 3
Japanese TSM
form machi > teng1
meaning town > town
graph >
In example 16, the Japanese character and its semantic referent

town, have been borrowed into TSM. In the donor language, the
Japanese reading machi has been replaced by the unrelated TSM reading
teng1. In contemporary TSM, teng1 town and its Mandarin counter-
part dng are bound forms, generally associated with the compound
Se1-mng5-teng1 (Md. Xmndng) , lit. Western Gate Town, the
name of a district in Taipei.
The reason why this example does not qualify unambiguously as a
type 3 loan is that the character is, strictly speaking, not a graphic
innovation as it is attested in traditional Chinese dictionaries. In these
dictionaries the reading of is indicated as tng (Southern Mn teng2)
boundary between agricultural land. The character is a so-called
xngshng character consisting of a semantic determinative broadly
indicating the meaning of a character and a phonetic determinative
roughly indicating the sound. In , the left part agricultural land,
field is the semantic determinative and the right part (TSM teng1,
110 henning klter
Md. dng) is the phonetic. The historical path of borrowing of the

character can be conceived as follows: Japanese once borrowed the
Chinese character for its native expression machi street, town.
The semantic link between boundary between agricultural land and
street, town is self-evident: streets and town-like rural settlements
are located between fields. In modern Japanese, machi is a commonly
used morpheme for administrative units within a town. TSM in turn
borrowed Japanese street, town and replaced the Japanese reading
machi with the native reading teng1.
It is difficult to judge whether the historical pre-Japanese origin of
has played a role when the graph was borrowed from Japanese into
TSM. In other words, the question whether Taiwanese recipients of the
graph recognized a historical Chinese character or simply imposed
a TSM reading on a graph perceived as Japanese cannot be answered
with certainty. It is noteworthy, however, that the form teng1 in Se1-
mng5-teng1 Western Gate Town does not correspond to the traditional
Southern M n recitation form teng2 for . On the other hand, the TSM
form teng1 town exactly corresponds to the reading teng1 of the graph
, which is the phonetic in . This in turn suggests a reinterpretation
of the graphic components of rather than a rediscovery of a historical
character reading. Moreover, many Taiwanese users perceive the graph
as a Japanese kanji, regardless of its historical Chinese origins.
Type 4: [ form, meaning, + graph]

In this type, the only thing borrowed is the graph. The fact that neither
linguistic form nor meaning are borrowed does not imply that they
are absent from the process of borrowing. Instead of being borrowed,
semantic or phonetic features shared by the donor and the recipient
language explain the selection of characters. Two subtypes can be dis-
tinguished: (4.1) characters that are borrowed on semantic grounds
only, and (4.2) characters borrowed on phonetic grounds only. This
type is the reverse counterpart of type 2. Whereas the selection of
characters is the default result of type 4, type 2 by definition involves
the borrowing of lexical items.
type 4.1
(Mandarin) TSM
form (zi < EMC *tsaj`) ti7
meaning be in, at be in, at
graph >
Mandarin zi be in, at and TSM ti7 be in, at are etymologically unre-

lated. Whereas the origins of the former can be traced back to archaic
sources (1000200 bce) (Peyraube 1994), the oldest written evidence
of ti7 can be found in Southern M n translations of the Christian doc-
trine dating back to the seventeenth century (Klter 2005: 578, Klter
2007). In these sources, the character is used for its semantic value
in Mandarin. The same character for TSM ti7 be in, at can be found
in TSM sources of the twentieth century. All Japanese characters with a
kun reading are based on this type of borrowing (Chinese > Japanese),
viz. hito man, person, machi street, town, haru spring,
hitsuji sheep, etc.
type 4.2
(Mandarin) TSM
form bu (EMC *pwk) bueh4
meaning divine wish
graph >
In example 18, the use of for TSM bueh4 wish is based on the
Mandarin character reading bu (EMC *pwk). The Mandarin and
the TSM share phonetic similarities, but are semantically unrelated.
Type 5 [ form, + meaning, graph]

Loan translations (or calques) typically fall under this category. New
words in the recipient language are translations of the morphemes of
a foreign word. The loanword not only reflects new meaning, but also
a new structural arrangement of existing morphemes.
type 5
English Mandarin
form /hd dsk/ > yngdi
meaning hard disk > hard disk
graph <hard disk> >
In example 19, the morphemes already existing in the recipient language

are yng hard and di small plate. Under the influence of English
hard disk, they form the new compound yngdi hard disk. In this
compound, di small plate has undergone a semantic shift from small
plate (eating utensil) > disk, flat piece for storing information in a
112 henning klter
computer. Neither the phonological form /hd dsk/ nor the original
spelling <hard disk> are preserved in the loanword yngdi hard
disk. Loans of type 5 abound in Taiwan Mandarin, viz. English hot
dog > Md. rgou (hot+dog) hot dog, cold war > lng zhn
(cold+war) cold war, foreplay > qinx (before+play) foreplay,
download > xizai (down+load) download, etc.
Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, an integrated analysis of language and script contact

has two sides. Diversity in the written accommodation of loanwords
is closely linked to the social contexts of writing and to linguistic hier-
archies and policies of literacy education. The question of what is bor-
rowed when languages and scripts are in contact cannot be answered
sufficiently on the basis of existing loanword terminology. As above
examples show, it is by no means the rule that all analytic components
of a word, i.e., its form, its meaning and its representation in writ-
ing, enter the recipient language as a closed unit. Instead, recipient
languages are eclectic with regard to what is borrowed. Only a single
component or a combination of two components may be borrowed.
On the level of writing, users of a script resourcefully accommodate
loanwords traditionally written in a foreign script. Eclectic borrowing
and diversity in scriptal accommodation of loanwords yield various
types and subtypes of loanwords. My list of types and subtypes of bor-
rowing is unlikely to be complete. One obvious reason is that hybrid
loans have not been included. It can also be expected that more types
and subtypes are indentified when data from other language and script
communities are considered.
Conventions
Transcription
The romanization of Taiwanese expressions follows the Church
Romanization system. Tone marks have been replaced by numerals:
1 = ynpng (high level [55]), 2 = ynshang (falling [52]), 3 = ynq
(falling [31]), 4 = ynr (falling abruptly, ending in voiceless stop [32]),
5 = yngpng (falling-rising [214]), 6 = identical with 2, 7 = yngq
(medium level [33]), 8 = yngr (falling abruptly, ending in voiceless
stop [43]). The digraph <oo> stands for the close-mid back vowel //.
The transcription of Mandarin expressions is according to the Hnyu
Pnyn system. Japanese expressions are transcribed accord-
ing to the Hepburn system.
Symbols and Abbreviations

exp experiential aspect marker
Jp. Japanese
MC Middle Chinese
Md. Mandarin
OC Old Chinese
TSM Taiwanese Southern Mn
<,> (1) direction of borrowing
(2) direction of diachronic changes
<word> alphabetic spelling of a word
+ morpheme boundary
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THE ADAPTATION OF THE CUNEIFORM SCRIPT TO
FOREIGN LANGUAGES
The Case of Hurrian
Hurrians are attested in Mesopotamian sources since the reign of king

Naram-Sin of Akkad, ca. 2200 bc (Wilhelm 1996: 175, Steinkeller 1998:
88f ). This king conquered a number of places with Hurrian names,
probably located in the Habur region in the northeast of modern Syria.
Two hundred years earlier there are no Hurrian names to be found in
the written sources and the population in the north seems to have been
largely Semitic (ibid.). However, by 2200 bc Hurrians appear to have
established themselves throughout northern Mesopotamia and their
immigration must have started at least one generation earlier than the
reign of Naram-Sin. In this early period, we already find a few Hurrian
names of kings who ruled over city-states. King Atal-shen (ca. 2100)
ruled over a small state in the Habur region that encompassed his capital
Urkesh (modern Tell Mozan) and the city of Nawar/Nagar (modern
Tell Brak; Salvini 1998: 106f ). We know this from an inscription of
his written in Akkadian (Wilhelm 1988). His successors, Tupkish and
Tish-atal, probably only ruled over Urkesh; a large number of seal
impressions of Tupkish and his consort were found in Tell Mozan
(Buccellati & Kelly-Buccellati 19951996). King Tish-atal left us the
first inscription in Hurrian (Wilhelm 1998).
Attestations for the Hurrian population in northern Mesopotamia
are scarce during the Old Babylonian period (20001600 bc),1 a period
that saw a strong Amorite immigration from the west (Steinkeller 1998,
97f ). They become more numerous during the time of the Mittani
empire, which probably came into existence before the sixteenth century
and which came to an end around 1340 (Wilhelm 1994, 1996: 179f ).
During this time Hurrian city-states were united under a dynasty whose
members bore Indo-Arian names. The Mittani empire was one of the
1
For an overview of the available Hurrian sources, see Wegner (2000:16f).
118 wilfred h. van soldt
prominent states during the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries bc and

several letters of its last king Turatta were found in the Egyptian
capital Amarna (Akhet-Aten). The language used in these letters was
Akkadian, which served as lingua franca in the ancient Near East.
One letter, however, was written in Hurrian, the language of Mittani,
and this text has become one of our most important sources for our
knowledge of this language (Wegner 2000, 21, Wilhelm 1987, 1989:
32f). The scribes used a special orthography that seems to have been
designed for writing the Hurrian language (see below).
During the same period Hurrian influence in the Hittite empire
(Anatolia) was strong, in particular in the religious cult. This may be so
because of the close ties with the southern Anatolian state Kizzuwatna
that was once part of Mittani, but which had been closely linked with
the Hittite empire since king Tudhaliya I at the end of the fifteenth
century (Klengel 1999: 112f, Bryce 2005: 139). The influence is largely
ascribed to the fact that Puduhepa, one of the most influential Hittite
queens, originated in this country. Many of the cultic texts from the
Hittite capital H attua are written in Hurrian, but the orthography used
to write the language was not really standardized. Only in a bilingual
text in Hittite and Hurrian found in the 1980s is the orthography
more or less the same as that of the Mittani letter of Turatta (Neu
1988, 1996).
The Mittani empire was conquered by the Hittite king uppiluliuma
I around 1340, but the standard Mittani orthography was still in use
until the beginning of the twelfth century, as is clear from texts written
at both Karkami and Ugarit (van Soldt 1991: 364f ).
Hurrian was also written in another script, in the alphabetic cunei-
form of Ugarit. Since the Mesopotamian cuneiform expressed the
vowels but was less accurate with the consonants, and since Ugaritic
cuneiform wrote no vowels but expressed the consonants quite clearly,
words written in both scripts give us a better idea of their pronuncia-
tion (for examples, see below).
The Use of the Mesopotamian Syllabary for the Hurrian Language
The Mesopotamian cuneiform script was probably developed for

Sumerian. During the third millennium bc it was adapted for writing
the Akkadian language. Since Sumerian and Akkadian have differ-
ent phoneme inventories, it took considerable time before the script
the adaptation of the cuneiform script 119
was developed enough to express the Akkadian sounds satisfactorily.

Hurrian, however, was a language quite different from Akkadian, and
its phonemic structure did not allow for a simple borrowing of the
Akkadian syllabary. The following list gives the most important dif-
ferences:
Akkadian Hurrian
has a nominative-accusative structure has an ergative structure
is inflexional adds suffixes to a fixed
stem
consonants: voiced-voiceless-(emphatic) (tense-lax?)
long(geminated)-short long-short
no labial fricatives labial fricatives ( f, v)
vowels: long-short long-short
aeiu aeiou
Two main differences will be discussed here: the Hurrian adaptation of
the consonant signs as they are used for Akkadian, and the orthography
of the vowel /o/. These two are interconnected.2
The Hurrian orthography uses the Akkadian syllabic values for
consonants in a way that deviates from the latter. For example, where
Akkadian distinguishes between /d/ and /t/ this is not the case in
Hurrian orthography. For example, signs that are written in Akkadian
texts to express /d/ can, apparently, be used for both /d/ and /t/ in
Hurrian. In Akkadian texts written by Hurrian scribes, this is a com-
mon phenomenon. The reason is easy to find: unlike Akkadian, the
Hurrian language knew no opposition d:t, but only an opposition
between long and short (geminated and non-geminated) consonants.
Moreover, in Hurrian the correct spelling of the vowels /e/ and /o/
was more important than in Akkadian. In the latter, [e] usually was an
allophone of /a/ or /i/ and /o/ did not exist, at least during this period
(van Soldt 1989).
First we will look at the Mittani orthography. In Turattas letter
(the so-called Mittani letter) the following syllabary is used (Bush
1964: 20). The signs are arranged horizontally according to vowel and
vertically according to consonant. The values are those of the Akkadian
syllabary:
2
Unfortunately, our understanding of the Hurrian phonemes is limited due to the
cuneiform script. It is quite possible that other consonants and vowels existed which
could not be expressed.
-a -e -i -o -u
A E I U
p PA BE BI BU BU
t TA TE TI DU DU
k KA GI KI KU GU
h H A H H I H U H U
l LA LI LI LU LU
m MA ME MI MU MU
n NA NI NI NU NU
r RA RI RI RU RU
s SA [SI] [SI] SU SU
A E I U U
z ZA [ZI,Z?] ZI ZU ZU
w PI PI PI PI PI
p AB IB IB UB UB
t AD ID ID UD UD
k AG IG IG UG UG
h AH AH AH AH AH
l AL EL IL UL UL
m AM IM IM UM UM
n AN EN IN UN UN
r AR IR IR UR UR
s [AZ] [IZ] [IZ] [UZ] [UZ]
A E I U U
z AZ IZ IZ UZ UZ
w [AB] IB IB UB UB
On the basis of the use of this syllabary in the Mittani letter, we can
distinguish the following phonemes:
Vowels: a e i u o (probably long and short)
Consonants: f p t k h z s l m n r w y (partly long and short)
For the consonants f p t k h , there existed an opposition short : long
(that is, single : geminated).3
The Hurrian scribes made a random choice from the available signs
of the Akkadian syllabary, in which the Akkadian opposition voiced :
voiceless : emphatic was ignored. For instance, for /t/, the series TA
TE TI DU was chosen. The opposition short: long was expressed by
gemination: a-ta vs. at-ta.
The pronunciation of the long consonants was probably always voice-
less, that of the short consonants differred according to position (note
3
The opposition may have been lax : tense, see Thiel (1974:116f, 135).
that these allophones were only noticed by non-Hurrian speakers).

Compare the following spellings in texts from Babylonia and Ugarit,
where Semitic languages were spoken:
Middle Babylonian: A-gite-ub (Agi-Teub) vs. Ak-kulen-ni
(Akkul-enni).
Ugarit (syllabic): A-da-ale-ni (Adal-ni) vs. At-te-nu (Attenu).
Ugarit (alphab.): adl-dn vs. atn
The pronunciation of the short consonants (at least to non-Hurrian
ears) was as follows:
1) voiceless: beginning of a word and in combination with another

consonant: talami, big; ove, mine; atohhe , feminine; Toppe
< Tob-ve, Teobs.
2) voiced: between vowels, after a liquid (m l n r) and at the end of a
word: ee, earth; arde, town; keldi, health; andi, that; niffu,
my brother.
Text examples:
d
te-e-e-u-pa-a = Toba; ta-a-nu-u-a-a-a-e-na = tnaena
Note the spelling of the following consonants:

w is written with :
e-e-ni-ip-wu--e-en = niffuwen, my brothers.
y is written -i-i-, -i- and -ia-:
a-i-i-in = ayn, if; at-ta-i-wu-u = attayvu, your father; ia-a-la-an =
yalan, and the things which . . .
Particularly interesting are the spellings of the fricatives v and f. Outside

Mittani they can be expressed by B, P or W-signs. Compare the fol-
lowing table:
Mari Chagar Bazar Nuzi Mittani Ugarit H attua
Alfab. Syll.
Short w b w b b b, w
Long w p w pw p p
This table shows that these phonemes cannot have been stops, but that
the scribes tried to express the fricative consonants v and f.
The following examples are taken from the Mittani letter:
e-e-ni-ip-wu--e-en = niffuwen, my brothers.

at-ta-i-wu-u = attayvu, your father
Finally, I give an example from the Mittani letter in which the text
is given in sign-by-sign transliteration, phonemic transcription and
translation. In the phonemic transcription, the morphological elements
have been separated by hyphens:
(Mitt. letter III:1213, king Turatta to the pharao):
un-du-ma-a-an e-e-ni-ip-wu--e-en a-ti a-ru-u-a- id-du-u-u-ta-ma-a-an e-e-ni-
ip-wu-ta
undo-mn na-iffu-we-n ati ar--av itt-t-a-mn na-iffu-da
Now then, my brothers wife I have given and she has gone to my brother;
in-na-a-ma-a-ni-i-in --un!-et-ta e-e-ni-ip-wu-u-a-a-an wu-re-e-ta
inn-m-nn n-ett-a na-iffu-+nna-an fur-ed-a
when she will come my brother will see her.
The Case of Ugaritic
The city of Ugarit is one of the oldest cities in the Ancient Near East:
the first levels of habitation date back to the seventh millennium bc.
Until the fourteenth century, there are, as yet, hardly any traces of
writing in this city, a situation that can, perhaps, partly be explained
by the fact that the excavators have concentrated only on the last phase
(fourteenth-twelfth c.). However, in a number of trenches, a few sound-
ings have been made to explore all the lower levels of the city and no
textual material has so far emerged from these excavations. It is only
from outside Ugarit that we have some earlier evidence for writing,
such as the letters written to the pharaohs of Egypt shortly before the
Hittite conquest (ca. 1350).
It is during the last phase (fourteenth-twelfth c.) and after the Hittite
conquest by king Shuppiluliuma I that we find an abundance of written
sources. They were discovered in various archives in different parts the
city (Yon 2006). The most important archives were located inside the
royal palace, a large building of considerable fame at least in antiq-
uity. No less than five large archives were stored here, mostly on the
second floor, in which tablets were partly arranged by general topic.
For example, all the texts concerning the relations with the Hittite king,
overlord over Syria, and his deputy, the viceroy of Karkami, were stored
in a special wing. Texts containing juridical records concerning land
transfer inside the city-state were stored in another archive. Apart from
the palace, there were at least seven major archives in private houses
where scribes were trained in the craft of their fathers. The scribal pro-
fession was a trade as much as that of bakers, singers or soldiers.
It is during this period that we find a large bureaucracy in the city.
The reason why it was introduced can perhaps be explained by the
Hittite conquest of Syria that marks the beginning of writing here
around 1330.4 The end of this period came at the beginning of the
twelfth century (1180) when the Levant was overrun by newcomers
from the west, the so-called Sea Peoples (Singer 1999). It is possible
that the bureaucracy at Ugarit came into being because the city became
part of the bureaucracy of the Hittite empire. We find lists of towns and
professional groups (guilds) that had to pay their part of the tribute to
the Hittite king and taxation could therefore have been an incentive to
take over the bureaucratic tradition. However this may be, the scribes
faced a difficult task: they had to learn the Mesopotamian languages,
Sumerian and Akkadian, both of which were foreign to them. Moreover,
their teachers often came from a region where neither Sumerian nor
Akkadian were spoken and these languages were as foreign to them as
to their pupils. The native language of the scribes was a West Semitic
dialect called Ugaritic. In structure this language was relatively close to
Akkadian. Both were Semitic languages that shared a number of charac-
teristics such as, for example, the case system. However, Akkadian had
lost part of its sound inventory, probably because of its long symbiosis
with Sumerian. But Ugaritic still preserved most of the typical Semitic
phonemes, in particular, the gutturals and sibilants. It is these two
groups on which I would like to concentrate by showing how the West
Semitic scribes solved the problems of a script that could not express
their complete phonemic inventory. The fact that the scribes in Ugarit
had created their own script greatly facilitates the comparison with the
Akkadian script. For Ugaritic, an alphabet of 30 signs was used which
expressed 28 different consonants. It was written like the Mesopotamian
cuneiform script: impressed with a stylus on clay tablets. Only excep-
tionally were vowels expressed. The Mesopotamian script was syllabic
in nature and was able to express vowels as well as consonants.
In the following paragraphs I will give comparisons between spellings
of Ugaritic words in the Ugaritic alphabet and in the Mesopotamian
4
Naturally, we cannot exclude the possibility that texts had been written in the
Middle or the Early Bronze Age. New excavations will probably bring more clarity.
syllabary. First, I will list the phonemes distinguished by the alphabetic

script, then I will give examples of Ugaritic words and names in both
scripts.
The Ugaritic alphabet distinguishes the following gutturals:
velar fricatives: h h
pharyngal fricatives: ,g
laryngal fricative: h
glottal stop: (a-i-u)
Of these, the Akkadian script can only distinguish between and h.
1) Velar fricatives h and h:

Ugaritic alphabet Mesop. syllabary
h (116x H): yh r ia-h-ar
mnh m mu-na-h/hi-mu
rh bn ra-ah-ba-ni
bdh gb r-ha-gab
(6x ): mrzh mar-za-i (also mar-zi-hi)
rh bn ra-b-ni
h (62x H): bdhmn r-ha-ma-nu
hrmtt ha-ar-me-a-tu
2) Pharyngal fricatives and ,g:
(32x ): tb ta-ba-a
bldn ba-a-la-da-a-ni
mrby ma-a-ra-b
(240x ): bd ab-du
bl ba-a-lu
ttrab a-tar-a-bi
knm ku-un-am-mu
g (16x H): ngr ni-ih-ru
gmr ha-ma-ru(-)
abgl a-bi-h-li
3) laryngal fricative h:
h (16x ): thmt ta-a-ma-tu4
hw -wa
ulnhr -lu-na-a-ri
4) glottal stop :
(13x ): nt ni-i-tu
ysa i-sa-a
rpan rap-a-a-nu
(300x ): adn a-da-nu
rpan ra-ap-a-nu
nnu na-nu-
mrp am-mu-ra-p
In accordance with the syllabic orthography the spellings of the gut-

turals can be divided into three different groups:
1. Syllabic spellings with H: Ugaritic g - h - h (h sometimes with )
2. Syllabic spellings with or : Ugaritic - ( more frequently than )
3. Syllabic spellings with : Ugaritic h
The grouping of these phonemes shows that there was practically a

one-to-one correspondence between spellings that expressed the same
phoneme (like h) or a phoneme that was very similar (like g), whereas
the other phonemes show variation in spelling (like h and ). Note that
in Akkadian is only written when its omission could create confu-
sion. The phoneme h was apparently considered to be too different
from h and . Its place was expressed by additional vowel signs. Since
this spelling is also used for long and contracted vowels, the existence
of h can only be demonstrated by an alphabetic spelling of the word
in question.
The Ugaritic alphabet distinguishes the following sibilants:
dental fricatives (or affricates): z s s
interdental fricatives: d t t
alveolar fricative
Of these, the Mesopotamian syllabic script only distinguishes z s s .
Thus, the interdental fricatives could not be adequately expressed by
the syllabic script. Since the other phonemes are all represented in this
script, I will only discuss the interdentals.
Interdental fricatives:
d (37x Z): ydrn ia-(a)-zi-ra-nu
dmrd zi-im-rad-du
dkr za-ki-ru
(3x ): ydrn ia-a-i-ra-nu

dmrd i-im-rad-d
t [(2x S):5 hrtt(?) ha-ar-s-ti]
tngrn sa-an-ha-ra-na]
(60x ): unt -nu-u-a
t tr a-ta-ru
mtb mu-a-bu
tbm u-ub-am-mu
t [(8x S):6
trn sa-ri-nu]
Apparently d was normally written with Z-signs and occasionally with
-signs, t was almost always written with -signs, and t was probably
written with S- signs. The phonemes could thus be expressed adequately
by the syllabic cuneiform script and one of the main acoustic charac-
teristics was singled out in the choice of the syllabic sign.
Conclusion
In this contribution I have tried to show how different languages

adopted and adapted the syllabic Mesopotamian cuneiform script to
their own needs when they were faced with a significant difference
between the Akkadian (usually Babylonian) phoneme inventory and
their own. In Mittani this led to a deliberate selection of signs for the
syllabary of the Hurrian language. This was achieved by disregarding
phoneme oppositions characteristic for Akkadian, both with regard to
consonants and to vowels.
In Ugarit the substitution of syllabic signs for Ugaritic phonemes that
could not be expressed properly is more coincidental and dependent
on the scribe who wrote the text; sometimes different spellings are used
even within a single text. It is exactly this fluctuation in spelling that
gives us some idea of the phonetic differences that must have existed
between the Ugaritic sounds and their Akkadian counterparts, at least
as the Ugaritic scribes perceived them.7
5
Since both attestations are not beyond doubt I have put this part between brackets.
6
The evidence is based on a single place name.
7
For Akkadian words written in alphabetic script, see van Soldt (1991:296f).
References
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Buccellati, G. & Kelly-Buccellati, M. 199596. The Royal Storehouse of Urkesh: The
Glyptic Evidence from the Southwestern Wing. Archiv fr Orientforschung, 4243.
Bush, F. 1964. A Grammar of the Hurrian Language. Ann Arbor.
Klengel, H. 1999. Geschichte des hethitischen Reiches, Handbuch der Orientalistik I/34.
Leiden.
Neu, E. 1988. Das Hurritische: Eine altorientalische Sprache in neuem Licht. Stutt-
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1996. Das Epos der Freilassung I, Untersuchungen zu einem hurritisch-hethitischen
Textensemble aus H attua. Studien zu den Boghazky-Texten 32.
Salvini, M. 1998. The Earliest Evidences of the Hurrians Before the Formation of the
Reign of Mittanni. Urkesh and the Hurrians, Studies in Honor of Lloyd Cotsen, pp.
99115.
Singer, I. 1999. A Political History of Ugarit. Handbook of Ugaritic Studies. pp. 603733.
Leiden.
Steinkeller, P. 1998. The Historical Background of Urkesh and the Hurrian Beginnings
in Northern Mesopotamia. Urkesh and the Hurrians, Studies in Honor of Lloyd
Cotsen, pp. 7598.
Thiel, H. J. 1974. Phonematik und grammatische Struktur des Hurrischen. In Das
hurritologische Archiv, V. Haas and H. J. Thiel (eds.), 98ff.
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To the Euphrates and Beyond, Archaeological Studies in Honour of Maurits N. van
Loon, pp. 103115. Rotterdam.
1991. Studies in the Akkadian of Ugarit, Dating and Grammar. Alter Orient und
Altes Testament 40. Neukirchen-Vluyn.
Wegner, I. 2000. Einfhrung in die hurritische Sprache. Wiesbaden.
Wilhelm, G. 1987. EA 24, A letter in Hurrian about marriage and friendship. In
W. L. Moran, The Amarna Letters, 6371 (translation).
1988. Gedanken zur Frhgeschichte der Hurriter und zum hurritisch-urartischen
Sprachvergleich. Xenia 21:4367.
1989. The Hurrians, Warminster.
1994. Mittan(n)i. Reallexikon der Assyriologie 8, D. O. Edzard et al. (eds.), pp.
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LOANWORDS, FOREIGN WORDS, AND FOREIGN SIGNS IN
MAYA WRITING
Erik Boot
Introduction
The script now generally referred to as Maya writing had its origin in
southeastern Mesoamerica, in an area encompassing the present coun-
tries of Mexico (the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatan, and
Quintano Roo), Belize, Guatemala, and the western parts of Honduras
and El Salvador. The earliest now known example of Maya writing dates
from circa the fourth to second century bce and was discovered in April
of 2005 at the site of San Bartolo, Guatemala (Saturno et al. 2006).
Classic Maya writing (circa 2501000 ce) represented the different
Classic Mayan languages through a mixed writing system or script
that contained both syllabograms and logograms, i.e., signs that rep-
resented syllables (e.g., a, ba, ma) and complete words (e.g., KIN,
TUN, YOPAT).1 In total some 650 to 700 signs were developed. In
1
In this essay the following orthography will be employed: , a, b, ch, ch, e, h, j, i, k,
k, l, m, n, o, p, p, s, t, t, tz, tz, u, w, x, and y. In this orthography the /h/ represents a
glottal aspirate or glottal voiced fricative (/h/ as in English house), while /j/ represents
a velar aspirate or velar voiced fricative (/j/ as in Spanish joya) (Grube 2004a). In
this essay there is no reconstruction of complex vowels based on disharmonic spellings
(compare to Houston, Stuart & Robertson 1998 [2004] and Lacadena & Wichmann
2004, n.d.; for counter proposals see Kaufman 2003 and Boot 2004, 2005a). In the
transcription of Maya hieroglyphic signs uppercase bold type face letters indicate
logograms (e.g., TUN), while lowercase bold type face letters indicate syllabic signs
(e.g., ba). Queries added to sign identifications or transcribed values express doubt on
the identification of the assigned logographic or syllabic value. Items placed between
square brackets are so-called infixed signs (e.g., po[mo]); order of the transcribed signs
indicates the epigraphically established reading order. All transliterations are placed in
italics (e.g., uyum); reconstructed sounds in transliterations are placed within square
brackets (e.g., yune[n]). All reconstructions (i.e., transliterations) in this essay are but
approximations of the original intended Classic Maya (epigraphic) linguistic items
(Boot 2002: 67), a written language which was employed by the various distinct
language groups already formed in the Classic period. Stress in Mayan words is not
indicated in this essay, unless it does not fall on the last syllable (e.g., *ptah). The
occasional citing of so-called T-numbers (e.g., T12) refers to the hieroglyphic signs as
numbered and cataloged by Thompson (1962).
130 erik boot
the early phase of the Classic period the number was some 125 to 300
signs were in use, during the middle phase of the Classic period some
300 to 360 signs, while in the late phase of the Classic period some
200 to 300 signs were being used. In the late Postclassic period (circa
12501525 ce) the Maya screenfold books employed close to 300 dif-
ferent signs (see Grube 1990a). While there is a tendency to employ
more syllabic signs towards the late Postclassic period, Maya writing
was and always remained a mixed script. The last hieroglyphic manu-
scripts were probably composed at the Itza island capital of Tayasal
(*Ti-Ah Itza-il At the Itza People Place), at the end of the seven-
teenth century in the central Peten, Guatemala, just before the Spanish
conquest in 1697 ce.2 At present some 30 different Mayan languages
are still spoken in the same area once covered by Classic Maya civiliza-
tion. In total some five million people speak a Mayan language as their
first language; some languages are represented by only a few speakers
(e.g., Itza, only 1012 speakers), while others have many hundreds of
thousands of speakers (e.g., Yucatec, over 750,000 speakers). The basic
syllable structure of Mayan words is monosyllabic and of the form CVC
(Campbell & Kaufman 1985: 193),3 consonant-vowel-consonant; less
common is CVCVC. Thus generally words in Mayan languages end in
closed syllables (i.e., the final sound is a consonant). Mayan languages
are synthetic and agglutinative. Syntactic relations within sentences are
indicated through inflection and suffixes of all type are attached to the
root of an expression (e.g., bak bone, ubakel his bone; chum sit,
chumlajijiy he sat [long ago]). Stress is mostly on the last syllable.
Word order is predominantly VOS (verb-object-subject). The different
Mayan languages evolved from the proto-Mayan language (Kaufman
2
On April 10, 1699, in a sworn testimony now at the General Archive of the Indies
in Seville, Spain, two Yucatecan clergymen named Morales and Mora referred to books
made of tree-bark, and their pages of betun [stucco page coating], in which they kept
their prophecies, and which are presently in the possession of Seor Don Martn de
Ursua [conqueror of Tayasal] (Jones 1994: 106107).
3
The root shapes are CVC, CVVC, CVC, CVVC (or CVV1C), CVhC, and CVVhC
(e.g., Kaufman 1976: 106; compare to Brown & Wichman 2003: 139; Houston, et al.
1998; Lacadena & Wichmann 2004, n.d.). Whether there were hieroglyphic spelling
conventions, established early on and/or developed gradually as the writing system and
languages evolved, that guarded and guided vowel complexity during the course of the
development and evolution of Maya writing is a matter of debate. See note 1.
loanwords, foreign words, and foreign signs 131
& Norman 1985: 80, note 3),4 which has no apparent genetic affiliation
with any of the other language families in Mesoamerica (Campbell &
Kaufman 1985: 191). During their history Mayan languages were in
contact with surrounding and nearby languages as well as languages
located further away (Figure 1),5 mostly through socio-political, reli-
gious, and/or economic relationships (e.g., Justeson et al. 1985).
In this essay I present a short but critical overview of loanwords
which have been discussed in recent epigraphic and linguistic research
(Kaufman 2003, Lacadena & Wichmann 2004, Macri & Looper 2003,
Melndez & Pallan 2005). To this I add one important lexical item
which previously has not been identified as containing a possible loan-
word. Additionally, I discuss the presence of several rare examples of
foreign words in Maya writing as well as the presence of non-native
script signs in Maya writing.
What is a Loanword, Foreign Word, and Foreign Sign?
Within the context of this essay I employ the following descriptive

definitions for loanword, foreign word, and foreign sign:
Loanword: That word or expression which is not native to the language
that records it. Within time it has been fully integrated within that lan-
guage and defines an important natural or cultural object or concept
originally unknown to that language or the loanword has obtained
an important and prestigious place and it may be, but not necessarily
is, supraordinate to, or may even replace, (an) indigenous word(s) or
expression(s) with the same meaning.
Foreign Word: That word or expression which is not native to the
language that records it. It is of recent time, not fully integrated within
that language, but it defines an important natural or cultural object or
4
The approximately thirty Mayan languages and their genetic groupings within
the family can be found summarized and outlined in tabular format in Bricker (2004:
Figure 43.1), Campbell and Kaufman (1984: Figure 1), Dahlin, Quizar, and Dahlin
(1987: Figure 1, with lexicostatistical estimates), Kaufman (1976: Table 1, with lexi-
costatistical estimates), Kaufman and Norman (1984: Table 1), and Stuart, Houston,
and Robertson (1999; table on page II-5, with a different genetic grouping in regard
to the Huastecan languages).
5
This map only illustrates the locations of the Mesoamerican languages at the time
of contact. The early phases regarding original location, movement, and final disper-
sal of all Mesoamerican languages, many of which have an ancestry of some 4000 to
5000 years, is most difficult to ascertain, especially in combination with archaeological
remains.
132 erik boot
b
Figure 1. Maps, a) Linguistic map of Mesoamerica at the time of contact (map
by T. Kaufman, after Lacadena 2005), b) Map of Mesoamerica, with sites men-
tioned in this essay (map by the author; location of sites only approximate).
concept and it is generally subordinate to (an) indigenous word(s) or

expression(s) with the same meaning.
Foreign Sign: That sign or combination of signs which is not native
to the writing system or script that employs it. The sign or signs have
characteristics uncommon to the adoptive script, which can be established
based on comparative research.
The language or writing system that provides the lexical items and/or
signs can be identified as the donor language or writing system, while
the language or writing system that receives the lexical items and/or
signs can be identified as the recipient language or writing system.
The successful adoption of loanwords, foreign words, and foreign
signs depends on the level of contact intensity between the identified
linguistic (and cultural) communities (e.g., Curnow 2001, Thomason &
Kaufman 1988). With regards to both loanwords and foreign words
the following has to be observed:
A loanword, within its process of adoption, may have undergone specific
phonological changes, especially when the loanword contains phonemes
unknown to the adopting language; also morphological changes are
possible, e.g., the deletion and/or addition of meaningful suffixes. A
foreign word may undergo (a) similar phonological and morphologi-
cal change(s) (compare to Campbell & Kaufman 1976: 8284; Justeson
et al. 1985: 34).
Foreign signs may, although not necessarily, undergo a similar process
in which non-indigenous donor signs are graphically adjusted (e.g., size;
shape [square, rounded]; rotation; scribal direction) to correlate with
the adoptive and recipient indigenous writing system.
The study of the presence of loanwords and foreign words is a
recent trend in Maya epigraphic and linguistic studies (e.g., Dakin
& Wichmann 2000, Macri & Looper 2003, Melndez & Pallan 2005),
although earlier important studies have appeared (e.g., Campbell &
Kaufman 1976, Justeson et al. 1985). In three sections I discuss a small
selection of possible loanwords, foreign words, and a variety of foreign
signs.
Loanwords
A small selection of loanwords has entered Mayan languages and sub-

sequently an even smaller selection entered Maya writing at different
moments in time. Some words are common in some or even many
134 erik boot
a b c
d e f
g h i j
Figure 2. Possible loanwords, a) yum, in spelling u-yu-mu, b) unen, in spelling
u-2ne, c) chik, in spelling bu-tza[ja] SAK-chi[ku], d) tzima, in spelling u-tzi-
ma-li, e) patah, in spelling pa-ta-ha, f ) kakaw, in spelling ka-2ka-wa, g) ul, in
spelling ti-u-lu, h) pom, in spelling 6-[po]mo, i) patan, in spelling u-pa-ta-na,
j) kohaw, in spelling u-KOHAW-wa (drawings by various artists).
Mayan languages, but only appear in Maya writing in unique or rare

instances. Other possible loanwords are more abundant in writing.
The first loanword presented here is yum boss, master; father
(Figure 2a). This word occurs at present only once in the whole corpus
of Maya hieroglyphic texts,6 in a possible parentage statement. It occurs
6
In my personal epigraphic research I have identified a spelling yu-ma in the Paris
Codex (page 7) and transliterated this spelling as yum father, boss, patron (Boot 2002:
93). This would be the second example, although the context is less clear. Possibly it
functions as an opening epithet yum . . . master/father . . . (note in present-day Yucatec
Maya for instance Yum Ixim Master/Father of the Corn and Yum Kaax Master/
Father of the Forest. This glyphic example for yum was not included by Lacadena
and Wichmann (2004: 162).
in the text on a stuccoed and painted early Classic ceramic vessel from
Ro Azul (Guatemala) in a spelling u-yu-mu, as first identified by Stuart
(1997: 45).7 The transcription u-yu-mu leads to a transliteration uyum,
in which the third person pre-consonantal possessive pronoun u- can
be identified, prefixed to the noun yum. This word yum can be found
in the following Mayan languages:
Yucatec yu:m (no tones), #yum
Lacandon @k-yum
Mopan ki-yum, tiyum
Chorti yum
Cholti #yum
Chol yum, yujmel
Qeqchi yum, xkab yum, xyum wanab
(linguistic data after Kaufman 2003: 110, /@/ represents the /schwa/, /:/
indicates vowel length; compare to Dienhart 1989: 231233)
For these Lowland Mayan languages the original form *yuum has been
reconstructed (Kaufman 2003: 110). Qeqchi, a language in the Greater
Kichean language group, possibly adopted the word from one of the
Eastern Cholan languages (Cholti, Chorti), although a direct diffu-
sion from one of Yucatecan languages is possible too. Researchers have
offered two different proposals on the origin of this word. According
to Kaufman (2003: 110) the Maya word yum is a loanword from Mixe-
Zoquean languages, based on the proto-Zoquean word *yumi boss,
patron. Commonly the word in Mixe-Zoquean languages is of the
shape CVCV. If correct, in this proposal the loanword yumi lost the -i
(an open syllable, a characteristic not common to Mayan languages) and
became a simple CVC root (the most common root in Mayan words).
However, according to Wichmann (in Lacadena & Wichmann 2004:
162), Mayan languages adapted the word from a proto-Zoquean word
*omi boss, father (note Wichmann 1995: 262, proto-Zoquean *ko-
omi boss, host, item ?O#027). If this proposal is correct, after adop-
tion the word underwent a root vowel change (/o/ > /u/), the opening
sound /-/ was replaced by /y-/,8 and the suffix /-i/ (an open syllable)
7
The 1997 article is based on a 1989 paper presented at the Language of Maya
Hieroglyphs: An Interdisciplinary Conference.
8
Note Central Zoquean coymi at Tecpatn and Southern Zoquean koym (no com-
munity indicated) (after Wichmann 1995: 262). These entries seem to contribute to an
understanding of the phonological process that led to the appearance of the phoneme
/y/. However, this evolution takes place in Zoquean, not in Mayan.
136 erik boot
was dropped to arrive at yum. Although this is possible, at present I

have more confidence in the reconstruction as suggested by Kaufman.
In Mayan languages, the indigenous words for father descended from
proto-Mayan *#taata (Kaufman 2003: 112). The example of uyum
(he is) the father of . . . in a relationship statement is unique, as most
commonly relationship statements identify the subject of a sentence as
child of mother and child of father (or vice versa, depending on
region in the Maya area, see Boot 2005b: 213).9
The second loanword discussed here is unen child of father (Figure 2b).
This word occurs within certain parentage statements (in possessed
form, y-unen [he is] the child of father named . . .) (Hopkins 1991,
his study includes a discussion of the origin and evolution of the word;
compare Stuart 1997: 3) as well as in the proper name of an important
god at the sites of Palenque and Tortuguero (named Unen Kawil Child
Kawil). Within the context of a parentage statement the word unen
occurs in hieroglyphic texts in the Early Classic (e.g., Kerr No. 1216,
yu-ne > yunen[n]) and the late Classic (e.g., Ichmac, Glyphic Band,
Stone 2, yu-ne-ta-ka > yune[n]tak).10 The spelling u-2ne leads to a
transliteration unen.11 The word unen can be found in the following
Mayan languages:
Chorti unen, onen
Tzeltal unin
Tojolabal unin
Chuj unin, uninal, unen
9
Other rare parentage/relationship statements include u-mam (u-MAM-ma;
u-ma-ma) the (maternal) grandfather/son of, u-mim (u-mi-mi) the grandmother
of, y-atan (ya-TAN-na) the wife/partner of, and ya-BAT/ya-BAT-na/ya-na-BAT
the mother of. This last collocation is not yet securely deciphered (BAT is a sign that
represents a leaf-nosed bat head). It was Yuriy Polyukhovich who some years ago noted
the spelling ya-la-na (y-alan) on the Castillo Bowl in the Museo Popol Vuh collection,
which may provide a syllabic substitution for ya-BAT-na.
10
The spelling yu-ne-ta-ka at Ichmac leads to an item yune[n]tak or y-une[n]-tak,
in which y- is the third person pre-vocalic possessive pronoun and -tak is a rare plural
suffix on animate objects. The hieroglyphic band at Ichmac (Campeche, Mexico) unfor-
tunately has survived in an incomplete state, but in front of this relationship statement
thus two or more names should have appeared. The name of the father appears after
the y-une[n]tak expression (Pollock 1980: Figure 802d) and tentatively I identify it in
another context at the more important and nearby site (ca. 15 km to the southwest)
of Xcalumkin (Lintel 4, Front: B; Graham and Von Euw 1992: 161).
11
In the transcription u-2ne the 2ne means that the sign is doubled (2ne > ne-ne);
the Maya employed two small dots to indicate the doubling of certain signs (or, when
space permitted the scribes doubled the sign). This particular Classic Maya scribal
convention was identified first by Stuart (1988; also see Stuart & Houston 1994).
Jacateco w-unin
Qanjobal unin
Acateco unin
Popti unin, w-unin
(linguistic data after Kaufman 2003: 117 and Dienhart 1989: 592595)
According to Kaufman (2003: 117) the word unen, as it is found in
Classic Maya inscriptions, is based on a loanword from Mixe-Zoquean.
The above Lowland and Western Mayan languages obtained the word
*une.. (sic; final phoneme in the suggested reconstructed proto-term
at present is unknown) (male) son of father from that language
group. The terminal sound /-e../ may have been an open syllable (com-
mon to Mixe-Zoquean languages)12 and possibly it was replaced by a
reduplicated root consonant /-n/. Mayan languages do have a pair of
indigenous terms to refer to children, for instance Yucatecan languages
have al (child of mother) and mehen (male son of father). Nobles were
known as almehen; their descent was known in both lines. In Chorti the
pair seems to be al (mothers child) and unen/onen (fathers son),
in which the loanword has replaced the indigenous term.13 In Classic
Maya the predominant pair may have been al (mothers child) and
mijin (fathers son).14
12
Note Wichmann (1995: 255, item ?U#026), who reconstructs proto-Mixe-Zoquean
*unV(k) child and proto-Zoquean *une child (compare to Campbell & Kaufman
1976: 86, item 40). Also note Wichmann (1995: 256, item ?U#032) who has proto-
Zoquean *yawa-une as baby. In both cases the reconstructed form *une ends in
an open syllable.
13
The onen groups among the Lacandon Maya, a (now defunct) zoomorphic system
of association in which each individual born had an animal companion of some kind
(Bruce 1979: 2324), ultimately may have been derived from unilateral male descent
groups or lines (from unen, onen, male son of father) which had an exclusive associa-
tion with certain animals. The onen animal companion was inherited from ones father
(McGee 1990: 30). At one time the onen determined permissible and non-permissible
marriages (Bruce 1979: 25). An onen had one or two common animal names and a
ceremonial name (McGee 1990: Table 3.3). As Boremanse (1998: 104) summarized,
ideally, Lacandon onen could be seen as local descent groups, with patrilineal descent
and virilocal residence. Lacandon Maya belongs to the Yucatecan language family,
which possibly lost the loanword unen. The fact that unen is found recorded at Ichmac,
a site well within the Yucatecan speaking Maya area, may indicate that at one time
Yucatec Maya had such a word. Alternatively, unen/onen as a word and its associated
meaning possibly diffused from a neighboring Mayan language and may have been
adopted as it carried more prestige in contrast to a native term.
14
This epigraphic Classic Maya pair is based on a recent proposal by Stephen
Houston and Marc Zender that T534 is logographic MIJIN, based on the rare prefixed
phonetic complement mi- (as identified first by Stephen Houston) and the common
postfixed -na. The al reading is based on the generally accepted syllabic transparant
spelling ya-la for y-al ([s]he is) the child of mother (Stuart 1997: 2).
138 erik boot
The third possible loanword is chik (Figure 2c). The word chik pos-
sibly can be found in a nominal phrase of the third Palenque king
named Butzaj Sakchik, the third ruler of that archaeological site. The
examples of his nominal date from the seventh and eight century ce.
The spelling chi-ku in his nominal phrase leads to a transliteration
chik, which is often translated as coati. The word chik coati can be
found in the following Mayan languages:
Yucateco chik, chiik
Itza chik, chiik
Mopan chiik, kotonchiik
Cholti chiik
Chontal ajchiku
(linguistic data after Boot 2000a: 2, Dienhart 1989: 130 and Kaufman
2003: 581)
The Itza and Mopan entries are reflexes of the proto-Yucatecan term
*chik (Kaufman 2003: 581). The Eastern Mayan item seems to be
diffused from the Yucatecan languages to Cholti (a language now
extinct). Kaufman (2003: 581) has suggested that proto-Yucatecan
*chik coati is a loan from proto-Mixe-Zoquean *tziku (note Bricker
et al. 1998: 70, *chiku; note Wichmann 1995: 268 *ciku coati, item
CI#016).15 The root -chiku in the Chontal entry is particularly close to the
proposed loanword *tziku. Indigenous terms for coati include kojtom
(Eastern languages), siis (Kichean languages), and tzutz (proto-Mayan
*tzutz[ub], non-Eastern languages) (Boot 2000a: 23, although different
species may have been grouped together; compare Campbell 2004: 73).
The Maya glyphic spelling chi-ku seems to contain the sounds present
in the original loanword (accepting a /tz/ > /ch/ evolution). However,
as I have suggested on another occasion, the nominal phrase Butzaj
Sakchik should not be analyzed as Smoking (butzaj) White (sak) Coati
(chik) (a common interpretation among some epigraphers), but as
Smoking (butzaj) Lark (sakchik) (Boot 2000a: 4). If my estimation
is correct, the glyphic spelling chi-ku in this particular context has
nothing to do with the suggested loanword *tziku as it does not refer
to a mammal (coati), but to a bird species (lark). The spelling chi-ku
15
Campbell (2004: 73), following Justeson et al. (1985: 24), notes that while proto-
Mixe-Zoque had *tziku coati-mundi, the Mixe branch, due to sound changes, pro-
duced the reflex *chik. From this, Campbell writes, it appears that Yucatecan took
the word more directly from the Mixe branch. This suggestion does not explain
Chontal -chiku.
appears in another context, as part of a toponym that refers to a loca-

tion at the archaeological site of Calakmul, namely chi[ku]-NAB for
chiknab (e.g., Calakmul Stela 114). Possibly in this toponym the part
chik may have the meaning coati, while nab may have the meaning
pool, pond; lagoon (Kaufman 2003: 429, proto-Mayan *najb).
The fourth possible loanword is tzima calabash (Spanish: jcara)
(Figure 2d). It has been identified only once in the corpus of Maya hiero-
glyphic texts (Reents-Budet 1994: 127, Fig. 4.19), in a text painted on
a thin-walled gourd-shaped Classic ceramic vessel (see Boot 2005b: 9).
The spelling can be transcribed u-tzi-ma-li and transliterated as utz-
ima[]il.16 In this item u- is the third person pre-consonantal possessive
pronoun and -il is a common possessive suffix on (a) certain class(es)
of nouns. In Mayan languages the following entries can be found:
Huasteco tzima
Chorti tzimaj
Chol tzimaj
Tzotzil tzima
Tzeltal tzima
Tojolabal tzima
Chuj tzima
Qanjobal tzima
Acateca tzima
Popti tzima
Mocho tzim
Tuzanteco tzim
Teco qtzimaq
Mam tzma, tzma
Awacateca tzimaa
Ixil tzimay
Kiche tzimay
Sipacapense tzmay
Tzutujil tzimaay
Kaqchikel tzimay
Qeqchi #tzima, tzimaj johm
(linguistic data after Kaufman 2003: 993)
According to Kaufman (2003: 993), the above cognates (spread over rep-
resentatives of most Mayan language sub-groups and families) descend
16
Reents-Budet (1994) and the present author (Boot 2005b: 9) once opted for a
transliteration utzimal. However, based on the reflexes of the proto-Mayan word
*tzima() a transliteration u-tzima[]-il, as proposed here, is to be preferred in Classic
(epigraphic) Maya.
140 erik boot
from proto-Mayan *tzima().17 This particular word was borrowed from

proto-Mixe-Zoquean, *tzima calabash (Kaufman 2003: 993; note
Campbell & Kaufman 1976: 84, *ima [item 2] and Wichmann 1995:
*cima jcara/bowl made out of a gourd, item CI#021). If correct, this
loanword retained the ending /-a/, which in some cases was reduced
to /-a/ (an open syllable) as in tzima, but which in other cases evolved
to /-ay/ and /-aay/ (closed syllables) as in tzimay and tzimaay and even
was deleted as in tzim. In the late Classic period (circa 750900 ce)
the spelling u-tzi-ma-li suggests a shape utzima[]il, in which tzima[]
would be the late Classic reflex of proto-Mixe-Zoquean *tzima. The
tzima calabash was and is an important cultigen in the Maya area.
The fifth possible loanword discussed here is patah guava, guayaba
(a certain fruit) (Figure 2e). The word occurs in a nominal phrase of
the mother of a king of the archaeological site of Bonampak and can
be found written pa-ta-ha and pa-ta (an abbreviation) (Boot 2002: 67).
In Mayan languages one can find:
Mopan p@ta, pataj
Chorti pata, pataj
Cholti #pata
Chol p@taj
Tzotzil pat, poto, potow
Tzeltal pta, pat
Tojolabal pta
Chuj pata, patak
Qanjobal pata
Acateca pata
Popti pata
Mocho pataj
Tuzanteco patah
Qeqchi pata, pat, patah, patahl, paataahl
(linguistic data after Kaufman 2003: 1102 [/@/ represents the /schwa/
and Dienhart 1989: 303304)
According to Kaufman (2003: 1102) proto-Mayan *ptah was adopted
from the proto-Zoquean word *patajaC (unknown final consonant)
guayaba (compare Campbell & Kaufman 1976: 84, item 10). Presence
of stress in the first syllable is a good indicator of foreign origin. If cor-
17
Note the absence of a reflex of proto-Mayan *tzima() in the Yucatecan languages
group (Yucateco, Itza, Mopan, and Lacandon). These languages possess a variety of
indigenous words that refer to various kinds of calabashes, most common of which are
homa, lek, and luch (e.g., Barrera Vsquez et al. 1980: 229, 444, and 464).
rect, by Classic times the final syllable was dropped as the loanword now
followed the CVCVC pattern of a small group of Mayan words (e.g.,
balam, balun, lajun, kawil, yopat). Melndez & Pallan (2005: 4) suggest
that the Classic Maya term patah descended from pata (a word ending
in a velar nasal), as known in Sierra Popoluca. At present I have more
confidence in the suggestion by Kaufman. Proto-Mayan also had *(i)
kaq as a word for guava, guayaba, the cognates of which survive in
the Greater Kichean and Mamean languages (Kaufman 2003: 1101).
Possibly the loanword *ptah replaced the indigenous word *(i)kaq
in the Lowland Mayan languages.
The sixth loanword is kakaw cacao (Figure 2f ). This word occurs
frequently in dedicatory texts on ceramics in a part that describes
the contents of ceramic containers. The word was identified first by
Lounsbury in the Dresden Codex, one of four surviving late Postclassic
(ca. 12501525 ce) screenfold books, identifying an offering of cacao.
It was subsequently identified by Stuart (1988) in the hieroglyphic text
on a stirrup lidded vessel found at the archaeological site of Ro Azul
spelled ka-2ka-wa (illustrated). The common spelling is ka-ka-wa, but
also 2ka-wa, ka-ka, ka-wa, and ka can be found. The last three spell-
ings are abbreviated spellings. The following Mayan languages record
the word:
Huasteco kakaw
Yucateco chukua, kakaw
Itza kakaw
Lacandon k@kaw, k@kow
Mopan kkj, kukuj
Chorti kakaw
Chol k@k@w
Tzotzil kokow
Tzeltal kakaw
Chuj kakaw
Qanjobal kakaw
Acateco kakaw
Popti kakaw
Tuzanteco kakaw
Teco kakaw
Mam kiku, kukuuw, kyikyiw
Awateco kyikyuj
Ixil kakaau, kikyuj
Uspanteco kakaw
Kiche kakaw, kako
Sipacapense kakaw
142 erik boot
Tzutujil kokow
Kaqchikel kakow, kaakow, kakaw, kakou
Poqomam kakau, kakawaa
Poqomchi kakau, kikow
(linguistic data after Kaufman 2003: 1104 and Dienhart 1989: 102103;
/@/ represents the /schwa/)
Kaufman (2003: 1104, Campbell 2004: 73, Campbell & Kaufman 1976:
84, item 1) reconstructed the term *kakaw for proto-Mayan and sug-
gested that that language borrowed the term from proto-Mixe-Zoquean
*kakawa or perhaps *kakaw. The first occurrence of the word kakaw
in a Maya text dates at present from the mid-fifth century (and is the
example illustrated); it is found on the stuccoed and painted stirrup
lidded vessel from the archaeological site of Ro Azul that also contained
the item yum mentioned above. A chemical analysis of residue found in
the vessel indicated that the vessel indeed had contained a cacao drink
(Hall et al. 1990). If the Mixe-Zoquean word *kakawa is the correct
loanword, it would mean that in the process of adoption the final open
syllable was dropped; if the word *kakaw is the correct loanword, this
would mean that proto-Mayan adopted the term in straightforward
fashion to which would attest most of the present-day reflexes.
This most viable reconstruction of the process of adoption has been
challenged in a recent article by Dakin & Wichmann (2003). These
authors suggest that kakaw was not a native Mixe-Zoquean word,
but that that language adopted the term kakawa-tl cacao from an
Uto-Aztecan language, possibly by the first/second century ce after
the split of the main branch into proto-Mixean and proto-Zoquean
(Dakin & Wichmann 2003: 57). One of the basic arguments is that the
word structure CVCVCV is uncommon to Mixe-Zoquean languages;
the same is also true for the shape CVCVC (as the common Mixe-
Zoquean syllable structure is CVCV). The Uto-Aztecan word kakawa-tl
is probably a descriptive term based on *kawa egg (a word later lost
in Uto-Aztecan languages) and it followed a pattern of reduplication
to set it apart from the original referent (Dakin & Wichmann 2003:
5860). If this reconstruction is correct, Mayan languages borrowed the
word prior to the mid-fifth century ce directly from an Uto-Aztecan
language, Nhuatl.18 And if this alternative proposal is correct, in
18
If the Nhuatl origin of the word kakaw is correct, the word should not and can
not be reconstructed back into proto-Mayan, as the word would have been adopted from
the time of the first to second century ce onwards, when also the first Teotihuacan-
the process of adoption the ending -atl was dropped. A CVCVCVC

structure is uncommon for a noun and the sound /-tl/ is unknown in
Mayan languages (see below).
The seventh possible loanword discussed here is ul atole (cornmeal,
mash, gruel) (Figure 2g). The most common spelling, as found on
Maya ceramics, that refers to the contents of the ceramic container as
ul, is u-lu, but also a spelling u-li can be found (Kerr 1989: 103, Kerr
1994: 544). 19 The word ul can be found in the following Mayan
languages:
Yucateco uul
Chol ul
Tzeltal ul
Tuzanteco ulul
Tojolabal ulul
Chuj ulul
Qanjobal ulul
Acateco ulul
Popti ulul
Mocho ulul
Qeqchi ulul
(linguistic data after Kaufman 2003: 1186)
For proto-Mayan, Kaufman (2003: 1186) reconstructed the shape *uul
and suggested that it is based on a word *unu atole which was adopted
from proto-Zoquean. If correct, the Zoquean word lost the final open
derived architecture occurs in the Maya area (at Tikal). At that time already some ten
distinct Mayan languages can be identified (for which I apply lexicostatistical estimates,
if those are correct) (see Kaufman & Norman 1985: Table 1). This also means that
the word diffused rapidly to the other existing Mayan languages and eventually was
adopted by all, possibly replacing any (now lost) indigenous word or words for kakaw
as the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao L., is native to tropical Central America (which
includes the tropical part of the Maya area). Although the exact original location of
Uto-Aztecan languages is debated, it was not located in a tropical zone, but far north
in Mesoamerica (or even outside of it). Based on the fact that Early Classic examples
of cacao iconography seem to be rooted deeply in Maya religious thought (e.g., vessel
at Dumbarton Oaks, see Miller & Martin 2004: 7879), I am still somewhat hesitant
to accept the Nhuatl origin of the word kakaw. Alternatively, the Nhuatl kakawa:tl
may be unrelated to proto-Mixe-Zoquean *kakaw(a) and proto-Mayan *kakaw and its
apparent donor status simply may be based on a comparable lexical shape with very
similar phonemes that evolved through chance (see Aikhenvald & Dixon 2001: 2).
19
Lacadena and Wichmann (2004: 158) do not include the spellings u-li, only
u-lu. Also Kaufman (2003: 1186) only refers to a spelling u-lu. In my Classic Maya -
English vocabulary I only included the spelling u-lu (Boot 2002: 81), to which the u-li
is added in an upcoming updated version.
144 erik boot
syllable and the terminal consonant -n changed to -l through some

phonological process. Also the root vowel was lengthened. Lacadena and
Wichmann (2003: 158) reconstruct the word to proto-Mayan (basing
themselves on Kaufman & Norman 1984: 135, item no. 596), but do
not suggest a loanword scenario. Melndez & Pallan (2005: 4) follow
Kaufmans suggestion. Indigenous Mayan words for atole (cornmeal,
mash, gruel) include proto-Mayan *maatz, Lowland Mayan *sa, and
Greater Kichean *joch (Kaufman 2003: 11841185, 1187), as well as
the descriptive terms sakha white water and ukha drink water in
the Greater Mamean languages (Kaufman 2003: 1185). The word ul was
included in primary dedicatory texts on late Classic ceramics, which
were used in an elite context (although most are without known prov-
enance). Possibly the loanword ul carried more prestige in this context,
but sa and the descriptive term sakha are also recorded.20
The eighth possible loanword is pom incense (copal) (Figure 2h).
The word is spelled po[mo]; the Dresden Codex example can be tran-
scribed 6-po[mo] for wak pom six (times) incense. This word pom
is known in the following Mayan languages:
Yucateco poom
Itza pom
Mopan pom
Cholti #pom
Chol pom
Tzoztil pom
Tzeltal pom
Tojolabal pom
Chuj pom
Qanjobal pom
Popti pom
Mocho poom
Tuzanteco poom
Teco pom
Mam poon
Awateco pom, poom
20
At present I have identified two possible examples of sakha in dedicatory texts on
ceramics (over 625 dedicatory texts in database). One is recorded in the dedicatory rim
text on a small cup (Hellmuth 1987: Figure 411, yukib sakha the drink-instrument
[for] sakha ), the second is recorded in the dedicatory rim text on a straight-walled
vessel (Kerr 1989: 639, yukib ta sakha the drink-instrument for sakha ). The term
sa atole is found spelled with the syllabic sign sa on the body of small flared vessels
within court scenes on Late Classic ceramics (e.g., Kerr No. 8008).
Ixil pom
Uspanteco poom
Kiche poom
Sipacapense pom
Sacapulteco pom
Tzutujil poon
Kaqchikel pom
Poqomam poom, puam
Poqomchi pom, poom
Qeqchi pom, poom
(linguistic data after Kaufman 2003: 13581359 and Dienhart 1989:
352354)
The proto-Mayan shape, from which these cognates descend, has been
reconstructed as *poom (Brown & Wichmann 2004: 177, Kaufman 2003:
1358), the reflex of a loanword *poom@ diffused from proto-Mixe-
Zoquean (Kaufman 2003: 1358; /@/ represents the /schwa/; also see
Campbell & Kaufman 1976: 85, item 19). According to this proposal,
in its process of adoption the loanword lost its final open syllable /-@/
(uncommon to Mayan languages), but in most languages retained the
vowel length. Most of the Lowland and Western Mayan languages
shortened the vowel, while some Highland languages changed the final
consonant from a bilabial nasal (/-m/) to an alveolar nasal (/-n/). Incense
is commonly made from the resin or sap of the copal tree; Mayan
languages do provide indigenous words for tree-derived resin, sap
(Lowland Mayan: *iitz), as well as gum (Eastern Mayan: *qool) (after
Kaufman 2003: 10471048 and Dienhart 1989: 352354). Possibly the
cultural importance and prestige of the Mixe-Zoquean loanword pom
outweighed the indigenous words; in many instances the indigenous
words were replaced or they shifted their meaning (e.g., qool gum
> turpentine, pitch).
The complex visual narratives contained in the murals at San Bartolo,
Guatemala include several short captions that identify events and par-
ticipants, although many of the signs employed remain undeciphered.
One of the few captions that can be transcribed without difficulty is
po-mo-ja (Figure 3). Saturno, Taube & Stuart (2005: 41) tentatively
suggest that the part po-mo may hint at pom incense, but they
remained doubtful as they could not explain the final syllabic sign -ja.
Wichmann (2006: 12) suggests that the spelling po-mo-ja may hint at
a word pomoj, the Mayan rendition of the loanword *pomoh incense
of proto-Zoquean origin or perhaps *po:moh (/:/ indicates lengthened
vowel) of pre-proto-Zoquean origin. This particular hieroglyphic
146 erik boot
Figure 3. The spelling po-mo-ja, San Bartolo (drawing by David Stuart, after
Saturno et al. 2005: Figure 31).
text at San Bartolo dates to circa the first century bce (Saturno et al.
Stuart 2005: 67) and thus pom constitutes one of the earliest attested
loanwords. The loanword may have entered through the (pre-)proto-
Zoquean speaking communities of Chiapas or Veracruz a few hundred
years earlier to eventually diffuse to all Mayan languages. According
to Wichmann, after this early recording of the item pomoj it came to
loose the ending -oj.21
The ninth possible loanword discussed here is patan, a word with the
meaning tribute, service (Figure 2i). It can be found spelled pa-ta in
the majority of examples known, and is discussed as such in previous
research (Kaufman 2003: 59, Macri & Looper 2003: 289290, Melndez
& Pallan 2005: 8). However, one unique spelling gives u-pa-ta-na
21
Here I suggest a different interpretation. The spelling po-mo-ja leads to an item
pom-aj, in which pom indeed is the Maya rendition of the proto-Zoquean loanword
for incense. The final syllabic sign -ja is employed in much later hieroglyphic texts to
lead to an ending -aj through a process of vowel insertion (e.g., 2tzu-ja > tzu-tzu-ja >
tzu[h]tz-aj; chu[ku]-ja > chu[h]k-aj). Although this Late Classic convention is within
verbal context, it may be applicable in this late Preclassic example. What would pom-aj
mean? I suggest that pom-aj means incense-person. The suffix -aj person, based
on the general agentive aj (Kaufman 2003: 83), can be found spelled with T12 AJ/a
(a process of acrophony probably reduced AJ to simply a in the Late Classic) in both
Early Classic (e.g., Ro Azul Looted Mask, kuh-aj god-person) and Late Classic
contexts (e.g., Palenque, Temple XIX, joch-kak-aj drill-fire-person). In the mural
at San Bartolo the spelling po-mo-ja can be found next to a male human figure, his
body painted black, and with both hands above his head he carries a rectangular object
clouded in thick, dark smoke scrolls probably emanating from burning incense. This
figure may thus carry the incense, as he is a pom-aj incense-person, an appropiate
epithet.
for upatan his patan (Kerr 1994: 640), an example which, to my

knowledge, was discussed first by Stuart (1995: 356; also see Houston
& Stuart 2001: 69).22 This complete syllabic spelling substantiates the
correctness of the earlier identification of pa-ta as an abbreviated spell-
ing for patan (Stuart 1995: 354357). In Mayan languages the following
words can be found:
Yucateco #ptan, ah patan (tributary)
Chorti patan (work to clean the corn field)
Cholti #patan
Chontal patan
Tzotzil patan
Tzeltal patan, spatanil
Mocho pataan (milpa, plant corn)
Tuzanteco pataan (milpa), patan.laq (milperio)
Uspanteco ptan (mecapal)
Kiche patan, pataan
Sipacapense ptem (mecapal)
Poqomchi #patan, patnal (mecapal)
Kaqchikel patan samaj (service for the cofrada)
(linguistic data after Kaufman 2003: 5960; Lacadena 2006: note 2; Macri
& Looper 2003: 290, Table 4; Dienhart 1989: 675)
In the above Mayan languages the word has the meaning of tribute,
but as some entries show, the word has also obtained the extended
meanings of milpa (corn field), plant corn, and mecapal (object
to carry cargo) (Kaufman 2003: 58). For the Central Mayan languages
(the western and eastern Mayan languages combined) a reconstruction
*pataan tribute, service has been proposed (Kaufman 2003: 58), a
probable indication that the word can not be placed back into the
proto-Mayan language. It is thus a possible candidate for a loanword.
Macri & Looper (2003: 289290) have suggested that the Mayan word
is based on a loanword from Nhuatl, patla to trade, to change or
22
This Classic Maya vessel (Kerr No. 4996) illustrates a court scene in which bundles
of items (too eroded to be identified properly) are delivered by three male individu-
als (entitled lakam, see Stuart 1995: 356, Lacadena 2006) to the court of Tayel Chan
Kinich, the king of Motul de San Jos. The opening section reads jun *kib chan paxil
tza[h]paj upatan ux lakam a[w]ichnal tayel chan kinich kuhul hux[?]a ajaw (on the
day) 1 *Kib 4 Paxil stacked was the tribute of three lakams (court officials with military
and tributary associations) in your presence, Tayel Chan Kinich, Divine Motul de San
Jos (Hux[?]a) King (reconstruction of day name kib and full transliteration by the
present author; compare to Houston & Stuart 2001: 69 & Lacadena 2006: 12). The
vessel probably was produced in or close to the site of Xultun (northeastern Peten),
as the local title Kabte occurs in the primary dedicatory rim text.
148 erik boot
patiuhtli price, payment, salary, security. If the first suggestion patla

is correct, the sound /tl/ would be conceived as /t/, as in *pat or *pata.
If *pat would be the derivation of patla, the Mayan word, in its process
of adoption, obtained an -an suffix. If pat would have become a Mayan
verb with the meaning to service, to give tribute, the suffix -an
(a participial ending in origin) would be present to derive a noun. The
second suggestion patiuhtli is also possible; only the root *pat would
have been adopted, to which a suffix -an would have been attached to
derive a noun.23
The inscriptions at Palenque, La Corona,24 and Piedras Negras may
provide the tenth possible loanword, kohaw (Figure 2j). This item can
be found spelled with a logogram as well as transparent syllabic spell-
ings: u-KOHAW-wa (illustrated), u-ko-o-ha-wa, and u-ko-ha-wa.
The loanword kohaw probably means helmet and only one (Colonial)
language seems to provide a surviving cognate word:
Tzotzil kovov
(linguistic data after Macri & Looper 2003: 290)
Macri & Looper (2003: 290291) suggest that the Classic Maya word
kohaw is based on a loan from Nhuatl, cua:itl, which means head.
Entries for certain kinds of helmets in the early colonial Nhuatl dic-
tionary by Molina, as the authors indicate, contain the part cua- head
(pronounced /kwa-/) (Simon 1988: 389, as quaitl, quai-). The possible
loanword kohaw only seems to have survived in colonial Tzotzil as
kovov. The mosaic helmet which is employed as the logographic sign
probably had its origin in a central Mexican iconographic tradition.
Mosaic helmets of different sorts can be found in the early icono-
graphic programs at the site of Teotihuacan in central Mexico (e.g.,
Von Winning 1981).
Presented last is my contribution to the small corpus of possible
loanwords. The eleventh possible loanword to be discussed here can
be found in a composite noun that functions as a title and lies at the
heart of Maya socio-political organization. That word is ajaw, commonly
23
If indeed the word patan consists of a root *pat- adopted from the Nhuatl donor
language and the suffix -an, a participial ending in origin, in the Mayan recipient
language this word could qualify as a loanblend (Haugen 1950: 215).
24
The panel on which a spelling u-ko-o-ha-wa occurs is known as Site Q Panel 11.
Recently, based on an important find of two small panels at the site of La Corona, Site
Q has been identified as La Corona (located close to the important site of El Peru).
Figure 4. Spelling examples of the title ajaw king, lord: a) AJAW, b) AJAW,
c) a-AJAW, d) AJAW-wa, e) AJAW, f ) a-AJAW, g) AJAW-wa, h)
a-AJAW-wa, i) AJAW, j) AJAW, k) AJAW-wa, l) AJAW-wa, m) a-AJAW,
n) a-ja-wa, o) AJAW, p) AJAW-wa, q) a-AJAW, s) a-AJAW, t) AJAW-wa
(drawings by Linda Schele, after Schele & Freidel 1990: Figure 1:4).
translated as king, lord. This word can be found spelled hieroglyphi-

cally in a large variety of ways (Figure 4)25 as it is not only the most
common recorded paramount title, but is also one of the most common
25
This is only a selection of spelling examples. In previous research I identified a
spelling a-ha-wa for ahaw (with T60+1040 ha). However, with better photographs
available of the looted monument in which this spelling putatively occurred, it is now
clear that it does not exist.
150 erik boot
recorded words (Stuart 1995: 189). Mayan languages provide the fol-
lowing entries on king, lord; boss, chief :
Huasteco ajaatik
Yucateco ahaw
Itza ajaw
Lacandon yajaw
Cholti #ahaw
Chol #ajaw
Tzotzil ojow, ajwal
Tzeltal ajaw, yajwhal
Tojolabal ahaw, ajwal
Qanjobal y-ajaw-il, yajaw, ajaw
Popti ajaw, q-ajaw (God)
Mocho aj(a:)w (moon; month)
Uspanteco aj-aw, ajaaw
Mam aajaw, q-aajaw (God)
Teco aajaaw
Awateco ajw
Kiche ajaw, ajaaw
Sacalpulteco ajaw
Tzutujil ajaap, aajaaw
Kaqchikel ajaw, aajaaw
Poqomchi (a)jaw, haaw, jaaw
Poqomam aajcaal
Qeqchi ajaw, ajaaw
(linguistic data after Kaufman 2003: 8485 and Dienhart 1989: 396
397)
For the proto-Mayan language *aajaaw has been reconstructed
(Kaufman 2003: 84). The item ajaw can be analyzed as a composite
noun aj+aw, as some epigraphers have suggested (e.g., Houston &
Stuart 1996, 2001; Stuart 1995; Zender 1999: 44, note 22), including
the present author (Boot 2000b: 1, note 3 and 2005: 382), for he who
shouts. The part aj can be identified as the common male or general
agentive prefix, followed by the part aw. On this item the following
cognates can be found in Mayan languages:
Yucatec awt (cry out), awat (shout)
Mopan awat (howl), uchi uyawat (shout)
Cholti awlu (call)
Tzotzil aw (shout)*, awan(el), awan (cry out)
Tzeltal aw (shout)*, awun (shout)
Tojolabal awan, awen, awanal (cry out)
Chuj aw (shout)*
Qanjobal aw (shout)*
Popti aw (shout)*
Mocho a:w (shout)*, a:w-a (shout)
Tuzanteco a:w (shout)*, a:w.a-:n (howl [as animals])
Kiche #awunik (howl)
(linguistic data after Kaufman 2003: 716, Dienhart 1989: 165166 and
Wichmann & Brown 2003: 166; items marked by * are nouns)
For proto-Cholan the form *aw has been reconstructed, while for the
Western Mayan languages (which includes proto-Cholan) the form
*aaw has been reconstructed (Kaufman 2003: 716). This item has not
been reconstructed into proto-Mayan by Kaufman, although Brown and
Wichmann (2003: 166) on a similar and thus limited set of cognates
suggest a proto-Mayan term *aahw shout, shouting. The distribution
of a root aw- with the meaning shout, call, howl, cry out in these
mainly Western Mayan languages makes it a likely candidate for a
loanword, independent of the fact whether it can reconstructed into
proto-Mayan (note reconstructed forms in proto-Mayan for the items
kakaw cacao and pom incense above, which both are considered
to be loanwords).
This loanword aw- may actually originate in the Mixe-Zoquean
languages, as the following entries indicate for mouth:
North Highland Mixe a:h
South Highland Mixe o:w, a:, a:w
Midland Mixe a:, a:w, a:w (opening)
Lowland Mixe a:w, a:, a:w
Mixe de Coatlan []a:hwak *
Popoluca de Otula avi
Popoluca de Sayula ahw
Zoque de Chiapas anaka
(linguistic data after Wichmann 1995: 250, item ?A#052, except item
marked with *, which is from Hoogshagen & Halloran de Hoogshagen
1993: 268, original spelling aahuac)
The proto-Mixe-Zoquean form has been reconstructed as *aw mouth
(Wichmann 1995: 250).26 The scenario I suggest here is that Western
Mayan languages adopted the word aw mouth, but with a meaning
26
Huave, a language isolate spoken in the southeast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca
(circa 12,000 speakers), contains an item aw with the meaning he says, he said, which
occurs at the end of sentences in which somebody is quoted (Huave de San Mateo
del Mar, Stairs and Scharfe de Stairs 1981: 76). Huave may have borrowed the word
aw from Mixe-Zoquean.
152 erik boot
shifted to shout, yell, call, cry out.27 This shift in meaning can be
explained as aw does not mean mouth in Mayan languages (or, at
least, it does not anymore) and that the indigenous proto-Mayan word
*tyii mouth (Brown & Wichmann 2003: 180; Kaufman 2003: 262264)
was retained through reflexes in most if not all Mayan languages (also
see Dienhart 1989: 439442). The most common verb for to speak, to
tell in the Western Mayan languages is derived from *hal~al and for
the Yucatecan languages it is derived from *(h)al.V (Kaufman 2003:
729), which is suggestive of the fact that these are indigenous words
even though a proto-word has not yet been proposed.28 The root aw-
probably was adopted at the end of the early Preclassic period (ca.
20001000 bce) and diffused into the existing Mayan languages (prob-
ably three in the Eastern Mayan language group, two in the Western
Mayan language group, if lexicostatistical estimates can be taken as
a measure; e.g., Kaufman 1976: Table 1). It was adopted through the
composite noun aj+aw person (male) that shouts, yells, calls, cries
out,29 as the earliest Maya hieroglyphic text now known (from the
fourth to second century bce) at the site of San Bartolo contains the item
ajaw. Here the scribe employed a late Preclassic variant of the composite
sign T168 MAT+THRONE AJAW (see Boot 2000b on the origin and
evolution of the sign T168) (Figure 5). The prefixed agentive aj male;
a relatively large/strong living thing is of indigenous Maya origin
(Kaufman 2003: 83).
The total of eleven loanwords discussed here could be extended to
include other possible loanwords, but in many cases the linguistic origin
27
If correctly identified, the proto-Mixe-Zoquean item *aw mouth that was
adopted by Mayan languages as aw shout, yell, call, cry out can be identified as a
loanshift ( Haugen 1950: 215; Lehiste 1988: 20), although a more in-depth study on the
semantic shift of this item may be in order (compare to Choi 2001: 116). That an item
aw indeed became to mean shout, yell, call, cry out may find some corroboration in
the fact that in Huave aw has the meaning he says, he said. See note 26 above.
28
Perhaps there was a semantic distinction between speaking in private and speak-
ing in public, represented by the indigenous roots *hal~al and *(h)al.V to speak,
to tell in private and the non-native root *aw to shout in public. If this semantic
distinction was present, it may underlie the origins of Mayan kingship as it is centered
around the ajaw he who shouts (in public).
29
As noted by various researchers, paramount titles in other Mesoamerican lan-
guages have a similar etymology. For instance, the Azteca-Mexica paramount title was
tlatoani he who speaks well, purist (derived from Nhuatl tlatoa speak, sing) or
simply speaker (e.g., Evans 2001: 238), which by extension means great lord, prince,
ruler (Karttunen 1992: 266; Simon 1988: 674).
Figure 5. The earliest Maya text column now known, with Preclassic AJAW
at position 7 (drawing by David Stuart, after Saturno et al. 2006).
is much more difficult to prove.30 These other loanwords (that is, those
that possibly made it into hieroglyphic writing) include words from
Mixe-Zoquean, Uto-Aztecan (Nhuatl), as well as Otomanguean and
Totonac languages (see Campbell & Kaufman 1976, Justeson et al. 1985,
Macri & Looper 2003, Melndez & Pallan 2005). The loanwords dis-
cussed above diffused to Mayan languages through either Mixe-Zoquean
30
For instance, Mayan words may deer and pay guide are possibly loaned from
Mixe-Zoquean and Nhuatl, respectively (Melndez & Pallan 2005), or the Mayan word
ol heart, center loaned from Nhuatl (Macri & Looper 2003). From Otomanguean
languages, for example, the word ok dog may have been borrowed, which became
used as the tenth Maya day name Ok Dog (see Justeson et al. 1985; Melndez &
Pallan 2005). As a Late Classic ceramic vessel that surfaced in a private collection only
recently (May 2007) indicates, ok also referred to dog in Classic Maya outside the
day name context, as a spelling OK-ki occurs next to the drawing of a dog.
154 erik boot
or Uto-Aztecan languages. While Mixe-Zoquean languages are neigh-

bors or close neighbors to the Mayan languages, Uto-Aztecan languages
were not. To this I will return in the final section.
Foreign Words
In this section I will discuss the presence of five foreign words, words
that have a foreign origin but which were not adopted systematically in
any of the Mayan languages. Their status remained foreign.
The first foreign word is the Nhuatl word cozcatl jewel (pro-
nounced /koskatl/) (Figure 6a). The word is recorded only once and it
is employed within a complex hieroglyphic collocation ko-sa-ka-[chi]
THRONE on Tikal Stela 31, dedicated in 445 ce. The three opening
syllabic signs ko-sa-ka may hint at koska, as suggested by David Stuart
(cited in Houston & Nelson 2006), in which the final phoneme /tl/
(unknown to Mayan languages) remained underspelled or abbreviated.
a b
c d e
Figure 6. Foreign words in Maya writing, a) cozcatl, in spelling ko-sa-ka-
[chi]THRONE (drawing by Linda Schele), b) -co locative, in spelling KAN-ko
(drawing by Ian Graham, dots added for clarity by the present author), c)
Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli, in spelling ta-wi-si-ka-la, d) Xiuhtecuhtli, in spelling
CHAK-xi-wi-te-i, e) kak(a)tunal, in spelling ka-ka-tu-na-la (black-and-
white scans by the author after the Frstemann 1880 edition of the Dresden
Codex).
The word koskatl means jewel (Simon 1988: 129, cozcatl, cuzcatl).
The most common Mayan word for jewel was uh (Kaufman 2003: 500,
Greater Lowland Mayan languages: *uuh). The foreign word koska
was never fully adopted.
The second foreign word is the Nhuatl word -co, a suffix with the
meaning place (pronounced /-ko/) (Figure 6b). Also, in this case,
this foreign word only occurred once and was identified by Stephen
Houston (Houston & Nelson 2006). The fairly eroded collocation on
Uaxactun Stela 14 still can be transcribed with confidence as KAN-ko.
This stela is of late Classic manufacture, probably close to 810 ce. This
spelling can be transliterated kanko, in which kan- would be a Mayan
word with a variety of meanings (bench; yellow, precious, ripe), and
-ko tentatively can be identified as the Nhuatl toponymic suffix -co.
Mayan languages provide a variety of indigenous suffixes to indicate
place, among them -nal (e.g., Kanwitznal Yellow/Precious Mountain
Place), -il (e.g., Sotzil Bat Place), and -al (e.g., Bakal [Abundance
of] Cascades of Water Place). Again, the foreign word -ko was not
adopted into Mayan languages.
The Dresden Codex, one of the four late Postclassic (circa 12501500
ce) screenfold books, contains a five page section (pages 4650) dedi-
cated to an eight year Venus cycle. Within this section a series of gods is
named; these gods guard and supervise different portions of the Venus
cycle. Three of these gods are of non-Maya origin, as recognized in
earlier research (Barthel 1952: 8082; Bricker 2000; Grube 1986: 5561;
Macri & Looper 2003: 287288; Riese 1982: 3739; Taube 1992: 125;
Taube & Bade 1991; Whittaker 1986: 5660).31
The first foreign god is named in a collocation that provides the spell-
ing ta-wi-si-ka-la (Figure 6c). This spelling can be transliterated tawiskal
and can be related to the Nhuatl god name Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli
(or tla-wis-kal-pan te-kuh-tli) Dawn Lord (alternatively tla-wis-kal
pan te-kuh-tli, Dawn House Lord). The opening sound /tl/, as seen
earlier, is unknown in Mayan languages and at the beginning of a
word it is rendered simply as /t/. The next syllabic signs conform to
the correct pronunciation of the Nhuatl god name, but a large part
31
Although these foreign god names were recognized in earlier epigraphic research,
the earlier readings of the god names may be (far or slightly) removed from those
proposed here (based on more recent epigraphic research) and will not be discussed,
to avoid confusion.
156 erik boot
of the name is not rendered. The second foreign god is named in a

collocation spelled CHAK-xi-wi-te-i (Figure 6d). This spelling can be
transliterated chak xiwtei[] and it is probably the Mayanized approxi-
mation of the Nhuatl god name Xiuhtecuhtli (or xiw te-kuh-tli) Fire
Lord. The Maya rendition of the name opens with chak, a word with
the meaning red, great and a common part of the Maya name for
the planet Venus, Chak Ek Red/Great Star (which follows each of the
god names in this section). The first two syllables are rendered as in the
Nhuatl word, but the closing part of the god name -kuh-tli apparently
is abbreviated to simply -i[], possibly due to the fact that the Nhuatl
god name ended in a sound unknown to Mayan languages, -tli (com-
pare to Macri & Looper 2003: 288, who favor a derivation based on
xihu[i]tl year or xi:hu[i]tl comet). The third foreign god is named
in a collocation that spells ka-ka-tu-na-la (Figure 6e). This spelling
can be transliterated acatunal (e.g., Riese 1982: 3839; Whittaker
1986: 57) or kak(a)tunal. There is, however, no Nhuatl god of that
name known in central Mexico and perhaps it is an epithet standing
in for a god name. The first part, written as ka-ka, still eludes a good
interpretation (compare Whittaker 1986: 57), while the second part of
the god name, -tunal, is perhaps the Maya approximation of tonalli, a
Nhuatl word meaning spirit; birth sign; part, portion (Simon 1988:
716) or warmth of the sun, day (Karttunen 1992: 246). Mayan lan-
guages had great difficulty in adopting these Nhuatl god names. The
Maya completely abbreviated certain adopted words, as some of the
sounds contained in the original Nhuatl word were unknown to the
indigenous language or the string of syllables was simply too long. This
unfamiliarity with certain sounds also led to the abbreviation of much
shorter loanwords from Nhuatl. The word kot eagle (which perhaps
did make into Maya writing)32 is based on the Nhuatl word cuauhtli
(or: kwa:w-tli) (Kaufman 2003: 608). The indigenous Mayan word for
eagle was xik (Kaufman 2003: 607, proto-Mayan, *xi[h]k), while in
the Classic period the now generic word for bird, tzikin, may have
referred to eagle (Boot 2005b: 252259).33
32
An incised text at Comacalco (Urn 26, Pendant 14) provides the spelling ko-to-
ka-ba for a possible toponym, kotkab. Tentatively I interpret kotkab as eagle (kot)
land (kab).
33
The so-called Fenton Vase, now at The British Museum, records the nominal
phrase Jolom Tzikin written as JOL-ma EAGLE-na (Boot 2005c, cited in Van Akkeren
2005: 4652), which on Kerr No. 1392 seems to be spelled in an abbreviated form as
JOL-ma? tzi-na. The EAGLE-na spelling, clearly using an eagles head (compare to
These are at present the only five foreign words that have been
identified in Maya hieroglyphic texts, and by chance, each is represented
by only one (surviving) example. These five foreign words are all of
Nhuatl origin and it is to this particular phenomenon that I return
in the last section.
Foreign Signs
In this section I present a third phenomenon that had some impact on

Maya writing, namely the incorporation of foreign signs. At different
points in time Maya scribes included signs (seemingly) of foreign origin
into their hieroglyphic texts.34
The Tikal Marcador is a unique monument. It is shaped after a
kind of monument known at the central Mexican archaeological site
of Teotihuacan, now termed marcador, or mark stone, as the original
referent is unknown.35 It is not known if it ever had the same or a
similar function at Tikal, as it was found in secondary context at Group
6C-XVI (Fialko 1988; Laporte 1987). The monument is dedicated on a
eagle depicted on Kerr No. 0791), suggests the value TZIKIN EAGLE. The abbreviated
spelling tzi-na on Kerr No. 1392 (within a spelling of the same name) does underwrite
the opening syllable tzi-. The day sign TZIKIN was employed for the fifteenth day
name in the Classic Maya calendar; the fifteenth day sign/name in many Mesoamerican
calendars was eagle.
34
As Lacadena (2005) recently suggested, the original basic syllabic Maya sign
inventory may have been adopted from the Isthmian (aka. epi-Olmec) writing system
employed by Mixe-Zoquean speakers. This important suggestion has much merit, but
some of the details need to investigated further. For instance, some of the Maya signs
have clear referents in Isthmian writing, but many signs can not be traced back. This
may simply be due to insufficient Isthmian hieroglyphic texts currently available. The
oldest Maya text actually predates the Isthmian/epi-Olmec examples; thus direction of
influence may be questioned (see Saturno et al. 2006) or is there a missing common
ancestor (compare to Justeson 1986)? In earlier research it already has been suggested
that the so-called Long Count place notational method of time keeping used by the
Maya in their inscriptions possibly was adopted from non-Mayan speaking communi-
ties surrounding them employing the Isthmian writing system. Long Count dates from
these Isthmian inscriptions date from 36 bce to 162 ce, some 328 to 130 years before
the earliest now known Maya Long Count date (Tikal Stela 29, dated to 292 ce).
35
This mark stone tentatively has been associated with the ballgame, but also has
been identified as an effigy war banner/standard associated with the ballgame (Freidel,
Schele, & Parker 1993: 299). The identification is problematic, as the mark stone was
found in a secondary context. The hieroglyphic text does not make any reference to
the ballgame, but that is actually quite common on Classic Maya sculpture associated
with the ballgame (specifically disks in the playing court and rings set into the court
side walls). For a most recent study on ballgame related sculptures, see Barrois 2006.
158 erik boot
date in 416 ce. After the date there is a simple inaugural statement that
opens with the appropiate verb, the name of the object, and the name
of the subject (Figure 7a). The verb is spelled tza[pa]-ja for tza[h]p-aj
planted is, a typical statement to refer to the erection of a monument
(Grube 1990b). The next collocation opens with a common Maya script
sign for u to indicate u-, the third person pre-consonantal possessive
pronoun his/her/its. The glyph that represents the object is however
a glyphic approximation of a non-Maya sign that provided the original
non-Mayan name of the object. There is no indication present (i.e.,
phonetic complements) to indicate the correct phonetic value of the
logographic sign that names the object.36 The Marcador itself is marked
with this sign to identify the object.37 The name of the subject, the owner
of the object, can be transcribed in Maya script values, based on this
example and other examples of this nominal phrase. In the illustrated
example it employs two signs of non-Mayan origin. These signs are a
hand holding an atlatl or spear thrower (placed within a Maya script
sign for ma) and an owl. The nominal phrase can be tentatively tran-
scribed [JATZ?]ma KUH for Jatzom Kuh Scourger Owl or Owl that
will Scourge.38 This Jatzom Kuh was the father of Nun Yax Ahin, the
king who acceded to power in 379 ce. The Marcador itself is marked
by a non-Maya collocation of the same name, Jatzom Kuh. The text
on the Marcador provides yet other examples of foreign signs, such as
a logograph for SERPENT (non-Mayan are the mosaic pattern and
upturned, curled nose) (Figure 7b), subfixed with the Maya syllabic
sign -na, directing the reader to the common transcription CHAN-na
36
The foreign word that named the object more than probably opened with a
consonant, as is indicated through the use of the prefixed third person pre-consonantal
pronoun.
37
The Marcador panel text at position H1a provides a hieroglyphic sign that seems
to be the glyphic rendition of the Marcador itself, of which it is difficult to ascertain if
it is a Maya invention or a sign based on a foreign sign, and, if the last is applicable,
its source would be Teotihuacan. As Taube (2000; also see Browder 2005) has shown,
there was a Teotihuacan writing system, examples of which can be found at Teotihuacan
itself (e.g., Tetitla) as well as in the southeastern part of Mesoamerica.
38
The Marcador (E3F3) provides a phonetically transparent spelling that can be
transcribed ja-tzo?-ma ku, in which the value tzo recently was proposed by Albert
Davletshin. Testing this value in other contexts has produced interesting results, but
the decipherment is not yet generally accepted. The query is added to express a certain
degree of doubt. The logogographic value JATZ? is based on the ja-tzo? spelling, and
as such also carries a query. The transliteration of the phrase Jatzom Kuh is thus only
tentative. The verb root jatz-, which also occurs in another non-related context spelled
ja-tza, can be translated as to wound, to split (Boot 2002: 33, item hatz-).
b c
Figure 7. Foreign signs at Tikal, a) Tikal Marcador: E8F9, b) Tikal Marcador:
G7, c) Tikal Marcador: H9b (drawings by Linda Schele).
for chan serpent.39 Another composite sign (which occurs twice)

only employs foreign signs, one sign represents a hand holding a spear
thrower, the other sign provides a frontal depiction of a human face in
Teotihuacan style (Figure 7c).
Tikal Stela 31, dedicated in 445 ce, was already mentioned before as
possibly recording the Nhuatl word cozcatl jewel spelled ko-sa-ka.
That same collocation contains a foreign sign unique to this particular
inscription. It is the depiction of a throne or altar, onto which a Maya
sign chi has been placed (Figure 8a). This chi-throne or altar occurs
more frequently in Maya inscriptions, specifically in references to
dynastic founders. The glyphic sign that represents a throne or altar can
at best be compared to the depiction of perishable thrones in central
Mexican manuscripts of the late Postclassic (ca. 12501525 ce) and even
early Colonial period (ca. 15251700) (Figure 8b). The throne is a seat
made of woven reed or grass, a pattern also discernable in the glyphic
39
The SERPENT-na collocation occurs in a sequence 18-u-BAH SERPENT-na for
Waxaklajun Ubah Chan (Marcador: H6G7), Eighteen are the Heads of the Serpent.
This phrase occurs more frequently in which scribes employed the regular signs for
chan serpent (e.g., Copan Stela 6).
160 erik boot
sign on Tikal Stela 31. The glyphic sign has no phonetic complement,
as I take the chi-hand sign to be an integral part of the logographic
sign. This central Mexican chi-throne also has its Classic Maya coun-
terpart, which is connected to dynastic founders, as is clear at Yaxchilan
(Lintel 21: D1C1), and which may refer to some mythological place
of origin (Grube 2004b: 36), as probably is meant in the main text of
Tikal Stela 31 (C6C7).40 The central Mexican chi-throne is part of
a sequence related to Nun Yax Ahin, the new Tikal king who acceded
in 379 ce and who may be envisioned as a kind of founder.41 Nun
Yax Ahin was probably an intrusive ruler (usurper?) who continued
the Tikal (dynastic) line of rulers a year after the death of Chak Tok
Ichak the First in 378 ce (e.g., Boot 2005b: 225238).
At the end of the Classic period there is a series of monuments that
includes hieroglyphic signs of non-Maya origin. These monuments
include stelae erected at the archaeological sites of Seibal, Jimbal, and
Ucanal. Also some late Classic thin walled ceramic vessels, so-called
Pabellon Molded-Carved ceramics of the Y Fine Orange Group (Smith
1971: 19; Werness 2003: 2, note 4), contain signs of non-Maya origin.
In previous research these glyphic signs, as well as certain new icono-
graphic characteristics in the depiction of the human body, were seen as
evidence for non-Maya influences from an area to the west of the Maya
area (e.g., Proskouriakoff 1950: 153; Thompson 1970: 9, 4142).
The short texts on several stelae at Seibal contain calendrical infor-
mation in which the presumed day signs are not common Maya signs,
but signs foreign to Maya writing (Figure 9ab).42 At Jimbal (a site
40
The more common Maya [chi]THRONE sign may actually have been adjusted
to appear central-Mexican/Teotihuacan-like. It may thus be no original Teotihuacan
sign (or the sign was shared by both scripts, referring to the same object, a throne). At
Copan, at the superstructure of Temple 16, a Late Classic unique hieroglyphic bi-script
inscription can be found. The regular Maya inscription obtained a parallel Teotihuacan
inscription, a one-on-one transcription of one script into the other script, but the for-
eign signs are generally considered to be a Maya (re-)invention, an approximation
of the original Teotihuacan script (although intriguing substitutions take place).
41
The text on Tikal Stela 31 opens with the phrase u-bah (it is) the image of, after
which the name and titles of Nun Yax Ahin follow. After this name and titles one can
find the relationship statement y-ajaw (he is) the lord of, a phrase which places Nun
Yax Ahin in a subordinate position to the person to be named next. This person carries
in his nominal and titular phrase the ko-sa-ka-[chi]THONE collocation. The text ends
with the expression u-mijin(?) (he is) the son of, referring back to Nun Yax Ahin as
the son of the person named in the last collocation of the text, Jatzom Kuh.
42
The numbered signs on Seibal Stela 3 are identical, but open with seven and
five. Most probably these are day signs from a non-Mayan calendar. If these day signs
c
b
Figure 8. The [chi]THRONE sign, a) Tikal Stela 31, Left Side: L2, ko-sa-ka-
[chi]THRONE (drawing by John Montgomery), b) Detail of THRONE sign
(drawing by John Montgomery), c) Example of a woven fiber throne from the
central Mexican colonial Manuscrito Tovar (drawing by the author).
close to Tikal), on two stelae (dated to 878889 ce) the three signs
with prefixed numerals 12, 13, and 1 may be calendrical (in order
serpent, death, and deer); alternatively, but less likely, they are
epithets (Figure 9cd). The foreign signs are placed within square car-
touches with 90 degree corners, while the Maya generally preferred oval
cartouches or square cartouches with rounded corners. These square
cartouches are prefixed with numerals. Most of the signs employed in
these non-Maya square cartouches can not be identified with certainty.
On Pabellon Molded-Carved ceramics the square cartouches with
postfixed numerals (a non-Maya characteristic) may identify one of the
individuals depicted or the day on which the event illustrated took place
were in the order of the 260 day calendar, they would be 180 days apart (it takes 180
days to start at any 7 day name and subsequently to arrive at 5 day name (of the
same day name). The numbered sign on Seibal 13 represents a large vessel. This sign
may represent the day name water, the ninth day. Not necessarily this is a non-Mayan
day sign. Note that in the now lost mural at Uaxactun (Structure B-XIII, Room 7) at
least two of the Muluk day signs, the ninth day in the Maya calendar following the
early Colonial Yucatec Maya conventional names, are upturned vessels.
162 erik boot
a b c
d e
Figure 9. Foreigns signs from Seibal and Jimbal, a) Seibal Stela 3 (drawing by
Ian Graham), b) Seibal Stela 13 (drawing by Ian Graham), c) Jimbal Stela 1
(drawing by Linda Schele), d) Jimbal Stela 2 (drawing by Linda Schele).
(e.g., Werness 2003: Figure 1.48).43 Comparable square and rectangular

cartouches containing distinctive signs with postfixed numerals can
be found within complex visual narratives on mold-made late Classic
ceramics from the Ro Blanco area in the Mexican state of Veracruz
(e.g., Von Winning & Gutirrez Solana 1996) to the far west of the Maya
area, while a variety of nominal glyph tags at El Tajn in the Mexican
state of Veracruz have signs outside of a cartouche but with postfixed
numerals (Columns 1 and 2; e.g., Kampen 1972) (compare to Werness
2003: 5859; Wyllie 2002: 163164, 170).
During the late Classic period (ca. 750900 ce) and early Postclassic
period (ca. 9001250 ce) Chichen Itza was the most important site
in Yucatan. In the former, the central plaza as well as residential
compounds to the (far) south of this plaza were enlarged and greatly
43
Also note Kerr No. 6437, a polychrome painted vessel. In the primary rim text
two foreign signs can be identified, each prefixed with a numeral (here 11 and 12;
is the first sign the sign for dog, the eleventh day name?). Based on the calligraphic
style of the hieroglyphic texts recorded on this vessel, the employed sign inventory, and
the contents of the visual narrative, this vessel probably has an origin in the eastern
Maya area (eastern Peten/western Belize).
b
Figure 10. Foreign signs at Chichen Itza, a) Selection of graphic signs, Temple
of the Warriors and Northwest Colonnade (after Morris et al. 1931: Figs.
231233), b) Selection of graphic signs, Northwest Colonnade (after Morris
et al. 1931: Figs. 234 and 236).
extended. The architects and sculptors who designed these new building
phases employed large polychrome painted sculpted visual narratives in
which numerous human and non-human actors interacted. To identify
these various actors the sculptors employed a set of graphic signs which
in most cases seem to be of non-Mayan origin. Alternatively, these
graphic signs are so far removed from their Maya glyphic origins that
164 erik boot
is difficult to establish if these signs are truly foreign. However, some

signs are certainly foreign and have no Maya origin. Placing glyphic
and graphic signs to identify actors within complex visual narratives
is characteristic of many Mesoamerican cultures.
The sculpted murals at the Great Ballcourt, the sculpted columns at
this building (South Building, Upper Temple of the Jaguar), and the
sculpted columns at the Temple of the Warriors Complex (specifically
the North West Colonnade) contain a multitude of human portraits. A
great number of these portraits is identified with graphic signs that pro-
vide the personal name, title, or perhaps family to which the individual
depicted belonged (compare Kristan-Graham n.d.) (Figure 10ab).
Certain signs can be identified with ease, such as SERPENT-STAR or
KAN-EK for Kanek (Pillar Six, South Building, Great Ballcourt), an
important name among the Itza, the putative founders of Chichen Itza
(Boot 2005b) (Figure 11a). These particular signs as well as others may
be derived from Maya signs (the signs probably were less abstracted,
more recognizable to a non-Maya audience, and thus in most cases
removed from their original hieroglyphic referents), but others are more
difficult to identify and may have a foreign origin.44 Many individuals
that participate in the elaborate ceremonial dance pageant portrayed
in the mural program at the Lower Temple of the Jaguar at the Great
Ballcourt are associated with graphic signs. Some signs may be derived
from original Maya glyphic signs, other graphic signs are abstract
renditions of animals and plants. One of the signs used is very close
to signs known from the Zapotec script as employed in a large area in
the Mexican state of Oaxaca, for instance at the archaeological site of
Monte Alban (Figure 11b).
South of the Great Plaza in Chichen Itza, located beyond the Las
Monjas Complex, one can find the Initial Series Complex. During the
period 19992002 the upper faades of various buildings at this group
were excavated, consolidated, and restored (Schmidt 2003). In one
of these faades the human individuals portrayed are identified with
numerals and graphic signs, which may be of non-Maya origin. In the
upper faade at the back of the House of the Monkeys one can identify
two seated male individuals. Above the heads of these a series of dots
44
Space in this essay is limited and a full discussion of all graphic signs and their
possible origin in either Maya writing or a foreign writing system has to wait for a
future occasion.
a b
Figure 11. Native and foreign abstract signs at Chichen Itza, a) Sign combina-
tion SERPENT-STAR for KAN-EK, Great Ballcourt, South Building, Pillar
6 (drawing by the author), b) Zapotec sign, Great Ballcourt, Lower Temple
of the Jaguar (drawing by Annie Hunter).
can be found, positioned to the left and right of an animal head, prob-
ably a dog and a deer (Figure 12). One person may be named 10(?)
Dog, the other 11 Deer(?).45 This recording method of numerals is
uncharacteristic of Maya writing, which preferred a combination of bars
and dots to express numerals (ten, if this the correct number, would
have been represented by two bars, a bar standing for five; eleven
would have been two bars for ten and one dot for one). The use
of dots only to express numerals in names (numeral + sign) is typical
for writing traditions in the Mixteca-Puebla style as well as among the
Azteca-Mexica (e.g., Anders & Jansen 1988), both in central Mexico.
As such, in the tentative transcription 10?-DOG for 10(?) Dog, the
item dog is a well-known day name, as is deer in the tentative
transcription 11-DEER? for 11 Deer. In many of the Mesoamerican
cultures people were named after the day on which they were born,
so 10(?) Dog and 11 Deer(?) may be names that are indicative of
birth dates.46
45
These upper faade narratives were constructed with carved limestone blocks,
placed close to each other. The narratives were intricately painted (many traces of
which have survived, as most stones fell face down). The numerals and graphic sign
span several blocks and some detail has been lost due to breakage and erosion. The
numeral that accompanies the DOG sign seems to be 10, but 9 is also a possibility (if
two fragmented dots indeed should join).
46
The birth day name was based on a naming system in which an individual was
named after the day on which (s)he was born. This day was one of the 260 days of the
so-called ritual Mesoamerican calendar (as it was shared by most if not all cultures
within Mesoamerica), a calendar based on the combination of the numerals 113
combined with 20 distinctive day signs (alligator, wind, house, lizard, serpent,
166 erik boot
Figure 12. Possible birthday names at Chichen Itza, House of the Monkeys,
10?-DOG (top), 11-DEER? (bottom) (line tracing by the author).
Loanwords, Foreign Words, and Foreign Signs: Origin and Timing
In three sections I presented examples of loanwords, foreign words,

and foreign signs. Normally these three phenomena are not treated
together in Maya studies, but these three phenomena simply cannot be
seen independent of each other. They are expressions of intense, long-
term sociocultural contact between the Maya area and important regions
close to the Maya area as well as areas located in central Mexico.
Here follows a descriptive and tentative reconstruction on the ori-
gin and timing of the loanwords, foreign words, and foreign signs
discussed in the previous three sections. During the Preclassic period,
from circa 1500500 bce the inhabitants of the Maya area (who, in the
early phase, were speakers of the first four languages that descended
from proto-Mayan; in the later phase they were speakers of some ten
different languages) were in contact with the Olmec civilization, the
heart of which was located in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Important
Olmec sites were located at La Venta, San Lorenzo, and Tres Zapotes.
Probably the Olmecs were speakers of a Mixe-Zoquean language
(Campbell & Kaufman 1976; note Wichmann 1998 & Wichmann
et al. n.d.) and contact-induced Olmec influence spread towards central
Mexico, Oaxaca, the Maya area, and as far as western Honduras and El
etc.) leading to 260 unique combinations (e.g., 1 Alligator, 7 Serpent, 10 Dog,

13 Flower). Each individual also received a personal name, and so the famous Mixtec
usurper and lord 8 Deer is known as 8 Deer Jaguar Claw.
Salvador (e.g., Sharer & Grove 1989). Late Preclassic Maya iconography
shows several characteristics which may have Olmec origins. These
characteristics specifically can be found in the portrayal of god heads,
for instance, in early iconographic programs at Calakmul, Holmul, and
San Bartolo (e.g., Saturno et al. 2005). The movement of Olmec people
was probably based on trade relationships that reached far beyond the
Veracruz heartland (for instance, Guatemalan jade sources; e.g., Seitz
et al. 2001). It is from this period in the Preclassic that probably all of
the Mixe-Zoquean loans stem, judging from their ancestry in Mayan
languages: yum boss, father, unen child, chik coati, patah guave,
tzima calabash, ul cornmeal, pom incense, and aw mouth. These
loanwords fall within common lexical fields as recognized in loanword
studies, which sometimes employ broadly defined lexical fields (e.g.,
Campbell and Kaufman 1976) or in other cases employ more speci-
fied and restricted lexical fields (e.g., Haspelmath 2003). The possible
borrowing of the item aw mouth with a meaning shifted to shout
deserves some additional attention. If correctly identified, this item
was integrated in the composite noun ajaw king, lord, which literally
means he who shouts. The very fact that this title came into being
for an institution that lies at the heart of Classic Maya socio-political
organization may mean that the actual concept of king- or lordship, as
expressed through the title ajaw, may have been borrowed from Olmec
civilization as well. As several earlier and recent iconographic studies
have suggested, the iconographic complex that represents Classic Maya
kingship and its socio-religious context in visual art has an ancestry
that goes back to the Olmec period (e.g., Reilly 1991, 1995, 2005; Taube
2004). The Maya institution of ajaw already was established by the
early phase of the late Preclassic period (ca. 500 bce250 ce),47 as the
currently oldest known hieroglyphic text, from the fourth to second
century bce as discovered at San Bartolo, contains this item. Even writ-
ing itself and the first basic syllabic inventory may have been adopted
from a Mixe-Zoquean speaking and script community (see Lacadena
2005).
47
A complex social structure with at the heart the institution of ajaw was probably
established already centuries earlier (compare to Hansen 2005). Between ca. 400200
ce the largest structures ever built by the Maya were constructed at the Guatemalan
sites of El Mirador and Nakbe (Sharer 1994: 108117), some 4050 km. to the north
to northwest of Tikal.
168 erik boot
As current research shows, beginning in circa the first to second

century ce, the Maya area came into contact with the central Mexican
site of Teotihuacan. This contact phase became apparent through the
incorporation of Teotihuacan-derived iconography and architecture,
for instance at the site of Tikal (e.g., Laporte 1987; Laporte & Fialko
1995). It is at this site that contact between central Mexico and the
Maya area specifically intensified. Tikal Stela 31 records a specific date
in 378 ce on which the contemporary king of Tikal named Chak Tok
Ichak the First died and on which a certain Siyaj Kak arrived at Tikal
from Teotihuacan. In 379 ce the new king, Nun Yax Ahin, acceded
to the throne. Inscriptions from the period of circa 416445 ce report
on these and other events retrospectively. The inscriptions that report
on these events and the iconography associated with these inscriptions
show a high level of Teotihuacan influence. One of the words recorded
on Tikal Stela 31 may be koska, a Mayan approximation of the Nhuatl
word cozcatl jewel. That same inscription provides a collocation that
contains a hieroglyphic rendition of a central Mexican throne or altar.
The Tikal Marcador text describes the planting of the Marcador monu-
ment itself; the monument is named by a Teotihuacan name through
a Maya rendition of a Teotihuacan script sign. The name of the owner
of the object is even rendered in hieroglyphic signs which have a non-
Maya origin, although the name can be transliterated into Classic Maya
based on syllabic complementation and substitution.48 The presence of
loanwords with a Nhuatl origin may stem from this period in Maya
history, probably beginning in the first to second century ce: kakaw
cacao, patan service, tribute, and kohaw helmet. These words were
recorded from the early to the late Classic period (circa 750900 ce),
a period in which also the Nhuatl suffix -co with the meaning place
can be found recorded at the site of Uaxactun. As several research-
ers recently have suggested, the combination of Teotihuacan derived
architecture, iconography, glyphic signs, and the presence of Nhuatl
loanwords and foreign words of Nhuatl origin may be an indication
48
It is possible that through syllabic complementation and substitution the Classic
Maya name (or title) Jatzom Kuh actually should be identified as a loan translation,
the original being in the language of Teotihuacan (probably Nhuatl). Also the Maya
name (or title) Siyaj Kak Fire (kak) Born (siyaj), the one person actually arriving
from Teotihuacan at Tikal (e.g., Boot 2005b: 225238; Martin & Grube 2000: 2836;
Stuart 2000), may be a loan translation.
that the language of Teotihuacan was (in part) Nhuatl (e.g., Dakin &
Wichmann 2000; Macri & Looper 2003; but note Kaufman 2001:29,
no nawa [Nhua] before 500 ce in central Mexico). Representatives
of several contemporary cultures in Mesoamerica had residency in
Teotihuacan (e.g., Zapotec quarter), as did the Maya (most probably
at Tetitla). This language affiliation with the city of Teotihuacan may
also influence the identity, origin, and ancestry of the Nhua speaking
groups that came to live in the Maya area, even as far as El Salvador
(e.g., Macri & Looper 2003) (see Figure 1).
In the Terminal Classic phase (ca. 750900 ce) a number of monu-
ments erected at the sites of Seibal, Ucanal, and Jimbal employed day
signs placed within square cartouches which (mostly) were of non-
Mayan origin. Similar designs were employed in the visual narratives
on Pabellon Molded-Carved Y Fine Orange ceramics. Although there
are no direct clues for a linguistic affiliation of these non-Mayan signs,
tentatively they can be correlated with an area to the west of the Maya
area, in eastern Mexico, i.e., the state of Veracruz, in which the Ro
Blanco area and the site of El Tajin figure prominently (El Tajin is
located in an area in northern Veracruz which was Totonac speaking
at the time of the conquest, see Figure 1a).
During the Terminal Classic period and the first part of the early
Postclassic period (ca. 9001250 ce) at the site of Chichen Itza, com-
plex visual narrative programs were developed in which the human
actors were identified through graphic signs mostly unknown to Maya
writing in any previous period. It was suggested that perhaps a large
number of these signs could well be of Maya origin, but that these
signs were abstracted in a different manner and thus far removed
from their original (possibly glyphic) referents. Many of these graphic
signs and what they depict are recognizable, even to us, but the correct
readings may never be known. One sign identifying a human actor
was of Zapotec origin, while others were comparable to the Mixteca-
Puebla style and central Mexico. The use of these graphic signs in
elaborate visual narratives may reflect that the city of Chichen Itza
was visited by people from all over Mesoamerica, with many different
linguistic backgrounds. There is no indication yet that representatives of
contemporary cultures in Mesoamerica had residency at Chichen Itza
comparable to Teotihuacan. In the early Colonial period (ca. 15251700
ce), centuries after the apogee of Chichen Itza, this visitation was still
known among the local Maya population and communicated to the
170 erik boot
Spaniards. As early Spanish sources reveal, people came to Chichen

Itza as far away as Mexico, Guatemala, Chiapas, and other remote
provinces (Boot 2005b: 436).
During the late Postclassic period (circa 12501525 ce) the Maya
produced many screenfold books, only four of which have survived
to the present day. One is the Dresden Codex and it is here that three
collocations were identified spelling Nhuatl names and/or epithets.
During the late Postclassic period in central Mexico the Azteca-Mexica
had founded their capital at Mexico-Tenochtitlan (now the location of
Mexico City). The language they spoke was Nhuatl. The Azteca-Mexica
had intense socio-cultural and possibly also religious contacts with
northern Yucatan and it is probably from that period that the inclusion
of the Nhuatl god names and/or epithets is derived.
This overview, albeit very descriptive in nature, may provide the
background on the origin of loanwords, foreign words, and foreign
signs in Maya writing.49
Final Remarks
In this essay I discussed loanwords, foreign words, and foreign signs

in Maya writing. The particular loanwords discussed in this essay (only
a fraction of a larger number of possible loanwords) were of Mixe-
Zoquean and Nhuatl origin, while the foreign words that have been
identified were only of Nhuatl origin. The foreign signs employed in
the central Maya area were of central Mexican and possible eastern
Mexican (Veracruz) origin, while some of the foreign signs employed
at Chichen Itza may have their origin in Oaxaca, the Mixteca-Puebla
area, and/or central Mexico.
I distinguished five different but largely subsequent phases in which
loanwords, foreign words, and foreign signs entered Maya writing. In
each phase there was a shift in the area from which words or signs were
borrowed. These shifts are parallel to the waxing and waning of other
49
Additionally I note that, next to the voluntary movement of population, invol-
untary dispersal of population can also lead to language change and the adoption of
loanwords, foreign words, and foreign signs. Next to the natural waxing and waning
of indigenous cultures, drastic climatic change may have contributed to the descrip-
tive scenario presented here, in which intense language contact leading to adoption of
linguistic elements as well as language divergence due to linguistic isolation took place
(see Dahlin, Quizar, & Dahlin 1987).
prominent civilizations in Mesoamerica: From the Olmec (Preclassic

period), to Teotihuacan (early Classic to late Classic), to the Mixteca-
Puebla area, to El Tajin (late Classic), to the Azteca-Mexica of central
Mexico (late Postclassic). It should be specifically noted that this was
no one-way process. Maya writing and iconography was included in
elaborate visual narratives at Teotihuacan in the early Classic period
(e.g., Taube 2003), while during the late Classic period (when Maya
civilization reached its apogee) complex visual narratives at the site
of Cacaxtla close to central Mexico were executed in pure Maya style,
while within these foreign visual narratives the writing examples were
in a local tradition. To a lesser extent this also happened at the site of
Xochicalco, also close to central Mexico (e.g., Boot 2005b: 269).
Maya writing, as any writing system, cannot been seen out of the
context of the civilization that invented (or adopted), developed, and
used it. Within Maya iconography and architecture, from the earliest
to the latest phases, one can recognize a variety of non-Maya char-
acteristics. To fully understand the underlying principles that led to
the adoption of the loanwords, foreign words, and foreign signs
discussed in this essay we also need to study and integrate those non-
Maya characteristics.
To conclude, the loanwords and foreign words discussed here were
of Mixe-Zoquean and Uto-Aztecan origin, both languages spoken by
cultures with which the Maya were in prolonged and intense contact.
The loanwords that were incorporated into writing can be categorized
to common and well-known lexical fields as religion and belief
(pom incense), food and drink (ul cornmeal), animals (chik
coati), commerce (patan service, tribute), war, hunting (kohaw
helmet), agriculture, vegitation (kakaw cacao, tzima calabash,
patah guave), vocal utterance (aw mouth/shout), and family
relationships (yum boss; father, unen child). In most cases Mayan
languages retained their indigenous words, which probably means that
loanwords received from the donor language held greater prestige and
as such were recorded in writing by the elite. The two rare foreign
words of Uto-Aztecan origin (koska jewel, -ko place) were probably
recorded only as they carried prestige, as these words never came to
function parallel to or replace the indigenous words (uh jewel, -nal,
-il, -al place). The early Classic examples of foreign signs of central
Mexican origin coincide with the presence of Uto-Aztecan (Nhuatl)
loanwords and foreign signs, an indication of the intensity of cultural
and linguistic contact at that time. Future research may substantiate the
172 erik boot
suggestions made in this essay. This future research may also identify
more loanwords, foreign words, and foreign signs as well as their
respective origins.
Acknowledgments
In the first place I thank Alex de Voogt for his kind invitation to
participate in the third The Idea of Writing seminar held at Leiden
University and his patience in regard to receiving the final written
version. I thank Lucero Melndez and Carlos Pallan who made the
manuscript version of their paper available, which they presented
at the 10th European Maya Conference, December 2005, at Leiden
University, the Netherlands. I also thank Alfonso Lacadena, who made
the manuscript versions available of papers he presented at the 10th
European Maya Conference, December 2005, Leiden University, the
Netherlands, and at the 52nd International Congress of Americanists,
July 2006, Seville, Spain. For correcting awkward English phrasings I
thank Irving Finkel and an anonymous reviewer. Additionally I thank
Nick Hopkins and David Mora-Marn for suggestions in regard to an
earlier version of this essay. Any remaining mistakes or fallacies are
the sole responsibility of the author. As always, unless noted otherwise,
the opinions expressed in this essay are mine.
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ON LOANS AND ADDITIONS TO THE FIDL (ETHIOPIC)
WRITING SYSTEM1
Azeb Amha
Introduction
Fidl is the local name of the writing system widely used in Ethiopia
and Eritrea. Both countries make use of other scripts as well, but fidl
is undoubtedly the major script used for adminstrative and educa-
tional purposes. Fidl is known by various names among scholars: the
Ethiopic, Geez, Abyssinian, Ethiopian or Amharic writing system. It
was originally used for writing the classic Ethio-Semitic language, Geez.2
A rich heritage of inscriptions in stelaes, old parchment manuscripts,
numerous religious and secular books as well as annotations on icons
and scrolls has been preserved with this writing system. Currently fidl
is used for writing a number of Ethiopian languages from the Semitic,
Cushitic, Omotic and Nilo-Saharan language families.
A number of scholars claim that fidl is the result of the gradual
transformation of the Sabaean/Minean script (Coulmas 1989, Diringer
1968, Getachew Haile 1996, Jensen 1970). The two writing systems are
indeed strikingly similar (see examples below). The contrasting view
that fidl originated in Ethiopia has also been proposed (Asres 1959,
Bernal 1990, Wossene 1990, Ayele Bekerie 1997).3 Hudson (2002: 1767)
suggests a middle position, i.e., that there was a common South Semitic
writing from which the Sabean writing system and fidl further devel-
oped independently. As justification for his view, Hudson refers to the
dating of inscriptions from Ethiopia/Eritrea and Yemen, which point at
the contemporaneousness of the two writing systems (cf. also Drewes
1962, Ricci 1994, among others). Thus, the question of origin is still
1
I am grateful to Alex de Voogt, Baye Yimam and a reviewer for helpful comments
on earlier versions of the paper.
2
Geez ceased to be used as a mother tongue language since the ninth century.
However, it is still used in religious services in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido
Church.
3
See a review of Ayyele Bekeries book by T. Daniels posted at: http://www3.aa.tufs.
ac.jp/~aflang/TEXTS/review/Daniels.html
180 azeb amha
open. In Section 2 we compare the Sabean writing system to the Geez

writing system in order to demonstrate the qualitative and quantita-
tive differences and similarities between the two scripts. When Geez
ceased to be a spoken language, the script was employed for writing
Amharic and later other Ethio-Semitic languages such as Tigrigna. This
brought about a number of additions and modifications in the script,
as we show in Section 3. The first written Amharic text dates back to
the fourteenth century (cf. Richter 1997), but broader use of written
Amharic for educational purpose is relatively recent. Use in education
necessitated yet more adaptations and additions to the script. These
developments will also be discussed in Section 4. The third stage of
modifications and additions can be observed from recent times when
fidl was used for writing certain Ethiopian Semitic (other than Amharic
and Tigrigna), Cushitic and Nilotic languages, the consequences of
which will be discussed in Section 5.
Fidl I: The Script of Geez Compared to Sabean
The oldest form of fidl, used for writing Geez, appeared around the
year 350 (cf. Jensen 1970: 243). Geez-fidl contained twenty-six basic
graphemes (cf. Table 2). Twenty-four of these graphemes have strik-
ingly similar parallels in the Sabaean script (see some examples in Table
1). The differences include orientation (straight vs, tilting), direction,
length and presence or absence of part of a grapheme. In a few cases
e.g., (s) and (z), the graphemes are significantly different from that
of the Sabaean writing. Table 1 includes examples of Geez graphemes
(indicated by the arrow) and their corresponding Sabean forms to the
left (See Asher 1994: 1149).
There are other substantial differences between the two systems. An
important innovation in the initial stage of writing Geez involved the
addition of two graphemes to represent the bilabial ejective (p), repre-
sented in Geez by and the voiceless bilabial stop (p) written as . The
consonant segments represented by these graphemes came into the Ethio-
Semitic languages through Greek and Latin loans such as: pappas ()
bishop, trppeza () table and police (), posta ().
In Amharic, some speakers still replace, p () with b pronouncing the
words police and posta as bolis and bosta.
Initially, the Geez writing system was non-vocalized just like Sabean.
Until about 350 ad the graphemes represented only consonants and
on loans and additions to the fidl writing system 181
Table 1: Sabean and Geez graphemes compared
no vowels (Jensen 1970: 346). Geez-fidl is unique among the Semitic

scripts because of the systematic indication of vowels.
There are indications that vocalized Geez was present in the sixth-
seventh centuries, but in this period, side by side with the vocalized
Geez, the non-vocalized form was also used. Elias (1997) reports that
among twelve inscriptions discovered in 1830 by Rppel (with texts
dated to fourth-seventh centuries), three inscriptions employed unvo-
calized Geez, while five were written with vocalized Geez. There is a
trilingual stele (written in Greek, Old South Arabian (OSA) and Geez
languages), excavated by the same team, which revealed inscriptions
written in the scripts of OSA and unvocalized Geez. The chronology
of these inscriptions does not match the chronological order of the
scripts development. That is, although OSA is attested earliest in other
inscriptional contexts, the Aksumite inscriptions with OSA are not the
earliest of the inscriptions found from the area. Likewise, unvocalized
Geez is used both before and concurrent with vocalized Geez (Elias
1997: 425).
The motivation for indicating vocalization could be to facilitate learn-
ing for the increasing number of students who spoke Geez as their
second language (Getachew 1996: 571). Some scholars argue that Greek
was the model for vocalization (cf. Diringer 1968), while others claim
that Indian scripts such as Brahmi and Kharoshti are more probable
inspirations (Friedrich 1966, Coulmans 1989).
When vocalization took place, each grapheme was made to repre-
sent a combination of a consonant and a vowel. The basic twenty six
graphemes in the first column represent a consonant plus the vowel
or in a few cases the vowel a (cf. Table 2). Combinations with the
remaining six vowels, u, i, a, e, and o are derived through systematic
modifications on the basic form. Each of the six vowels has a charac-
teristic diacritic mark. For example, to derive the combination with the
182 azeb amha
Table 2. The Geez fidl

vowel u, one needs to add a small horizontal line at the middle-right

side of the basic form. With very few exceptions, the combination with
the vowel i is derived by adding a horizontal line at the bottom-right
part of the basic form, whereas the combination with the vowel e is
characterised by a small circle at the bottom-right of the basic form.
These derivations can be observed from the Geez-fidl in Table 2 (see
Asher 1994: 1150).
Some scholars consider both the Geez and Amharic-fidl as syllabary
(Bender et al. 1976). Others argue against this by pointing out that:
(a) there is no one-to-one correspondence between the number of
syllables in a word and the graphemes used to represent it. Thus, words
with one syllable may be written with two or more graphemes. For
example, na come has one grapheme and represents one syllable.
On the other hand the monosyllabic words (sw) a man/person
and (srg) wedding respectively contain two and three graphemes
because final consonants and consonant clusters are pronounced and
written without the vowels (cf. Getachew Haile, Baye Yimam 1997).
(b) unlike a syllabic system, in fidl, there is a largely consistent
similarity among the family of graphemes (cf. Taddese Beyene 1994).
Sampson (1985: 6466) writes . . . in essence the Ethiopic writing sys-
tem is a segmental script in which segments are encoded as features
of graphs rather than as independent, spatially-disconnected marks.
Similarly, Baye Yimam (1997) states that fidl is alphabetic but its
representation is one that coordinates the vowels and consonants in
one. Coulmas (2003: 155) uses the term alphasyllabic to refer to the
Ethiopian writing system. Interestingly, abugida, one of the two ways
of ordering the fidl graphemes, has now become a generalized term to
refer to writing systems that represent consonant and vowel combina-
tions in one grapheme.
The other difference between the Sabaean and Geez-fidl involved
the direction of writing. Originally, Geez, like Sabaean, had right-to-left
writing. This was first changed to the so called bstrophdn pattern
in Geez, i.e., texts were written and read from right-to-left, continued
in the second line from left-to-right and in the third again from right-
to-left (Asher 1994: 1149). But later, around the fourth century, a fixed
left-to-right writing developed.
The names and order of graphemes were also different in the Geez-
fidl and in the Sabaean and other Semitic writing systems. According to
Jensen (1970: 281) the divergences in the naming . . . are to be explained
184 azeb amha
partly by the fact that Ethiopic names of like meaning were substituted
for the north-Semitic ones (hence maj for mm water, rs for r
(r) head), and partly by the fact that we have to do with very old
variations. Geez-fidl also differs from related scripts in the order of
letters. Some graphemes that are represented far apart in the North
Semitic list are brought together in close sequence in Geez-fidl due
to resemblance of outward form or sound.
In addition to the above characteristic developments, paleographical
studies show that the Geez-fidl has undergone a number of changes in
length, thickness, and shape during the various centuries it was written
on parchment (cf. Uhlig 1984: 45).
Geez ceased to exist as a spoken language after the ninth century,
but is still used as a liturgical language by the Ethiopian Orthodox
Church and spoken marginally among priests. The diminishing role
of Geez opened opportunities for Amharic as a written language.
Writing Amharic introduced a number of additions to the Geez-fidl,
as discussed in the next section.
Fidl II: From Writing Geez to Writing Amharic
The first written testimonies of Amharic date back to the fourteenth

century. These include texts with riddles, proverbs, folktales, royal
songs, manuscripts on medicine, on historical events, and documents
on problems of everyday life (cf. Richter 1997: 543). However, Geez
remained the only literary language used in education until 1617 when
the Portuguese Jesuits started employing Amharic (next to Portuguese)
to teach reading and writing. With the expulsion of the Jesuits in
1632, the development of Amharic was stranded for about two cen-
turies (Pankhurst 1976: 310). The next significant chances for written
Amharic came in the 1830s, when Protestant and Roman missionaries
used this language for teaching and, some twenty-five years after the
missionary effort, when Emperor Tewodros II ordered the Ethiopian
royal chronicles to be written in Amharic (Cooper 1976: 290). Even
after these developments, it took another century before Amharic was
fully used in education and in other literary capacities (see Section 3
for more discussion).
Amharic inherited all the twenty-six graphemes of Geez and inno-
vated symbols for writing palatal consonants: (), (j), (), (),
and () by adding a horizontal line above the graphemes representing
the alveolar consonants (t), (d), (s), (z), and (n); and in the
case of (), by adding circles at the bottom of the corresponding

alveolar ejective (t).
Another addition to the Amharic-fidl is the grapheme for v, written
as , by adding a horizontal line to the grapheme for b (). is exclu-
sively found in recently borrowed foreign words (all of them nouns)
such as visa and virus. Earlier loans with this sound are
pronounced as b and written with the grapheme for b, for example,
the word varanda is pronounced and written as brnda. In the stan-
dard list of Amharic graphemes, is treated as marginal by listing in a
separate box, as the last of graphemes representing a simple consonant
plus a vowel combination (see below).
The entire set of fidl graphemes, comprising 299 symbols is referred
to as fidl gbta plate of letters. There are standard ways of listing
the fidl graphemes in a fidl gbta. In earlier times the list was made
in a roll of parchment, later, a cardboard with the printed graphemes
was used. An example of fidl gbta is given in Table 3; it consists of
the following five sub-parts:
1. The first and main part consists of 224 graphemes which are
represented in seven columns. The first column contains thirty-three
basic graphemes, which depict the combination of a consonant
and the vowel , and in a few cases a. The remaining six columns
represent modification of each of the basic graphemes to represent the
combination with u, i, a, e, and o. These graphemes are represented
in the list in two different orders: the ha-hu order and the abugida
order (in Table 3, top left and right respectively). Discussion on the
formal and functional difference between the two orders is given in
Section 4.)
2. A separate row contains seven graphemes for the combination of
the consonant v and the seven vowels (with first order form: ). As
mentioned earlier, v is used only in loan words. Its marginal use is
shown by listing it separately. Moreover, this grapheme does not
feature in the abugida order (see top-right in Table 3).
3. Then there are forty graphemes which represent complex segments
or sequences. Like the grapheme for v, these also are not included
in the abugida-order. They are divided into two sub-types, which
are kept separately in the list.
186 azeb amha
a. In the first group we find labio-velar consonants (kw, kw, gw)

and the glottal fricative (hw) which are sometimes referred to as
defective (cf. Bender 1976), because, out of the seven vowels of
the language, the symbols for these complex consonants depict
only combinations with the vowels , i, a, e and (e.g., (kw),
(kwi), (kwa), (kwe) and (kw). Among the labio-velar set,
the distinction between (kwi) and (kw) is almost lost since,
in most contemporary writings, is used to represent both kwi
and kw combinations (Baye Yimam, pc).
b. The second group comprises twenty symbols depicting what are
alternatively described as representations of a complex labialized
consonant and the vowel a, or as a simple consonant followed by
a complex vowel (diphthong) ua, e.g., (for lwa or lua). In this
group, all consonants but one are coronal; the exception is for
hwa).
4. Twenty symbols representing numerals also have a special slot in
the fidl gbta (For our purpose here, these are shown separately
in Table 4.)
5. Finally, fidl gbta depicts eight punctuation marks in a separate
box. The eight symbols, their names and functions are listed
below.
Symbol Name of symbol in Geez/Amharic Function of symbol
hulat ntb two dots basic word-divider
arat ntb four dots sentence-divider
ntla srz single stroke a comma, word-list divider
drrb srz double stroke a semi-colon, phrase/clause
sequence divider
tyyake mlkkt symbol of a question mark
question
__ tmrt tks symbol of quotes quotation mark
! tmrt ankro symbol of exclamation mark
emphasis
! tmrt sllak symbol of sarcasm utterance is sarcasm
Currently the symbol (?) is widely used for the question mark in place
of . It is now also common to leave out the word-divider () in print.
Consequently, word boundaries are signaled by space. In hand-writings
the word-divider is still widely used.
The following is an example of fidl gbta, the list of all of the
Amharic graphemes mentioned above (excluding the symbols for
numerals, for which see Table 4). It is typed by the present author
Table 3. The Amharic fidl-gbta

188 azeb amha
Table 4. Ethiopic numeral graphemes

Ethiopic digits Ethiopic digits
1 20
2 30
3 40
4 50
5 60
6 70
7 80
8 90
9 100
10 1000
following the standard model published and distributed by the Berhan

and Selam printing press.
Fidl has twenty special graphemes for numerals. This is in contrast
to other Semitic languages, e.g., Hebrew, where the symbols for writ-
ing numerals are based on graphemes used for writing words. Each of
the fidl numerals has a horizonal stroke above and below. There is
no grapheme for zero.
In modern Amharic, the Hindu-Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) are
used in schools for teaching arithmetic and also for business purposes.
This could be attributed to the absence of a grapheme for zero, which
makes writing larger numerals difficult. Some Ethiopian scholars, among
whom Kidanewold Kifle (1956) and Amdework (2000), attempted to
introduce a grapheme for zero but this and other reform initiatives
did not acquire wider usage due to lack of Church and government
support (cf. Meheretu Adnew 2006: 30). According to Diringer (1968:
231) the symbols for numerals are borrowed from Greek. Getachew
(1996: 574) states that this borrowing might have been channeled
through Coptic.
As can be seen from Table 3 above, some consonant-vowel combi-
nations are represented more than once. Thus, there are four symbols
for representing h ( ), two for s ( ), /a ( ) and s
( ). These graphemes represented distinct sounds in Geez as some
of these still do in Tigrigna. The phonological distinction among some
of these is lost in present-day Amharic, or the sounds are merged into
one in the spoken language, but the graphemes are not abandoned.
Consequently, Amharic speakers use , , , , , and alternatively
to write ha. So far, reform suggestions for getting rid of the redundant
graphemes in Amharic have not found support.
Sometimes fidl is described as a difficult system for learning and

teaching. The background for this view seems to be the presence of
redundant symbols and the large amount of graphemes in the writing
system. There are not many publications that focus on the teaching-
learning process itself for a general reader. However, issues related to
this process are discussed in studies on language use and history of
education. Below we mention some general observations based mainly
on these studies and secondarily on the authors own experience as a
pupil in a Church-administered primary school.
Teaching and Learning Fidl: Expansion of Education
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church schools have existed for more than
a thousand years, giving primarily religious education. These are still
important institutions for teaching reading and writing skills, especially
in the countryside where formal schools are not available. Church edu-
cation consists of three stages: 1) nebab bet, aimed at training the child
for two years in reading, writing, and oral learning until the Psalms of
David can be read. 2) qeddase bet, training in basic/elementary religious
songs (qum-zema) and advanced singing (mwast zema). This train-
ing lasts four to five years. 3) zema bet (poetry school) and mesihaf
bet (school of commentaries) for commentaries and interpretation of
the Old and New Testament. (Cf. Pankhurst 1976, Yalew Ingidayeh
1997: 4012).
As Haile-Gabriel Dagne (1976:340) states . . . [i]nstruction in the
nibab bet is limited almost exclusively to reading. Children master the
231 letters of the Giiz syllabary [sic] and are drilled in the art of good
reading. Traditionally writing is not taught, since this was not needed
in everyday life as reading is for daily prayers and participating in the
church service.
In church schools, learning relies heavily on memory. Two methods
of representation are important in facilitating the initial stage of learn-
ing the symbols. Of these, the so-called ha-hu-order4 is taught first. In
this pattern, the thirty-three basic symbols (i.e., a consonant plus the
vowel and in a few cases a) are listed vertically and the six derivative
4
In dictionaries word entries are made following the ha-hu order.
190 azeb amha
forms of each of these are listed horizontally. The vertically listed

basic-forms follow the fixed order of (ha), (l), (ha), (m),
(s), etc. (see column one of Table 3.) For example, for the first basic
grapheme (ha), the horizontally listed derivative forms comprise:
(hu), (hi), (ha), (he), (h) and (ho), in this linear sequence.
The pupils learn these through rhythmic repetitions with a leading
pupil or the teacher pointing at each grapheme, starting from the left-
most grapheme of each row. Once they have mastered the ha-hu-order,
they move on to learning through the second method of representing
the graphemes, i.e., the abugida order. In this pattern, the number of
the letters and the modification of the forms according to the seven
vowels remain the same as in the ha-hu system, but the place of the
basic graphemes and their derivative forms is mixed up. The vertical
list does not follow the ha, l, ha, m order mentioned above; rather,
here we find the order a, b, g, d, ha, w, z, etc. And, instead of
systematically showing the different shapes of a single basic form, one
finds consonant and vowel combinations for different basic forms listed
horizontally. Thus, the name abugida, reflecting the first four horizontal
graphemes which correspond to the Semitic grapheme names: aleph,
beth, gimel and daleth. The reason for the introduction of this system
seems to have been didactic: so that the child cannot depend only on
his memory in learning the fidl (Haile Gabriel Dagne 1976: 341).
The abugida system is designed in such a way that the complete list of
the seven values of any basic grapheme is to be found by looking at
the diagonal line (see the highlighted forms in Table 3 for the values
of the graphemes and ).
In recent years, government schools teach fidl mainly using the
ha-hu pattern and by regrouping the graphemes according to formal
correspondences between the basic graphemes, e.g., one-legged letters
such as (ha), (n), (); two-legged graphemes (a), (k),
(h); and graphemes with no legs such as (m), (s) and (r).
With few exceptions, graphemes belonging to the same set are modified
in a similar manner to derive the symbols for the remaining consonant-
vowel combinations. For example, for one-legged basic graphemes, to
derive the combination with the vowel u, one has to add a small hori-
zontal line in the middle-right hand side of the basic grapheme. Thus,
(ha), (n), () become (hu), (nu), (u). To derive the
combination with the vowel i, the same horizontal line will be added
at the bottom-right side of the basic form, e.g., (hi) (ni) (i).
The first government school was cole Imperiale Menelik II, which
was opened in 1908 in Addis Ababa. The school was staffed by Egyptian
teachers and the medium of instruction was French; Amharic was
given as subject. The same year another school was opened in Harar
(in eastern Ethiopia). The curriculum included French, English, Italian,
Amharic, mathematics, and science. In spite of a fully developed writ-
ing system, centuries old literary tradition and use in administration,
Amharic was not chosen as a medium of instruction in these schools.
As McNab (1988: 716) writes [E]ven by the end of the nineteenth c.
it was not self-evident that Amharic should be used as a medium of
instruction.
With the active support of the administration, about one hundred
mission schools/stations were operating by the year 1935 and the
choice of medium of instruction was left for the schools: most used
French, some Amharic and Oromo (cf. Pankhurst 1974, McNab 1988).
During the Italian occupation 19351941, a new language policy was
introduced: five local languages namely Amharic, Tigrigna, Oromo,
Harari and Somali were to be used as languages of education in their
respective regions. McNab (1988: 717) writes this was based on . . . the
enshrined colonial principle of divide and rule . . . not as a pedagogi-
cally sound step in education. In the post-war years much stricter regu-
lations were made on the use of language in education; perhaps it was
felt that equal promotion of diverse languages is a risk for the countrys
unity. Consequently, a decree in 1944 laid restrictions on language use
and missionary activities. This decree, as quoted in Cooper (1976: 189),
ruled Amharic as the general language of instruction but it allowed
teaching via other local languages in the early stage of missionary
work, until such time as pupils and missionaries shall have a work-
ing knowledge of the Amharic language. The Revised Constitution of
Ethiopia, proclaimed in 1955, declared Amharic as the official language
of the Empire and in 1958 Amharic was first instituted as a medium of
instruction in primary schools (cf. McNab 1988). Out side of the domain
of formal education, the regulations were not imposed and a number of
Ethiopian languages, e.g., Tigrigna, Oromo, Harari, Kunama, Tigre and
Wolaitta were written by missionaries using fidl, Roman or Arabic
script. Translations of parts of the Bible or the Koran and texts such
as songs and poetry were written in these languages.
192 azeb amha
Fidl III: Loaning Fidl for Writing Other Ethiopian Languages
In 1974 a new (military) government replaced the Imperial system

and one of its planned reforms was to allow each nationality to use
its own language. However, Amharic remained the national official
language and the only medium of instruction for primary education
(for secondary and higher education the medium of instruction was
English). Between 1979 and 1989, that government allowed fifteen of
the over seventy Ethiopian languages to be written in fidl and used in
a national literacy campaign. For writing these languages some addi-
tions and modifications were made to the Amharic-fidl. For example,
a grapheme was designed for writing the alveolar implosive consonant.
This was made by adding a horizontal stroke inside the head of the
grapheme (d). These languages were not further promoted as the
medium of instruction in formal education. The literacy program was
partly ideologically driven and, once it was discontinued, official efforts
for writing the Ethiopian languages using fidl were disrupted.
The present government of Ethiopia came to power almost twenty years
later, in 1991. It declared radical reforms in educational and language
policy. A clause recognizing equal linguistic and ethnic rights was
included in the new constitution drawn up in 1995 (cf. article 39.2).
Amharic was declared to be the official (not national) language of the
federal state. Regional states were allowed to choose their own offi-
cial language(s) and medium(s) of instruction(s). Depending on the
linguistic diversity of regions, two to twelve different languages are
used in the curriculum (the latter is the case of the so-called Southern
Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Regional State [SNNPRS]). Similarly,
the choice of script was not restricted. Some political groups associated
fidl with Amharic and what they perceived as Amhara-domination
and declined using fidl for writing certain Ethiopian languages. Their
arguments included technical deficiencies of fidl for writing one or
the other language: it was argued that an alphabetic system with fewer
symbols and distinct forms for vowels is easier to learn and it can better
represent geminate consonants and long vowels. Ideas for solving these
shortcomings were proposed and the advantages of writing Ethiopian
languages in fidl were pointed out (cf. Baye Yimam 1994, 1997, among
others), but authorities in certain regional states insisted on develop-
ing Roman-based script (generally known in Ethiopia as the Latin
script) for writing languages in their respective regions.
Table 5. Medium(s) of instruction and script used in the nine regional states
in Ethiopia.
Language Linguistic family Writing system (Parts of) regional
state where the
language is spoken
1 Amharic Ethio-Semitic Fidl Afar, Amhara,
Oromia,
Benishangul-
Gumuz, Harari,
SNNPRS
2 Tigrigna Ethio-Semitic Fidl Tigray
3 Silte Ethio-Semitic Fidl SNNPRS
4 Harari Ethio-Semitic fidl5 Harari
5 Oromiffa Cushitic Latin Oromia, Amhara,
Harari,
6 Somali Cushitic Latin Somali, Harari,
7 Hadiyya Cushitic Latin SNNPRS
8 Kambata Cushitic Latin SNNPRS
9 Gedeo Cushitic Latin SNNPRS
10 Sidama Cushitic Latin SNNPRS
11 Afar Cushitic Latin Afar
12 Awngi Cushitic Fidl Amhara
13 Xamtanga Cushitic Fidl Amhara
14 Kebena Cushitic Fidl SNNPRS
15 Wolaitta Omotic Latin SNNPRS
16 Keficho Omotic Latin SNNPRS
17 Dawro Omotic Latin SNNPRS
18 Koorete Omotic Fidl SNNPRS
19 Agnwa Nilo-Saharan Fidl Gambella
20 Nuer Nilo-Saharan Latin Gambella
21 Majangir Nilo-Saharan Fidl Gambella
22 Suri Nilo-Saharan Fidl SNNPRS
A 2002 report by the Ethiopian Ministry of Education, as quoted in

Mehiretu Adnew 2006, shows that currently twenty-two Ethiopian
languages from different language families are used as a medium of
instruction. Eleven of these are written using the fidl; the remain-
ing eleven languages are written using the Latin-script. The written
languages are listed in Table 5, adopted from Mehiretu Adnew (2006:
3839). 5
5
Mehiretu Adnew (2006: 53) mentions that this language was written earlier in two
other scripts: in Arabic script for religious purposes and in Latin-script by (Christian)
missionaries in the 1990s.
194 azeb amha
It seems that other languages are written after the 2002 report men-
tioned above (Baye Yimam, pc). Anyua (Nilotic) is written in the Latin
script whereas Kebena (Cushitic) is written in fidl. An orthography
is in preparation for Mareko (Cushitic), on the basis of fidl.
For writing some of the above languages, fidl was revised again. Some
of the graphemes that were redundant when fidl is used for Amharic,
were re-interpreted to represent related sounds that are attested in the
newly written languages. For example, to represent the meaningful
contrast between x, and h in Harari, respectively, , and are used.
All of these three graphemes designate (ha) in Amharic. The potential
of fidl for writing any other Ethiopian language is demonstrated in
the excellent study by Miheretu Adinew (2006). However, because of
ideological and historical reasons, its importance as a cultural heritage
is ignored, while its potential is being undermined by advocating the
incorrect idea that the Roman script is technically better for writing
the non-Semitic languages of Ethiopia.
Conclusion
Fidl is one of the oldest writing systems that is widely used only in
Ethiopia and Eritrea. Technically, it is impressively advanced when
compared to related ancient writing systems such as the Sabean script.
In Ethiopia fidl is now used side by side with a recently-adopted
writing system, i.e., the so-called Latin script. Nevertheless, it is still
vital and very much alive as it is used for writing numerous languages
from the Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic and Nilosaharan language families.
Eleven of the languages that are written in fidl are now a medium of
instruction. Fidl also has great potential for writing other Ethiopian
languages.
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of Society of Ethiopian Electrical and Electronic Engineers. Online: www.yebbo.com/
zero.
Asher, R. E. and J. M. Y. Simpson 1994. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.
Oxford / New York: Pergamon Press.
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Asmara: Kokebe Tsibah Printing Press (in Amharic).
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Coulmas, Florian 1989. The Writing Systems of the World. Oxford New York: Basil
Blackwell.
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Cambridge University Press.
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Shokado.
Getachew Haile 1996. Ethiopic writing system. In Daniels, P. T. and Bright, W. (eds.)
The Worlds Writing Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haile-Gabriel Dagne 1976. Non-government schools in Ethiopia. In Bender, M. L.
et al. (eds.), Language in Ethiopia, pp. 339370. London: Oxford University Press.
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196 azeb amha
Yalew Ingidayehu 1997. Historical development and trends of modern education in

Ethiopia. In Ethiopia in Broader Perspective: Papers from the XIIIth International
Conference of Ethiopian Studies, ed. by Fukui, Katsuyoshi, Eisei Hurimoto and
Masayoshi Shigeta. Vol. II, pp. 401423. Kyoto: Shokado.
LANGUAGES AND SCRIPTS IN THE MALDIVE ISLANDS:
CODING AND ENCODING
Alex de Voogt
The Maldivian language, better known as Dhivehi, is an Indo-European

language closely related to Singhalese spoken in nearby Sri Lanka
and other languages found on the Indian subcontinent. Until the
eighteenth century, Dhivehi was written in a script characterized by
Vitharana (1997) as old-Singhalese of which the early form is called
Eveyla Akuru. It is found in twelfth and thirteenth century inscriptions
and underwent a number of changes towards the later form generally
known as Dhivehi Akuru or Dives Akuru. A full account of this script,
its closest neighbors and its history has been published by Naseema
Mohamed (1999).
Eveyla Akuru is a syllabic script written from left to right and was
replaced in the eighteenth century by Thaana or Taana, which is con-
sidered an alphabet and written from right to left. The adequacy of this
latter script for the Dhivehi language has been studied at length by
Sugathapala DeSilva (1969), who concluded that it was most adequate
from a phonological point of view.
Since the 1970s, the Maldive Islands have become an increasingly
popular tourist destination and, despite this foreign influence, the status
of Taana has improved. The script is used nationwide and a secondary
use of Roman letters seems to be limited to texts for tourist purposes.
The Maldivians choose a language, Dhivehi or English, and a writing
system, Taana or Roman letters, to publish their messages. The possible
basis of these choices is explored in the following examples that were
collected on the Maldives in 2003.
Taana
Taana is characterized by DeSilva as a mixture of both Indic and

Semitic (Perso-Arabic) traditions. By this he means that it has the
characteristics of an alpha-syllabary and of the Arabic writing system.
The signs of Taana are derived from Arabic numerals and also other
numeral signs most likely from an earlier system used on the islands.
198 alex de voogt
A Taana sign consists of a consonant symbol with a diacritic symbol

indicating a vowel. One neutral sign with vowel diacritic is used to
indicate a single vowel. Contrary to most alphabets, the consonant signs
are not used without a diacritic; for these there is a neutral diacritic
known as sukun, which consists of a little circle placed above the base
sign. In contrast with the alpha-syllabary, the consonant or base signs
do not have an inherent vowel, such as a, when no diacritic is present.
They are simply not used without one. Even the neutral sign used for
word-initial vowels is not used without a diacritic. The creative use of
the sukun has been described in detail by DeSilva and has made Taana
both a phonemically adequate and a generally flexible system that can
distinguish long vowels (placing two diacritics), double sonants as
well as geminates in recent loanwords (repeating the sign but placing
a sukun on the first sign) and geminates in Dhivehi (neutral sign plus
sukun followed by the consonant sign with vowel). This flexibility and
originality of the writing system is further exemplified by the develop-
ments since 1970 when Taana was introduced into all parts of modern
Maldivian society and when the English language continued to invade
the islands as part of the tourist trade.
The syllabic characteristics of the system are illustrated by a card
game known as Akuru Thaasbe in which the script is represented as a
syllabary. This language game is based on Scrabble and was developed
by Abdulla Sadiq. He had this idea in the 1970s and developed it in
the 1980s. A thousand games were printed in the 1990s and it is now
readily available in stationary stores. The game has playing cards each
printed with a different syllable of the language. A number of possible
but highly unusual syllables were excluded. Although Taana is not
formally a syllabary, the use of the script in a language game made
syllabic cards most convenient.
The use of Taana extends to Maldivian dialects. Dialects are not
officially recognized in the Maldives but a convincing example of the
versatility of Taana script is illustrated by the Fuamulaku dialect that
has significant differences compared to the dialect spoken on Mal
(Fritz 2002). It is said that Fuamulaku is written the same as Dhivehi
but simply pronounced differently. A visit to this island revealed that
at least two street names were found written in the Fuamulaku dialect
rather than Dhivehi and that a local poet also used and wrote the dia-
lect. One restaurant featured a name that is written and pronounced
in Fuamulaku dialect as Bilhifeyshe Hotaa, the expression meaning
hook box. However, the first word of this name is pronounced and
languages and scripts in the maldive islands 199
Photos 1 and 2. Fuamulaku dialect street signs.

200 alex de voogt
written in Dhivehi as Bolhifoshi elsewhere in the Maldives. These

examples demonstrate the use of Taana in representing dialect varia-
tion in public signs.
The Dhivehi writing system Taana survived the introduction of
typewriters and computers. A presidential decision was most likely at
the core of this success, when Taana became the official writing system
for the government.
The first handmade Dhivehi typewriter was constructed in the 1950s
for the island administration and is still present on the island of Addhoo.
In 1988, the government ordered 2,000 typewriters that could type
from right to left and allowed for a large number of diacritics. Only
in 1995 did the first computer programs allow for the Taana script to
be used by the general public. The computer age has made possible
a broader application of the Taana script and today fonts are readily
available for Windows and Windows XP. Now Taana is widely used
by commercial, governmental and private individuals when printing
or writing by hand.
Photo 3. Typewriter still in use in the island office of Iguraidoo (Raa Atoll).
Two Scripts Each
This success of Taana has resulted in a blend of Taana and Roman

writing. English words may be given in Taana or Roman script while
Dhivehi words may be given in Roman or Taana script. English words
are phonetically represented when Taana is used and Dhivehi follows
a well-accepted orthography of its own when Roman script is used.
Often both Taana and Roman letters may be found on one sign or
document. This may be a bilingual message, though, in some cases
the Roman and Taana script provide different messages. This appar-
ent complexity in the use of Taana and Roman writing illustrates a
phenomenon known in linguistics as code switching, but this time the
script is part of the switch.
The use of English or Dhivehi, Roman or Taana is expected to be
clearly separated or codified. Societies where two languages with two
writings systems are used show such a clear codification (Scribner &
Cole 1981, de Voogt 1993, Backhaus 2005), i.e., it is clear when and
why people choose to use a particular language, a language that is only
represented by one writing system. In the Maldives, however, not only
a language but also a writing system can be chosen.
Taana is used on Coca-Cola bottles, for books and magazines includ-
ing school supplies, official papers and chequebooks. Local television
sometimes uses Taana credits and titles at the beginning and end of
the program. Imported items, such as stationary or food produce,
commonly have English in Roman letters. One may find either or both
Roman and Taana lettering for boat names, street names and street
signs, banknotes, T-shirts, restaurant names and telephone cards. The
Maldives attract many international tourists and it is necessary for
tourists to understand street names and signs, restaurant names and
telephone cards, and they often buy T-shirt with slogans they can read.
Tourism is then a possible motivation for the alternate use of Taana
and Roman writing.
The Maldives host at least two airlines, one of which has the largest
seaplane fleet operating from a single base. Their aircraft are provided
with local and English language instructions for the passengers
Dhivehi using Taana and English using Roman script. Most signs are
bilingual, including exit and life vest under your seat a well as the safety
card, the boarding pass and the in-flight magazine. The airsickness-bag
is only in English, use seat cushion for floatation did not have a Dhivehi
202 alex de voogt
translation and stow meal tray during take off and landing was not trans-
lated although a similar text in Dhivehi could be found on the safety
card. These examples point at blending rather than a codification of
language. The airline messages are in two languages, in this case using
only the common writing system for each language, and the Maldivian
reader is expected to understand some messages in English while most
messages are translated. Tourists appear better served.
Restaurants and stores often boast an English name, which they
sometimes translate or transcribe into Dhivehi and Taana. On Addhoo,
one finds two signs in one picture. The first reads danger, first in Taana
and Dhivehi language, then in Roman letters and using the English
word. The second sign is on the store in the background. This sign only
has Taana lettering even though it is not Dhivehi but English, since it
states Island Grocery. Equally curious is the use of English store names
such as: Six-x (Mal clothing store) and Hierarchy (Huvarafushi store,
its name transcribed as /hairaakee/ in Taana) which are presented in
Roman letters but have a Taana transcription. This is not a translation
but instead is a phonetic representation of the English word in Taana
writing. The Island Grocery and Hierarchy store are located on islands
where tourists are not allowed without special permits; as a consequence
tourism cannot fully explain the presence of Roman lettering. English
words are perhaps more attractive as names, but the intended market
is Maldivian therefore the script is Taana.
Six-x is located in the main shopping street of Mal and, although
not a tourist place, it certainly serves the more cosmopolitan crowd. In
this context the blending process is more prominent as in the example
of a shoe-store, clearly serving the Maldivians, that has a bilingual sign
in two scripts but each with different content. The Dhivehi/Taana text
reads: Black & white shoes are available for wholesale and retail. This
part is meant for the school going consumer, since b/w shoes are used
for school uniforms. The English part (see photo) is addressing a wider
audience, apparently, but still appeals to the Maldivian crowd, this time
excluding the schoolchildren.
The language changed depending on the topic. The examples above
illustrate that code switching in the sense of choosing a language is
not sufficient to describe the choices of the Maldivian authors. It is
not just the code but also the encoding that has become part of their
decision-making.
Photo 4. Store sign in English.
Photo 5. Island grocery written in Taana behind a danger sign in two

languages.
204 alex de voogt
Photo 6. Bilingual texts in the window of a shoe store.
Double Coding
It is not unusual for two scripts to co-exist for the same language.
When a language changes orthography, this situation is common.
Also, the presence of as many as three languages, each with a different
script, has been attested and without negative effects on the literacy
of the users (Scribner & Cole 1981). In the Republic of the Maldives,
with Islam as state religion, the Arabic script is taught for the Arabic
language in the Koranschools resulting in three different scripts in use
by the inhabitants.
However, it is remarkable to find two languages with two scripts
each in the same country. It is not yet clear whether this situation will
continue in the Maldives and if this use is limited to public signs. As
far as the few examples presented above indicate, the versatility of the
writing systems allows for this situation. In the Maldives, the Taana
writing system competes successfully with the Roman alphabet. It is
suggested that this is due not only to a governmental decree but also,
and mostly, because of Taanas proven possibilities beyond the confines
of the Dhivehi language.
Acknowledgements
Research on the Maldives was made possible with the generous sup-
port of the Society of the Advancement of Research in the Tropics, the
Netherlands, as well as the permission and assistance of the National
Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research in Mal, Republic of
Maldives. The author wishes to thank Abdullah Saeed and Ali Misbah
for their assistance in the collection and translation of the used data.
References
Backhaus, Peter 2005. Signs of multilingualism in Tokyoa linguistic landscape approach.

Dissertation Universitt Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
DeSilva, M. W. Sugathapala 1969. The phonological efficiency of the Maldivian writing
system. Anthropological Linguistics 11 (7): 199208.
Fritz, Sonja 2002. The Dhivehi language: a descriptive and historical grammar of
Maldivian and its dialects. Heidelberg: Beitrge zur Sdasienforschung, Ergon
Verlag.
Naseema Mohamed 1999. Dhivehi writing systems. National Centre for Linguistic and
Historical Research, Mal, Republic of Maldives.
Scribner, Sylvia and Michael Cole 1981. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Vitharana, V. 1997. Sri Lankan-Maldivian Cultural affinities. Buddhist Cultural Centre,
Sri Lanka.
FOREIGN TERMS IN SANSKRIT PERTAINING TO WRITING
Harry Falk
Prehistory
Writing has an old history in India. Allegedly, there are sign-systems

used by potters appearing at the beginning of the third millennium bc,
i.e., more or less contemporaneous with the first script in Sumer.
However, this system of marks did not lead to a proper script in India.
The first writing appears suddenly and fully fledged with the mature
Harappan phase in the middle of the third millenium bc. With regard
to the shape of its graphemes, only the proto-Elamite script can be
regarded as a precursor (Parpola 1994: 53). A rather long text, still
unread, occurs on a sacred object from Afghanistan (Francfort 2003),
dated to the third, second millennium bc. Despite these apparent cross-
relations, we cannot read any of these scripts, neither proto-Elamite,
nor the Afghan variety, nor Harappan. Presently, there is an ongoing
discussion about the nature of the Harappan script: some regard it as
logosyllabic, others as logographic. Without any evidence at hand we
can at least state that terms for writing must have been used in the
third millennium, all of which have left no trace in the languages of
the region.1
We are on safer ground when the Achaemenid empire spread into
what is now Pakistan. In Iran, writing was in full swing; Elamite and
Akkadian alike were written in the Sumero-Akkadian system, and the lan-
guage of Western Iran in a newly designed type of simplified cuneiform
writing. The eastern-most discovery place of a truly cuneiform inscrip-
tion is somewhere in eastern Afghanistan or northern Pakistan, dating
from the twelfth century bc (Michaud 2000). Apparently, a cuneiform
script was never used on imperishable material in Gandhara. From the
start, or from a certain point onwards, writing for administrative pur-
poses in Gandhara was in the hands of clerks belonging to the Aramaic
1
The arguments brought forward by Farmer, Sproat & Witzel (2004) against the
nature of the Harappan signs as script are not convincing, individually or as a whole.
I concur with the counter-arguments amassed by Parpola (2008).
208 harry falk
community. The earliest testimony of their Aramaic script in South Asia

dates from the time after the collapse of the Achaemenid empire, i.e.,
from the time of Alexander. The fact is well-known and some pertinent
words have been mentioned recently by Witzel (2006: 460f); however,
the following attempt at a chronological stratigraphy is new.
The Achaemenid Period
Dipi/libi/lipi
The first loanword we encounter in South-Asia is lipi, script. This
term is a clear Iranian loanword probably imported by Achaemenid
clerks. Its ultimate roots are found in Sumerian dub, turned to dipi/
dip in early Iranian. In Gandhara we first learn about this term in the
grammar of Pnini (3.2.21) which dates from the middle of the fourth
century bc (Falk 1994: 327). Pnini presents it in two forms, lipi and
libi, without hinting at which he preferred. This means that he regarded
this word as outside his own science, i.e., the science of word- and
sentence-formation.
Where Pnini was prepared to accept the soft labial of the original
second syllable, Aokan scribes in the Northwest used this import in
the form of dipi, i.e., his local scribes in Gandhara preserved the original
dental initial. So, writing in a new way returned to South-Asia in the
first millennium bc during the Achaemenid occupation at the begin-
ning of the fifth century bc. Pnini, living around the middle of the
fourth century, did not use writing for his grammar, which was based
solely on memory and the human faculty to associate related rules. His
grammar presupposes an elaborate and absolutely encompassing sys-
tem of sound analysis, with names for each sound and precise rules for
the changes sounds undergo when juxtaposed in a word or sentence.
Aramaic writing was in the hands of clerks of Aramaic stock through-
out Iran and into the confines of Taxila, east of the Indus. We find
Aramaic not Greek on the coins of Alexanders father-in-law, Oxyartes,
who was relegated to rule the area of Kabul, at Kapi (Mitchiner 1975:
194; Sear 1979: 576 nos. 62278). The same applies to three lithic records
from Taxila and Jalalabad from the time of Aoka. We find Aramaic
plus Greek on a lithic record of Aoka himself from Kandahar.
The term lipikara, scribe was not used for long. We find it as a
self-designation by a scribe of Aoka in southern India (von Hinber
foreign terms in sanskrit pertaining to writing 209
1989b: 56, Falk 1993: 257f), himself hailing from the north-west. This
term soon falls into oblivion.
Nipista/nipesita
Another remnant of the Achaemenid period is nipista, found in Aokas
Rock Edict 4 (sentence J) and nipesita in Rock Edict 4 (sentence K),
used for written and made to be written. It can be directly com-
pared to nipit, perfect participle from the root pai, found, e.g., on
the so-called daiva-inscription of Xerxes at Persepolis, meaning writ-
ten, inscribed.
Both forms are only found in the version at Shhbzgarh of the
Aokan edicts in Gandhra. All other parallels in Northern, Central and
Southern India have preserved the Indic terms likhita and likhpita/
lekhpita, originating from Aokas own language. Shhbzgarh is the
westernmost site for the Rock edicts; it is situated west of the Indus in
an area that certainly was once under Achaemenid rule. It is also the
westernmost site for Aokan texts written in Kharost h. All other Aokan
texts to the west of Shhbhgarh are written in Aramaic and Greek.
The Hellenistic Period
Alexanders campaign in Sogdiana, and in modern Afghanistan and

Pakistan, changed the world also in the ancient East. The Aramaic
monopoly on administrative writing was slowly superseded by Greek,
and soon also by Kharost h, a script designed for the local Prakrit. From
Alexander to the time of Aoka we have occasional evidence of the
continuation of Aramaic. About ninety years after the conquest of Alex-
ander, and about twenty years after the accession of Aoka in Northern
India, Aramaic ceases to be used. About twenty years after Alexander,
Kharost h was designed and brought into common use (Falk 1993: 103f,
1996); about 60 years after Alexander, Aoka had Brhm designed and
spread all over the sub-continent. Before that time, writing was not
practiced in what is now northern India. All terms referring to writing
needed to be coined, the most important being to write itself.
Likh/lekh
Writing needs at least two utensils, one to outline the characters and
one to receive them. In the case of the cuneiform characters pressed
210 harry falk
into clay, or in the case of the classical wax tablets, a stylo or wooden
pen is sufficient. In South Asia, something comparable seems to have
been designed rather soon: the medium was incised with a pointed
instrument into its naturally soft surface. We have no direct evidence
for this technique, only the root likh used for writing, meaning origi-
nally to scratch, scrape, furrow. Only this meaning, and not to
write, is present in the grammar of Pnini,2 composed a few decades
before Alexander.
That means that scratching was a first way to outline characters.
How did this idea originate in India? Do we have to assume the use of
palm-leaves at the beginning of writing? I have often expressed the idea
that Greek influence on Mauryan culture cannot be underestimated.3
There were Greek ambassadors and a Greek community in the capital
of the Mauryas, and there were Greek relatives in the ruling family of
Candragupta, including a daughter of Seleukos Nikator. The Greeks
used to write with a pen (graphis, grapheion) on tablets (pinax) usually
made from wood, although bronze tablets are not unknown.4 Waxed
tablets (deltos) served daily needs. In both cases scratching is suffi-
cient, and likh would have expressed just that. In Homer, where pinax
means just a wooden tablet, graphein is used in the sense of to pen-
etrate (with a pointed instrument).5
The use of root likh is therefore no proof for an indigenous origin of
this technique of writing. It seems to describe the action of the penetrat-
ing pen of the Greek writing stile just as graphein did when wooden
tablets and waxed tablets were introduced in the ancient Greek world.
Kalama
There are various terms for those items with which the Greek inscribed
their tablets. According to Aristophanes (448385 bc; Thesmophoriazusai
ed. Hall & Geldart line 779) it was some sort of knife (sml).6
2
For yavann cf. Falk 1993: 259f; avilikha, unable to write, is only found in much
later commentaries on Pnini 6.2.157.
3
I prefer being counted among those holding excessively colonialist ideas (Asher
2006: 52) over withholding reasonable thinking only because some are offended by the
mere idea of a foreign influence on ancient India.
4
Herodotus 5.49, where a map is drawn on a chalkeon pinaka.
5
Ilias 17.599 aichm grapsen hoi osteon achris.
6
age d pinakn xestn deltoi, dexasthe smils holkous, krukas emn mochtn,
Come, my beautiful tablets, receive the traces of my stylus and be the messengers of
my sorry fate. (Eugene ONeill, Jr.).
Another term is grapheion, also used for a graving tool and an

embroidery needle. Plato (Prtagoras 326d) uses it for incising letters
in school. The term stylos denotes a pillar in Greek, exclusive of any
other meaning, whereas the morphological equivalent stilus is common
in Latin as the writing pen.
The term kalamos is rather frequent in Greek, denoting a sort of
reed, its stem and all sorts of items made from reeds. It is used by Plato
in his Phaidrus, written around 365 bc, and he refers to ideas fixed
with ink and reed, melan and kalamos. Sanskrit knows the writing pen
as kalama, obviously related to kalamos. Here we have a typical loan
word. However, though it is found in all dictionaries, it is difficult to
find it in the early Sanskrit literature. The Undistra 8,84 is an excep-
tion, difficult to date. In any other case in which a pen is referenced,
the neutral term lekhan prevails.7 Although a later or additional loan
from Arabic qalam cannot be excluded, an early loan of melan without
kalamos seems rather unlikely.
Mel, ink
No term shows more conclusively the early Greek influence than mel,
ink, being a direct loan from Greek mlan n. ink. Even melandxion,
ink pot, found its way into Sanskrit in the forms melanduka (Mah-
vyha 273,18), melndu(ka) or melndhu(ka), according to the standard
dictionaries. In the distorted form merandu, it occurs in the Kranda-
vyha.
Ink is a watery liquid color applied with a pen or brush on the sur-
face of the medium. Often it is made from soot or metal oxides. The
term mel itself does not give us any clue about the substances used in
Hellenistic times. There is no early literary evidence for this term in
the Sanskrit literature available, but we do find inkpots in excavations
in the North-West, e.g., at Taxila.
7
(apayam) kyastham sa-mas-ptram lekhan-karnaprakam, Brhatkathlo-
kasamgraha 10,45, where karnaprana might be cotton for drying up ink.
212 harry falk
The Post-Hellenistic Period
Pustaka, book
The prime medium in India seems to have been the palm-leaf, tlapatra.
Inscribed specimens are found in northern India and as far as Chinese
Turkestan.8 The secondmost frequent material and prominent in
Gandhara comes from the birch tree, bhrjatvac, birch-bark.
Books were known in South Asia from Hellenistic times onwards,
usually called byblos or similar by the Greek. However, Indians only
started to produce books much later, using two terms: Grantha origi-
nally denoted nothing but a certain amount of text collected in one
composition; soon, this term was also applied to collections of inscribed
leaves. The second term is pustaka, of Iranian, but not Achaemenid,
stock. In the second and third centuries ad, in the times of the Arsacid
and Sasanian dynasties, a multitude of Iranian terms came to India,
mostly denoting officials. Probably this move brought Middle-Iranian
posht as well. Posht denotes leather or skin. Documents written on
leather have been rather common in Bactria and Khotan, where leaf-
palms are not indigenous. Up to now, we do not have Buddhist texts
written on leather; but Bactrian legal documents on leather are well-
known now through the edition of N. Sims-Williams (2000); even
Greek documents have survived from that area.9
The earliest preserved testimony for pusta or pustaka dates from the
first centuries ad. Examples are Nradyaiks 2.8,30, where the reading
from books (pustakavdya) is counted as one of six impediments to
dharmastra 18,44, a book (pustaka)
learning.10 According to the Visnu
is not to be separated into parts when an heritage is divided; the same
author (23,56) prescribes sprinkling, wiping or scraping for the clean-
ing of polluted books.
The Arthastra, with its notorious late parts, knows of a place for
lists and books (nibandha-pustaka-sthna) in the care of an audit officer
(KA 2.7.1), and these books can be sealed (samudra, KA 2.7.17).
8
For examples cf. the volumes of Buddhist Manuscripts, ed. by Jens Braarvig in the
Series Manuscripts in the Schyen Collection; Oslo: Hermes Publishing 2000 onwards.
9
For two recent finds cf. Clarysee & Thompson 2007.
10
dytam pustakavdyam ca ntakesu ca saktik, striyas tandr ca nidr ca vidy-
vighnakarni sad. NarS 2.8,30.
These examples certainly predate those cited by Sen (1957: 57), who
wanted to derive pusta from Vedic pavasta, covering, cloth, doing
away with the use of leather for Indian books.
Divra, clerk
Witzel (2006: 461) mentions the writer, Skt. divira, as an Iranian
loan. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica (s.v.) the oldest attestation
is Achaemenid, written tup-pi-ra in Elamite, leading to Middle Persian
dibr and New Persian dabr. In India, this term occurs only after the
scribes were made one of the four classes of Sasanian society under
Ardashir (ca. 224241). A superior clerk is called dabrbad, chief
secretary (EIr as above), a term found in inscriptions as divrapati,
e.g., along the upper Indus at Hodar (O. von Hinber in Bandini-
Knig 1999, 4: 5, 6: 9). The other volumes of the series Materialien zur
Archologie der Nordgebiete Pakistans contain ample evidence of the
widespread use of the title divra in the North-West during the first
centuries ad. However, it has to be stressed that this title is used out-
side inscriptions only sparingly (cf. v. Hinber 1989a: 46).
The idea of Mayrhofer (2001: 560), that dipra was Sanskritized into
dipikara in Aokan times, remains noteworthy.
Indigenous Terms
Apart from the imports, India was rather productive in coining new
terms. We get gol, kl, patrjana, rajan, malinmbu, ephalika for
ink, most of them descriptive terms. Terms for the diverse pens and
brushes are varnaka, varnik, isk, vartik, varnavartik, tl and
alka (Janert 1955/56: 87).
A Dravidian loan into the Indo-European languages of the North
might be mas, ink, since it is related to Kannada masi, soot, lamp
soot, cf. DED2 462a, nr. 5101, CDIAL no. 9920. It first occurs in the
Lalitavistara 9: 139 (masi), Surutasamhit (mas) and the Arthastra
(4.4,20; 13.4,20; 14.2,20+22) in the sense of soot and ink.
This derivation might be connected with the practice of rubbing soot
dissolved in oil into the grooves produced by the writing pen called
masipatha (m.). The blackened grooves are called maslipta, smeared
with ink (Kathasaritsgara). This practice is common in South India,
where Dravidian languages are frequent. In the North, however, palm-
leaves have always also been inscribed by ink with a pen.
214 harry falk
Conclusion
We have seen that there are several phases of imports: from the time
of the Achaemenid occupation the basic terms lipi/libi/dipi and nipista
have been preserved, attested in the fourth and third centuries bc,
but only where this occupation had taken place, i.e., in the extreme
north-west.
During Hellenistic times the terms for the utensils pen and ink were
added, kalama and mel. During this time writing was promoted and
spread particularly by king Aoka in the middle of the third century
bc. The indigenous term for writing is nothing but a semantical
enlargement of the existent term for scratching, likh. The same enlarge-
ment happened once in pre-Hellenistic Greek, for the same reason.
During the latest phase of Hellenistic kings in the north-west, the
Iranian term for document on leather, posht, was adapted to mean
large manuscript or book, pusta and pustaka.
The long process of adopting foreign terms thus reflects the political
development of about five hundred years, localized exactly where for-
eign influence was strongest: in the north-west. This process shows
again that writing as an art was an import to Mauryan South Asia.
Although this fact is not disputed in the West, there are constant
attempts at negating it in India, simply to ward off any sort of Western
influence, be it ancient or modern.
Most interesting are those ideas that were never expressed by loaned
foreign terms, specifically, the terms relating to the parts of speech put
into writing. This independence arose because the indigenous pho-
neticists and grammarians could describe the elements of spoken words
long before they would have thought of writing them down. There is
a long tradition of linguistic analysis. Accompanying the transmission
of the sacred lore, called the Veda, the student had to learn a series of
subsidiary sciences, called the Vedngas. One of them is vykarana,
grammatical analysis, another one is iks, phonetics, another one is
nirukta, associative etymology. These sciences most likely have their
roots in the second millennium bc, several millennia before similar
sciences came up in Europe.
All terms needed to describe parts of speech can also be used for
describing parts of writings: vowel, consonant, syllable, word, prefix,
inflectional ending, sentence; all these terms can refer to both actions.
The Indian grammarians dealt intensively with what happens when one
sound at the end of one unit meets the same or another sound at the
beginning of the next word. They observed, regulated and named such
sound-changes, which they put under the heading sandhi, merger.
There was also the correct idea that while speaking, we pronounce
a series of words in one breath, stop, and then continue with another
batch until the sentence is done. That means, we do not pronounce all
words of a sentence in one breath, and do not separate all words of a
sentence, but we keep units together, regulated by semantic cohesion.
These units have been termed varga, group (Scharfe 1967). Some
scribes of Aoka separated the vargas by spaces (Janert 1972).
Another important feature of classical India is the fact that incred-
ible masses of texts have been handed down over the millennia solely
through oral means. Knowing these texts made a man a scholar. Their
knowledge was required for the participation in rituals, in those times,
a respected way to make a living.
When writing became known in India during Achaemenid times, it
did not attract the attention of the Brahmin scholars. Writing would
have lessened the importance of the spoken word. Their reluctance
towards writing may be compared to what Socrates said about writing:
it is only useful when trying to remember what one already knows,
but the language it preserves is dead and without life.11
When writing was promoted in the times of Aoka, these Brahmin
scholars still refrained from making use of it. The Buddhist monks,
however, unimpeded by family conventions, readily took up this art
and soon used it for all sorts of purposes, including writing for state
offices. This political activity gave them a useful influence at the court.
It was this political side of writing which finally convinced the Brahmin
scholars that they also needed to revert to this soft skill, if they
wanted to get a firm grasp on power, on which they depended even
more than the Buddhists.
We see this happen around the beginning of our era. Suddenly the
language becomes more refined and, in the first century ad, manu-
scripts appear with a script representing all the details of Brahmin
sciences: all kinds of vowel shades are expressed, as are the sandhi-
varieties, consonant gemination; new letters needed to be designed, as
11
Then he will not seriously incline to write his thoughts in water with pen and
ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth ade-
quately to others? Phaedrus by Plato, translated by B. Jowett. February 1999; The
Project Gutenberg, Etext #1636.
216 harry falk
the one for the velar nasal. This script of the first/second century ad
is more elaborate than any we use today for Sanskrit. After this script
was adjusted to their needs, it was later also made more comfortable
to write, dropping some superfluous conventions such as writing the
upadhmanya and jihvamlya or writing the class nasal in all cases.
This sudden appearance of a fully fledged script for Sanskrit has to
be viewed from the perspective of what was customary until the latter
part of the first century bc: both scripts in use, Kharost h and Brhm,
showed remarkable deficiencies without being misleading, because they
were used for the rather simple popular languages, collectively called
Prakrit. However, they would not faithfully represent the series of
sounds uttered, in that Kharost h ignored the difference between long
and short vowels and in that Brhm started in Magadha with only one
sibilant (instead of three) and no means to represent pre- or postcon-
sontal r. Within Brhm, these two deficiencies were healed in only a
decade or so in Aokas lifetime. However, the idea of geminatae
remained alien to both groups of scribes. The first geminata was writ-
ten 350 years after Aoka in Brhm, and never in Kharost h, although
an overstroke was used as a geminata marker from the first century
onwards. This deficiency was not really a hindrance to a full under-
standing of what was written since the languages for which the early
Brhm was used was devoid of complicated consonant clusters.
So, what we observe with regard to foreign and loan words in Indian
writing systems is a merger of a popular branch and a scientific branch
around the beginning of our era. All imports were made on the popu-
lar side, in three steps starting in Achaemenid times. During the time
of these imports orthography was deficient, but sufficiently clear to
avoid misunderstandings.
When the merger took place all tools for writing were already there,
together with their partly imported terms. Suddenly the system was
expanded by terms and graphs for sounds which previously were
regarded as dispensable. Thus, the Indian way of writing in their most
complex language, Sanskrit, arose from a combination of sources, one
foreign and popular and one indigenous and elitist. Without foreigners,
oral means might have been regarded as ultima ratio for many more
centuries to come; without the Brahmin elite, the Brhm script would
never have reached the perfection that allows Indians to use it with
some formal developments to this very day.
References
Asher, Frederick M. 2006. Early Indian Art Reconsidered. In Patrick Olivelle (ed.),
Between the Empires Society in India 300 bce to 400 ce, pp. 5166. New York:
Bandini-Knig, Ditte e.a. 1999. Die Felsbildstation Hodar. Materialien zur Archologie
der Nordgebiete Pakistans, 3. Mainz.
Clarysee, Willy & Dorothy J. Thompson 2007. Two Greek Texts on Skin from
Hellenistic Bactria. Zeitschrift fr Papyrologie und Epigraphie 159: 273279.
Falk, Harry 1993. Schrift im alten Indien Ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen.
ScriptOralia, 56. Tbingen.
1994. Von Gtterfiguren und menschlichen Gttern. In Nalini Balbir & Joachim
K. Bautze (eds.), Festschrift Klaus Bruhn zur Vollendung des 65 Lebensjahren darge-
bracht, pp. 313331. Reinbek.
1996. Aramaic script and the Kharosth : a comparison. Berliner Indologische
Studien 9/10: 151156.
Farmer, Steve, Richard Sproat & Michael Witzel 2004. The collapse of the Indus script
thesis: The myth of a literrate Harappan Civilization. Electronic Journal of Vedic
Studiess 11(2):1957.
Francfort, Henri-Paul 2003. Flacon orn de deux serpents dragons. In O. Bopearachchi,
Chr. Landes and Chr. Sachs (eds.), De lIndus lOxus Archologie de lAsie
Centrale, pp. 3839, 54. Lattes.
Hinber, Oskar v. 1989a. Brhm inscriptions on the history and culture of the upper
Indus valley. Antiquities of Northern Pakistan Reports and Studies, 1: Rock
Inscriptions in the Indus Valley, pp. 4171. Mainz.
1989b. Der Beginn der Schrift und frhe Schriftlichkeit in Indien. Akademie der
Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 11. Mainz.
Janert, Klaus Ludwig 1955/56. Von der Art und den Mitteln der indischen Text-
weitergabe: Bericht ber mndliche und schriftliche Tradierungsmethoden sowie die
Schreibmaterialien in Indien. Jahresarbeit zur Diplomprfung fr den Hheren
Dienst an wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken. Kln.
1972. Abstnde und Schlussvokalverzeichnungen in Aoka-Inschriften. VOHD Supple-
mentband, 10. Wiesbaden.
Mayrhofer, Manfred 2001. Etymologisches Wrterbuch des Altindoarischen, III. Heidelberg.
Michaud, Ewan 2000. Le culte du dieu Kamul en Elam: une nouvelle brique de utruk
Nahhunte (11901155). Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brves et Utilitaires 1: 1415.
Mitchiner, M. 1975. Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage. Sanderstead.
Parpola, Asko 1994. Deciphering the Indus Script. Cambridge.
2008. Is the Indus script indeed not a writing system? Airvati Felicitation volume
in honour of Iravatham Mahadevan, pp. 111131. Chennai (Varalaaru.com).
Scharfe, Hartmut 1967. Satzphrasen (varga) in einigen Inschriften Aokas. Zeitschrift
der Deutschen Morgenlndischen Gesellschaft 117: 146147.
Sear, David R. 1979. Greek Coins and their Values, II: Asia and Africa. London: Seaby.
Sen, Sukumar 1957. Three etymologies. Our Heritage 5: 5559.
Sims-Williams, Nicolas 2000. Bactrian documents from Northern Afghanistan, Vol. I:
Legal and economic documents. Studies in the Khalili Collection, 3; Corpus Inscriptionum
Iranicarum II, 6: Bactrian. Oxford.
Witzel, Michael 2006. Brahmanical Reactions to Foreign Influences and to Social and
Religious Change. In Patrick Olivelle (ed.), Between the Empires Society in India
3000 bce to 400 ce, pp. 457499. Oxford/New York.
POLYSEMY
REDUCING POLYVALENCY IN WRITING SYSTEMS:
FROM EGYPTIAN TO MEROITIC
Claude Rilly
Polyvalency in Phonemic Writing Systems
The concept of polysemy is originally used in lexical semantics, where

it refers to the situation in which a lexical item has more than one
meaning (Asher 1994: VI, 3227). How far this concept can be
extended to the study of writing systems is debatable. In any event,
polysemy is not a simple concept, even in the field of semantics, where
it includes different levels of lexical ambiguity, from mere vagueness
to homonymy. The concept of polysemy in writing systems can only
be used in a metaphorical sense and its definition must be, of course,
adapted. Even in the case of ideographic scripts, polysemy would
refer to the situation where a sign or a sequence of signs has more than
one reading. In the case of phonemic writing, it would however be
far-fetched to speak of polysemy. A somewhat wider-ranging term
such as polyvalency would be more appropriate. Two subsidiary
concepts are intrinsically linked to polyvalency: polygraphy and mon-
ovalency.
Polyvalency one sign or grapheme several phonemic

readings
Polygraphy several signs or graphemes one phonemic
reading
Monovalency one sign or grapheme one phonemic
reading
Monovalency is merely theoretical: it never occurs on a regular basis

in any ordinary writing system. The system closest to monovalency is
a purely phonemic script as used by linguists. But even if speakers of
a given language adopt this system, monovalency cannot be sustained
for a long time because phonetic variations will sooner or later create
distortion with the transcription. In addition, this system will not
account for dialectal or idiolectal particularities.
222 claude rilly
Polyvalency in phonemic writing systems results from different fac-

tors. The most significant are the following:
Insufficient original graphemic stock

ex. Early Epigraphic Arabic /b/, /t/ or // (later , , )
Phonemic split
ex. Latin e French /e/ in et (< Lat. et)
// in est (< Lat. est)
// in devoir (< Lat. debere)
Traditional retention of foreign spellings (etymological orthography)
ex. English ch /t/ in chatter
// in chagrin (< French)
/k/ in chaos (< Latin < Greek)
Polygraphy in phonemic writing systems usually results from the fol-
lowing phenomena:
Phonemic merging
ex. Old Egyptian
sS
z
} Middle Egyptian /s/
Retention of inherited signs
ex. English i ~ y (< Old Greek I and Y corresponding to
different phonemes)
However, polyvalency is solved in most writing systems by a process

of differentiation which includes several levels:
Level 1. Sign: ex. c t

Level 2. Grapheme: ex. ch c
Level 3. Phonemic Environment: ex. ci ca
Level 4. Word: ex. charge character
What is polyvalent at Level 1 and 2 is not necessarily polyvalent at a

higher level. English c is polyvalent: it can be used either for /s/ or for
/k/. However, at Level 3, for instance in cinnamon and carry, poly-
valency vanishes as c + i is /si/ and c + a is /k/. Similarly, ch is a
grapheme which can be pronounced /t/ or /k/ in any phonemic envi-
ronment, but this polyvalency is solved at Level 4, for example between
charisma /k/ and chariot /t/. Graphic polyvalency at Level 4 is
exceedingly rare and results mostly from ambiguities in writing systems
where accent or tone are unmarked:
reducing polyvalency in writing systems 223
English present / prez()nt/ existing now present /prizent/ give

Old Nubian our /r/ your (pl.) our /r/ head
The case of homographs (Eng. like (to) like) is not taken into account
here since the same graphic process results in the same pronunciation:
it is a case of semantic polysemy, not graphic polyvalency.
Since polyvalency at Level 1 or 2 can be solved at Level 3 or 4, poly-
valent spellings can be retained in most written languages without
significant problems of legibility, provided there are regular and com-
monly accepted spellings for each word (orthography). Nevertheless,
especially in the early stages of writing systems when orthography is
not yet fully established scribes would try to reduce polyvalency.
Several methods are used:
Diacritics
ex. French accents: e //, /e/
Digraphs (or trigraphs)
ex. // Eng. sh, French ch, German sch
Modifications of signs (creation is rare)
Latin V (= /u/ and /w/) English u, v, w (< VV)
6
Specialization of homographic signs (redistribution of polygraphy)
ex. Egyptian r(w) used for /l/ in Late Egyptian
Meroitic Language and Script: Presentation and General Issues
Meroitic was the language of the successive kingdoms of Kush, the

Ancient Sudan, along the Middle Nile, roughly from the first Cataract
up to the region of Khartoum. The Meroitic scripts (hieroglyphic and
cursive) were deciphered in 1911 by the British Egyptologist, Francis
Llewellyn Griffith (Griffith 1911). But this decipherment did not pro-
vide a key to the translation of the texts, since the language proved to
be very remote from any known language of the region. Although
Nubian, the language that superseded Meroitic in the Middle Nile
Valley seemed to share many common features with Meroitic, Griffiths
efforts to link both the languages were fruitless. Apart from some
names of places, kings and gods, and from rare Egyptian loanwords
and titles, such as priest, envoy or general, no more than three
dozens of indigenous words could be translated with certainty. Some
texts, especially the funeral inscriptions, are well understood, but
their stereotyped content provides little information on the Meroitic
224 claude rilly
civilization since the long inscriptions of the kings of Meroe, that might
tell us so much on the history of the kingdom, remain impenetrable.
The situation changed somewhat in the last years, although it is still
impossible to know to what extent these changes will allow further
understanding of the texts. It has been recently proved that Meroitic
belonged to a specific linguistic family inside the Nilo-Saharan phylum,
Northern East Sudanic, grouping several languages extending from
the Chad border to Western Eritrea and including Nubian dialects
(Rilly 2003b). The next step is the reconstruction of a proto-language,
since the linguistic distance within this family is presently no less than
between remote Indo-European languages. But this undertaking is a
heavy task: it implies a long and difficult work on some living African
languages that are very little known. The first results are however
encouraging since it has been possible to clarify some aspects of
Meroitic morphology.
Meroitic, although the language of the indigenous elite during the two
kingdoms of Kerma (ca. 24001450 bc) and Napata (ca. 800300 bc),
was not written before the third century bc. Evidence of its existence
and status before this time can altogether be traced through the tran-
scriptions in Egyptian hieroglyphs of the native names of kings, queens
and important officials (Priese 1965). Approximately 1000 Meroitic
documents, many of them including short or fragmentary texts, were
found, so far, in the excavations in Egyptian Nubia and in Northern
Sudan (Leclant et al. 2000). Ninety percent are written in cursive. The
first traces of this cursive Meroitic script, used for pilgrims graffiti in
the temples of Dukki Gel and Kawa, can be dated to the beginning of
the second century (Rilly 2003a), but it is likely that the script was
invented some decades earlier. Hieroglyphic script was used exclusively
in captions of scenes depicting the rulers in state temples, particularly
in Naga, or engraved on some royal funerary items, offering-tables,
inscribed bowls, etc. The writing system is the same in both scripts (an
alphasyllabary of 23 signs plus a word-divider), and one could compare
more or less this double set of Meroitic signs with our small and
capital letters, although both scripts as a rule never occur together in
the same texts. A double cartouche from Naga with the name of Queen
Shanakdakhete, dated to the last decades of the second century bc
(FHN II: 661662), is traditionally regarded as the earliest inscription
in Meroitic hieroglyphic.1
1
Though generally accepted, this assumption is far from certain. The hieroglyphic
signs of Queen Shanakdakhetes cartouche display a classical aspect which is not yet
There is no reason to believe that Meroitic hieroglyphic script ante-

dated the cursive script, as has been assumed from an erroneous paral-
lel with the development of the Egyptian scripts. At the time Meroitic
writing system was elaborated, demotic, the late cursive form of
Egyptian hieroglyphs, was the common script in Egypt and was not
unknown in the Kingdom of Meroe.2 It is therefore absurd to assume
that the Meroites chose to resume on their side the millenia-long
development that led from early Egyptian hieroglyphs to demotic. On
the contrary, it seems highly plausible that the cursive script appeared
first for everyday life necessities, whereas the hieroglyphic script was
later elaborated for prestige texts. However, the following overview will
focus on the hieroglyphic script because the link with Egyptian script
is obvious, whereas the development of the cursive script from demotic
still remain unclear.
Nevertheless, Meroites did not copy the complex writing system of
their prestigious neighbours, but elaborated a purely phonetic system,
originating in the transcriptions of native names into Egyptian hiero-
glyphs as used in the kingdom of Napata (Napatan transcriptions).
Since the work of the German Egyptologist, Fritz Hintze, it has been
proved on sound bases that this script was not alphabetical or conso-
nantal as formerly suggested, but constituted an alphasyllabary
similar in its principles to the Indian scripts (Hintze 1973). However,
scholarly sign-for-sign transliteration from Meroitic in Latin letters, as
much for convenience as for respect of the traditions, obscure the very
nature of the Meroitic script. Each basic sign represents a syllable
whose vowel is /a/ and accordingly,
dm- receive was realized
/dama/.3 If the vowel is different, a special sign, more a vocalic modifier
established in Taneyidamanis cartouche from the Barkal Stele (REM 1044), although
Taneyidamani is considered as her successor. Shanakdakhete is usually equated with the
queen whose pyramid in Meroe (Beg. N. 11) is next to Taneyidamanis, even though
evidence for such an equation is lacking. If the owner of Beg. N. 11 and Shanakdakhete
were two different queens, the latter could be ascribed to a later period in accordance
with her cartouche, and Taneyidamanis name in REM 1044 (end of the second century
bc) should be considered as the earliest Meroitic hieroglyphic inscription.
2
Some demotic inscriptions, though later than the appearance of the Meroitic
scripts, were found on Meroitic sites as far south as Musawwarat, in the surroundings
of the sixth Cataract.
3
Throughout this paper, italics are used for scholarly sign-for-sign transliteration,
slashes for phonemic transcription, square brackets for detailed phonetic transcription.
Ex: 19Q Isis = Wos = /usa/ = [ua]. Meroitic hieroglyphic script can be written
either from left to right (as in this paper) or from right to left, by contrast with cursive
script which was always written from right to left.
226 claude rilly
than a true vowel-sign, shall accompany the basic sign: for instance,
93 nob Nubian, slave was realized /nuba/. Contrary to the
Indian scripts, this modifier is not written above or under the basic
sign, but just follows it. If a nude consonant is needed, particularly in
9C
consonant clusters, the basic sign is followed by the modifier e also
used for /e/ or schwa: so
NN Qoreti Qurta (a place-

name) was realized /kwurti/, cf. Greek transcription . A somewhat
fluctuant system was created for the initial vowels (see below). Some
phonetic features like geminate consonants were left unrecorded (hap-
lography). In spite of these defects, Meroitic script can be seen as a
remarkable achievement, especially now that a foreign influence on its
elaboration can be ruled out: the syllabic nature of the system does not
support the hypothesis of a Greek influence, and the chronology rules
out the hypothesis of a Persian influence.
From Egyptian to Meroitic Script
The development of Meroitic script from the Egyptian writing system

cannot yet be thoroughly explained. Several steps of this development
remain obscure because archaeological evidence is missing. For exam-
ple, no extant document in demotic has been found so far in Sudan
for the period preceding the emergence of the cursive Meroitic script,
so that the link between both the scripts is mostly inferred from
the resemblance between the southern forms of Ptolemaic demotic and
the earliest forms of Meroitic cursive. Fortunately, the transcription
of Napatan/Meroitic royal names in Egyptian hieroglyphs, continuously
attested, gives an insight into the formation of the Meroitic writing
system. The following observations are mainly drawn from this source.
Suppression of Determinatives
Generic determinative signs play a major role in the Egyptian script.
They were used to solve ambiguity in homographic spellings, such as
mr pyramid, specified by the pyramid-sign, and mr ill, specified by
the sparrow-sign, commonly called the bird of evil:
= mr pyramid mr ill

It is consequently a key device in a fundamentally polyvalent writing

system.
At first, the names of the Kushite kings did not include such signs,
probably because they were transcribed by Egyptian scribes accustomed
to render foreign names with purely phonetic signs. Later on, from the
reign of king Aspelta (ca. 593568 bc), generic determinatives appeared
in Napatan names to specify some Meroitic elements included in per-
sonal names:
Y Eg. ideogram nfr good, used as determinative for Mer. /malu/
good
Eg. ideogram ntr god, used as determinative for Mer. /maka/
god
% Eg. determinative for child, used as determinative for Mer. /mate/
child
It is significant that the first sign is not properly used in Egyptian as a
generic determinative, but only as an ideogram for nfr good.
Similarly, the use of the divine standard as a determinative for god is
rare in Egyptian. These details tend to show that the use of such signs in
Napatan names probably was due to local scribes. Significantly, it appeared
after the sack of Napata by Egyptian troops led by Psammetichus II in
591 bc and the withdrawal of the administrative capital of the kingdom
from Napata to Meroe, two events that resulted in a rupture with Egypt
and may have favoured the rise of a local caste replacing Egyptians
scribes (Rilly 2001: 363). These scribes, being themselves Meroitic
speakers, were probably eager to specify the meaning of elements that
made sense for them, but were confusedly rendered in Egyptian tran-
scriptions. The following spellings are for instance alternative transcrip-
tions for Meroitic /malu/ good (Flchelle 2004: 44):
A D P B H PY C Y D 6hY E rY

6
F H P
h
G 6 H
M I H6Y
6
J HY P

In A, F, G, H, the rendering is purely phonetic and uses variant
Egyptian signs for /m/ and /l/ (actually /r/ since there was no regular
sign for /l/, whose phonological status in Egyptian is unclear. See
Loprieno 1995: 31). In B, D, E, I and J, the Egyptian logogram nfr is
added as a determinative sign, although it is not used as such in pure
Egyptian.
228 claude rilly
So, the role of the determinative was not, as in Egyptian, to disam-

biguate polyvalency, but to unify polygraphy. However, this experi-
ment, which is known only for rare Meroitic elements, was abandoned
in the course of the fifth century bc. No significant attempt to intro-
duce ideographic elements in the rendering of Meroitic words is later
attested.
Specialization of the Plural Determinative as Word Boundary Sign

The only Egyptian determinative sign that made its way into Meroitic
P
script is the plural sign | | |. In the Egyptian inscriptions of the late
Napatan kings such as Harsiotef and Nastasen (end of the fourth cen-
tury bc), it appears unduly at the end of many singular words. Priese,
and more recently Carsten Peust (Priese 1973: 282283, Peust 1999:
124), consider rightly that the sign was then losing its original value as
a plural marker and was used rather as Wortgrenzsignal (word
boundary sign). This is probably the origin of the word divider

in Meroitic hieroglyphic script and in early cursive (later simplified
in ). Determinatives had in Egyptian, beside their generic role, a word
boundary value. The word divider enabled Meroitic scribes to compen-
sate the absence of such signs in their phonetic script.
Specialization of Signs Used for Apical Consonants

The Egyptian and Napatan scribes had some difficulties in transcribing
into Egyptian script the apical phonemes /d/, /r/, /l/ that occur in
Meroitic personal names. It resulted in ambiguities in the values of two
Egyptian signs:
Eg. Late Eg. values Values in transcribed
signs Meroitic names
6 /r/, /l/ (esp. in foreign words) /r/, /l/
r /r/ /d/, /r/, /l/
These difficulties originated in the fundamental difference between the

phonemic systems of Egyptian and Meroitic. It seems /l/ had in
Egyptian a questionable phonemic status (Loprieno 1995: 31). It had
anyway no single and clear hieroglyphic rendering. By contrast, /l/ and
/r/ were in Meroitic two clearly distinct phonemes. On the other hand,
Meroitic /d/ was a retroflex consonant [ ], i.e., pronounced with the tip
of the tongue curved against the hard palate, a position which produces
a sound very similar to a trilled /r/ (Macadam 1966: 52 and n. 26).

Egyptian scribes were accustomed to render graphically this Meroitic
retroflex /d/ as /r/, even in the earliest transcriptions of Meroitic per-
sonal names that can be dated from the second millenary bc. Later on,
the name of Meroe, Medewi in Meroitic, was again transcribed in
Egyptian as Mrwj, and in Greek as .
The Napatan scribes kept on using these ambiguous notations, but
they proved quite inconvenient, as shown by their attempt to introduce
determinatives for the element /malu/ good. In Meroitic scripts, the
three phonemes were clearly distinguished. The lion-sign 6 was
r
retained with the single value /l/. The Egyptian mouth-sign
C r
went some modifications, becoming on one hand Meroitic
(the latter from Eg.

under-
or
) used for /r/, and, on the other hand,
Meroitic p
, later , used for /d/. These modifications obviously
affected the iconic content of the hieroglyphs. However, most impor-
tant for the Meroites was apparently to stay within the limits of the
Egyptian hieroglyphic stock, probably because hieroglyphs were vested
Egyptian:
with magical power. The new signs used for /r/ and /d/ existed in
and wd.t. The fact that they had different values
in Egyptian did not really matter. Polyvalency of the original Egyptian
hieroglyphs used by Napatan scribes for apical consonants was solved
this way by specializing polygraphic signs and modifying an original
sign. The solution was convenient as proved by the fact that no variant
spelling involving these signs is known in Meroitic.
Notation of Vowels
Notation of vowels is absent from the ordinary Egyptian scripts (hiero-
glyphs, hieratic, demotic). This feature is common among the different
writing systems used for Afro-Asiatic languages and is of course due
to the consonantal nature of lexical stems in this linguistic group. By
contrast, Meroitic was a Nilo-Saharan language where vowels were
relevant in lexical stems: for instance /ked/- kill and /kadi/ woman
are not derived from the same stem.
The scribes of Kush had therefore to find a way to transcribe the
vocalic sounds of their language. Fortunately, Egyptians had worked
out a special system to record vowels, known as syllabic orthography
and chiefly used it for writing the names of foreign places and persons.
In this system, different groups of signs are used for each syllable, for
example bW
(b + stroke) for bi, (b + w) for bu, etc. However, this
230 claude rilly
system, which flourished during the Middle and the New Kingdoms,
had fallen into decline at the end of the second millenium bc. In addi-
tion, it was not very precise and regular and left much room for ambi-
guity. It is no wonder that Napatan scribes used it erratically. They
mixed pure consonantal writing and syllabic orthography with a special
revival of the latter during certain periods (Flchelle 2004: 5878).
Significantly, for the same personal names, many variant spellings
included either consonantal signs or syllabic groups whose value is
Consonant + /a/. This was probably the origin of the Meroitic system
where the unmarked vowel is necessarily /a/.
The Meroitic notation of vowels was doubtlessly a step forward to
monovalency. Apart from the vowel /a/, special signs were adapted to
note the vowels /e/, /i/ and /u/. The differentiation between /i/ and /e/
is particularly striking since the Egyptian scribes never attempted to
distinguish both vowels, even in syllabic orthography or in the tran-
scription of Greek names such as Cleopatra or Berenice. For e, Meroitic
i
scribes used as a basis the Egyptian reed-sign whose value was j
(glide) or in foreign transcriptions /e/ and /i/. The sign was however
i
modified as or This particular form existed in Egyptian in the

feather-sign w . So the magical aspect mentioned above was safe.

For i, the rare Egyptian sign for j oh (Coptic hi) was preferred
i i
to , perhaps to avoid confusion with or with the digraph y, ii
adapted from Egyptian y. ii
In that way, Meroitic system could have become a plain alphasyl-
labary, as it happened for instance for Indian scripts. However, for
some syllables including /n/, /s/ and /t/, a different system was adopted,
involving compact signs, i.e., syllabic signs with a permanent vocalic
value, as can be found in full syllabaries. For this purpose, Meroitic
scribes used Egyptian signs that had the same values in the ancient
Napatan transcriptions of Meroitic names, assigning special values to
some of them. In the Napatan transcriptions, /s/ could be either t
(the bolt-sign reading s in Egyptian) or Q (the papyrus thicket-sign,
reading in Egyptian).4 In the syllabic orthography, the papyrus
4
The confusion between Egyptian s and in the Napatan transcriptions is due to
the laminal nature of Meroitic sibilant /s/.
thicket had the value a, so that it was retained in Meroitic as the main
t
t
sign for s (= /sa/ with inherent vowel /a/). The bolt-sign in the form
, derived from the digraph , specialized in the value se, a syl-
lable which could consequently never be written Q i+ . By contrast,
the syllables /si/ and /su/ are regularly written Q Q9and .A
similar specialization occurred for the sign yy YY
ne, from Egyptian
nn, used occasionally for /n/ in the Napatan transcriptions. The
Egyptian sign n, more common in Napatan transcriptions, was
retained in Meroitic in a reduplicated form as the main sign for n
(= /na/ with inherent vowel /a/). Consequently, /ni/ and /nu/ are writ-
9
ten in Meroitic and , but the group ne is incorrect since
yy
the special sign must be used in that case.
Similarly, /t/ in Napatan transcriptions was indifferently
,t
) h , , or . In the Meroitic hieroglyphic script, apart from the
first sign which was abandoned, each one specialized in a different
syllable including /t/: N N N
became N in N /ta/ and N /ti/ , )
became /tu/, h became h
/te/. These compact signs give an
excellent example of the way polygraphy can be used to solve polyva-
lency, by subsequent specialization of signs originally of same values.5
New Polyvalency: Acquired and Inherent Ambiguities in

Meroitic Script
Meroitic writing system, although better tailored to the indigenous lan-

guage than the old Napatan system used for the transcription of per-
sonal names with Egyptian signs, was, however, far from monovalency.
The transcription of initial vowels is problematical in all alphasyl-
labaries because vocalic signs cannot be used independently in these
writing systems. The Indian scripts, such as Tibetan, resort to a special
dummy sign (initial a) which can support any vocalic appendix.
Unfortunately, the historic development of the Meroitic script was such
5
The retention of these particular syllabic signs in the Meroitic system, which is
essentially an alphasyllabary, seems rather odd. Actually, these special syllables cor-
respond to very common suffixes in Meroitic morphology: -se is for example the
genitival postposition, -te is the locative postposition, and so on. This retention can
consequently be interpreted as a form of shorthand writing.
232 claude rilly
that this simple method found its way only progressively and not for

all vowels. A first sign , derived from Egyptian syllabic orthogra-
phy i /a/, was used for initial /a/ and /u/, and sometimes other

vowels in variant spellings. The vocalic signs e and i could be used
independently at the beginning of a word in the early stage of
the Meroitic script. But this exception to the general principles of an
alphasyllabary was later straightened out by introducing a dummy y
y, resulting in y ye for initial /e/ and yyi for initial /i/. The same
process, which is not so far from the Indian method, was used for long
initial /u/ which was written with a dummy w w. 1
Diphthongs were defectively noted by the second element (Rilly in
print: 294296). So Isis is 19Q Wos = /usa/. If the vocative suffix
-i was added, the resulting form /usai/ was written 19Q Wosi
oh Isis. This is a very common source of ambiguity in Meroitic script.
For instance, the name of God Amun was probably pronounced
/amanai/, from Middle Egyptian /amna/ followed by the Meroitic
anthroponymic suffixe /i/. But since it was simply written {

amni, evidence for the actual pronunciation cannot be found in the
Meroitic texts.
These ambiguities are inherent to the Meroitic writing system.
However, new ambiguities arose from phonemic changes, leading to
acquired polyvalency. In the course of the first century ad, some vow-
els in weak positions were reduced to a neutral vowel //. No sign was
created for this new phoneme. It was written with the same sign as e
which was also used in consonant clusters to notate the absence of
vowel. Consequently, the sign e can be used in Late Meroitic for /e/,
// or zero vowel. For instance, the Meroitic name of Qasr Ibrim, a
Meroitic town in the neighbourhood of Abu Simbel, is [___[ { .
The scholarly sign-for-sign transcription Pedeme equates the different
-signs. However, the Old Nubian name prim /brim/6 directly inherited
from Meroitic and reflected in the second element Ibrim of the modern
name, shows that the name was pronounced [b()em] with different

values for each of the three -signs. It is yet impossible to know at what
level (see above) this polyvalency was resolved: orthographic rules
6
Old Nubian p, like Meroitic [___[ p, was pronounced [b]. In all the Northern East
Sudanic languages, /p/ has no phonemic status (as in Arabic).
might have existed, but are out of reach in the current state of
research.
Inherent and acquired ambiguities in Meroitic writing system are of
course a hindrance to the comparative study of Meroitic, which
requires detailed phonetic renderings for comparison with related
languages (Hofmann 1980). For that reason, future progress in the
translation of Meroitic texts cannot be envisaged without further
research on Meroitic writing system.
Conclusion
The development of the Meroitic script displays many common fea-

tures with its counterparts in other civilizations. In that respect, poly-
valency in Meroitic writing system is a particularly significant approach.
It shows that Meroitic scribes, faced with the same problems, used
more or less the same solutions. They resorted to modifications of signs
and redistribution of polygraphy in particular because they had inher-
ited the rich Egyptian stock from which they could pick up all the signs
they needed. It is not the least of their achievements to have adapted
the rigid writing system of the Pharaohs to a language that had nothing
in common with Egyptian. Experiments were carried out and later
abandoned, as obvious in the way determinatives were tentatively
adapted to Meroitic words. As Bruce Trigger wrote some thirty years
ago: Meroitic script cannot be described any longer, as repeatedly
suggested in secondary literature, as the haphazard creation of a simpli-
fied writing system among a people no longer able to manage with the
complicated Egyptian script (Trigger, 1973b:339340). By comparison,
in the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet, the adaptation of the Egyptian writing
to a language that was still linguistically related involved a complete
disintegration of the Egyptian system where only a few consonantal
signs and the principle of acrophony were retained. On the African
side of the Egyptian sphere of influence, the Egyptian script was
adapted more carefully, probably because it was chiefly an affair of
state. The rulers of Kush considered themselves as the legitimate heirs
of the glorious Egyptian Pharaohs at a time when Egypt itself was in
the hands of foreigners such as the Macedonians or the Romans.
234 claude rilly
References
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Pergamon Press: Oxford.
FHN II: Eide, T., T. Hgg, R. H. Pierce and L. Trk 1996. Fontes Historiae
Nubiorum II. From the Mid-Fifth to the First Century bc Textual Sources for the
History of the Middle Nile Between the 8th Century bc and the 6th ad. University
of Bergen: Bergen.
Flchelle, C. 2004. Transcription des anthroponymes koushites en criture hiroglyphique
gyptienne de la XXVe dynastie au dbut du royaume de Mro. Apports chronologiques
de lvolution orthographique. Mmoire de DEA de lUniversit Paris IV-Sorbonne.
Vol. III. [unpublished thesis]
Griffith F. Ll. 1911. The Meroitic Inscriptions of Shabll and Karanog. E. B. Coxe Jr.
Expedition to Nubia. VI, Philadelphia.
Hintze F. 1973. Some Problems of Meroitic Philology. 1. Internationale Tagung fr
meroitistische Forschungen in Berlin 1971, Meroitica 1: 321336.
1987. Zur Interpretation des meroitischen Schriftsystems. Beitrge zur Sudanforschung
2: 4150.
Hofmann, I. 1980. Zum Problem der gesprochenen und geschriebenen Sprache im
Meroitischen. Afrika und bersee 63: 269280.
Leclant, J., A. Heyler, C. Berger-El Naggar, C. Carrier and C. Rilly 2000. Rpertoire
dpigraphie Mrotique. Corpus des Inscriptions publies. Vol. IIII. Acadmie des
Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres: Paris.
Loprieno, A. 1995. Ancient Egyptian. A linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge.
Macadam, M. F. L. 1966. Queen Nawidemak. Allen Memorial Art Museum. Oberlin
Ohio: pp. 4271.
Peust, C. 1999. Das Napatanische. Ein gyptischer Dialekt aus dem Nubien des spten
ersten vorchristlichen Jahrtausends. Texte, Glossar, Grammatik. Peust & Gutschmidt:
Gttingen.
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Reiches von Kusch. Dissertation, Humboldt-Universitt, Berlin. [unpublished thesis]
1973. Zur Entstehung der meroitischen Schrift. 1. Internationale Tagung fr
meroitistische Forschungen in Berlin 1971, Meroitica 1: 273306.
Rilly, C. 1999. Une nouvelle lecture du signe mrotique Q. Gttinger Miszellen 169:
101110.
2001. Une nouvelle interprtation du nom royal Piankhy. Bulletin de lInstitut
Franais dArchologie Orientale 101: 351368.
2003a. Les graffiti archaques de Doukki Gel et lapparition de lcriture mro-
tique. Meroitic Newsletter 30: 4155, pl. IXXIII (fig. 18).
2003b. Rcents progrs dans le domaine de la philologie mrotique. Meroitic
Newsletter 30: 7377.
in print. La langue du Royaume de Mro. Un panorama de la plus ancienne
culture crite dAfrique subsaharienne. Champion, Collections de lcole Pratique
des Hautes tudes: Paris.
Trigger, B. G. 1973. Internationale Tagung fr meroitische Forschungen in Berlin 1971.
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stische Forschungen in Berlin 1971, Meroitica 1: 337349.
DIFFICULT HIEROGLYPHS AND UNREADABLE DEMOTIC?
HOW THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS DEALT WITH THE
COMPLEXITIES OF THEIR SCRIPT
Whenever Ancient Egypt is evoked, people associate it, among other

things, with the hieroglyphic writing system. By its visual impression, it
has a strong allure mixed, however, with some sort of reluctance. Can
you really read this? is a typical question posed to an egyptologist as
if this was far from self-evident. The very nature of the hieroglyphic
signs fosters a common misconception. The writing is taken to be pic-
tographic, and more specifically to be based on the direct pictorial value
of the depicted objects. This is hardly an adequate model, even if there
is a logical nexus between the depicted object and its value as a sign.
Cursive Writing
I certainly cannot evade the hieroglyphs, but I would like not to limit
myself to the monumental writing system. Instead, I will also bring
the cursive writing systems of Egypt to the fore, for several reasons.
The first is that people tend to forget about the true proportions of
use. Monumental inscriptions in stone were meant to perpetuate
their content for future times. They only represent, however, a limited
sample of the writing that actually was used in Egypt, and hardly a
representative one at that. Their importance for the culture is likely to
be overestimated nowadays since, in accordance with the intentions of
their makers, they were particularly good at bridging the centuries and
millennia. But it was the cursive writing systems normally transmitted
on papyrus, which represented the vast majority of the actual writing
occurring in Egypt, and those very texts, which were of immediate
concern for the Egyptians, be it administrative records specifying
revenues and obligations or liturgical manuscripts with rituals to be
performed by the priests.
Scholars distinguish two different sorts of cursive writing in Egypt,
namely hieratic and demotic. Hieratic evolved out of a simplification of
hieroglyphic writing, which came about easily when writing with a rush
pen and using ink.1 It soon developed into forms of its own, although
the connection to hieroglyphs was never really severed. Perhaps this can
be seen in one obvious fact: Hieratic is normal for everyday supports,
papyrus or leather as well as ostraca, but hardly ever encountered on
stone. There was one phase in Egypt, the Third Intermediate Period,
about 1070700 bc, when hieratic was sometimes incised on stone
for official inscriptions (Meeks 1979: 661687), but otherwise, when
texts were transferred from papyri to monumental surfaces, they were
transposed from hieratic to hieroglyphs. That very fact shows how the
Egyptians considered those writing systems to be two faces of the same
coin, not as distinct systems (although, as a matter of fact, there are some
differences in the orthographic preferences). The Greeks felt similarly,
because most of their authors who write about Egyptian script do not
distinguish between hieroglyphic and hieratic (Marestaing 1913), and
the Egyptians designated both with the same term as mtw-nr words
of the god.2
The second cursive writing used in Egypt is demotic.3 It evolved
by about the seventh century bc out of hieratic, by a serious further
simplification of the sign forms. In this case, it was considered more as
an entity of its own. It was, from the Ptolemaic period onwards, quite
often engraved as a sort of monumental script of its own,4 and received
a specific term. It was called popular writing or indigenous writing
in Greek, and sh - .t letter-writing in Egyptian. Still, it is theoretically
possible to transpose even demotic into hieroglyphic writing; there never
was a complete break. Since there are some cases of texts written in
demotic language but hieroglyphic script (Quack 1995, Quack 1998),
it is possible that models in demotic writing were actually put into
hieroglyphs but it cannot be excluded that in those cases, the basic
written document was in hieratic script (which could, at least during
some periods, be used also for compositions in demotic language).
In my contribution, I will focus on demotic when considering the
cursive writing for several reasons. Firstly, in normal descriptions of
Egyptian writing systems, demotic is rather relegated to a sort of foot-
1
For hieratic, the standard paleography is Mller (19091912); additional works on
selected periods are Goedicke (1988) and Verhoeven (2001).
2
Here and in the following, I am using for Ancient Egyptian the specific translitera-
tion system used, e.g., in Schenkel (2005).
3
For demotic writing in general, there is no really thorough treatment. See, e.g.,
the notes and sign-list in Bresciani & Menchetti (2002).
4
Many of the smaller ones are collected in Vleeming (2001).
difficult hieroglyphs and unreadable demotic? 237
note or appendix, not considered on a par with hieroglyphs, so there

is much less information about it that is easily accessible. Secondly, it
has a more distinct character than hieratic, so any differences between
monumental and cursive writing should be more accentuated in
demotic. Most especially, demotic illustrates the very subject of this
chapter, namely polysemy, as I will show later on.
First, however, a few words about the hieroglyphic writing system
and how it functioned in general. Hieroglyphs, as a medium of com-
munication, occur on objects as early as the late fourth millennium bc.5
Thus they are among the oldest known writing systems of the world,
rivalled only by Mesopotamian cuneiform writing. The question of
precedence, as well as possible Mesopotamian influence on the develop-
ment in Egypt, have been debated several times (e.g., Daniels 1996: 2).
Without entering into any details, I would simply stress that in their
actual functioning, the writing systems are too different to make a close
dependence feasible. At most, some general conception of writing as
a cultural technique might have been transmitted,
Egyptian writing combines signs of two different functions.6 On the
one hand, there are signs in a phonetic function, i.e., expressing sounds.
There is one specific point to be noted: In Egyptian writing, tradition-
ally only consonants are expressed, not vowels. Among the signs of
phonetic function, there are specific signs for each consonantal sound
of the Ancient Egyptian language, although with one probable excep-
tion. Generally, the system is fairly economic for one-consonant signs;
there are only few cases where more than one sign is in current use
for any particular sound. The sound-values were typically derived from
the Egyptian words for the object depicted. In order to arrive at one
single consonant, sounds of weaker pronunciation were disregarded,
but it seems that as soon as one satisfactory sign for a consonant was
devised, the process was finished and no further experiments along
those lines encouraged.
Furthermore, there are signs for sequences of two or three conso-
nants. The first group is fairly extensive and covers about 8090 signs
5
Dreyer (1998); for different interpretations, see Vernus (2001), Breyer (2002) and
Kahl (2003). For early Egyptian writing in general, see Kahl (1994, 2001) and Morenz
(2004).
6
For good overviews on the functioning of Egyptian writing, see Schenkel (1971,
2005: 4172), Depuydt (1999: 762) and Altenmller (2005). A fairly different systematic
has now been proposed by Schweitzer (1995: 2398). Some specific theoretical problems
are discussed in Schenkel (2003).
in normal use. Still, they do not represent all sequences of consonants

that are tolerated within the Egyptian language. This means that for
some sound combinations, a writing with one-consonantal signs is the
only possibility. When there was the option, however, the Egyptians
tended to use the signs with two-consonant value.7 Redundancy within
this group is fairly limited; it is rare to have two or more different signs
with the same two-consonant value. Whenever this occurs, one of the
alternatives tends to be restricted by convention to the writing of some
specific word while the other one is in free and general use. In some
cases, supposed redundancies have resolved themselves when close
analyses showed real differences in the sound values (Quack 2003a).
Signs with the value of three consonants are relatively rare. Since
most Egyptian words have a root with three consonants, this means that
it is impossible, for the greater part of the Egyptian lexicon, to reduce
the writing to a single sign. Furthermore, given the root structure of
the Egyptian language, it is difficult on a theoretical level to distinguish
between those signs that stand for a sequence of three consonants
regardless of its sense and those signs which are fixed to the writing
of one single root.
Pluriconsonantal signs be it two or three consonants are, with
great frequency, subject to the so-called phonetic complements. In
normal Egyptian writing, some or even all of the consonants expressed
by a pluriconsonantal sign are repeated by placing the one-consonant
signs before or after it; e.g., the two-consonantal sign b can have
the sign b before it and the sign { after it, resulting in
to be read b , not bb . The actual custom, whether one has both
{ ,
consonants of a two-consonantal sign, only the first or only the last

one expressed by a one-consonantal sign, are fixed rather arbitrarily
by conventions. The usages are less rigid at the origin, e.g., the writ-
ing habits of the fourth dynasty are still relatively erratic (Schweitzer
2005: 579604). Only later does orthography tend to become more
standardized. The use of complements certainly makes it easier to read
a text even when not quite sure about the sound-value of a two- or
three-consonantal sign, one gets part or all of that information by its
surroundings. In general, the use of complements is more frequent in
hieratic than in hieroglyphic writing, probably for the simple reason
7
Schweitzer (2005: 6366) has tentatively established rules for the choice of two-
consonantal signs instead of a sequence of two one-consonantal signs.
that cursive writing makes it more difficult to recognize the signs and
thus more measures to ensure correct understanding are necessary.
Now we come to the second great category of hieroglyphs, namely
the semograms. Among them, we have logograms and determinatives.
A logogram (also called ideogram) is a sign serving to write the word
corresponding to the object it depicts or to which it is closely related.
For example, we have the sign of the sun d as writing of the actual
word r sun, or the sign of the writing implements
sh to write and its derivations.
i for the root
A determinative is a sign not having any sound-value at all, but

still it was an essential part of the Egyptian writing system. It is a sign
placed at the end of a word and giving information about its semantic
category, acting as a classifier (Goldwasser 2006). We can have deter-
minatives of fairly broad use, like the sign of the striking man
for words having to do with force and exertion, or the animal hide
used
R for mammals and other hairy animals. On the other hand, there are
6
fairly specific determinatives like a man raising a column ( ), or the
sign of the cat as a logogram or determinative for the word cat.
The use of determinatives contributes significantly to the number of
hieroglyphs in use; there are about a hundred of more general applica-
tion (Gardiner 1957: 3133) and a significant amount of quite specific
use. However, in this case, they do not add to the complication of the
system, but rather to its malleability. One highly important factor in
writing is to distinguish between different derivations of a root. If, for
example, you have the root sh with the verb to write and a nomi-
nal derivation sh (.w) the scribe (with an ending reconstructed by
linguistic considerations but not used in actual hieroglyphic writing),
a writing purely based on the phonetic signs would not normally be
able to distinguish them. By using determinatives, you can easily mark
the second alternative with placing the sign of a sitting man at the
end of the word to signal that this word belongs to the sphere of man
and its occupations. Determinatives can even allow one to distinguish
between different connotations of one single word, mainly in hieratic,
but sometimes even in demotic writing (Pestman 1973), which would
be impossible in a purely alphabetic writing. Using determinatives thus
makes the reading of hieroglyphic texts easier. Actually, one can observe
a neat tendency to increase the use of determinatives at the beginning
of the twelfth dynasty which is, to all appearances, part of a conscious
effort to make writing clearer while at the same time enlarging the
bureaucratic staff of the government (Schenkel 1975: 7079).
Regardless of their function, most hieroglyphs form one single con-

tinuous sign. In rare cases, the sign can be discontinuous. A case in
point is the group YY for nn two plant shoots not touching each
other. Although there is also a hieroglyphic sign of a single shoot, it
does have a quite different value nhb and the group cannot be explained
as a combination of the values of its constituent parts. Discontinuity is
a bit more frequent with determinatives, e.g., three water-lines V as

determinative for water or three strokes as a marker of plurality.
Numbers
Several points of this factual description call for comments and are
relevant for our topic. First, the number of hieroglyphs: The complexity
of the writing system seems baffling at first. One can read that there are
about seven hundred different hieroglyphic signs in common use during
the Middle and New Kingdom, and that their number increased to about
five thousand, or even seven thousand in the Graeco-Roman period.
How could an ordinary human being keep such an amount of signs
in memory, and why did the Egyptians need so many different signs?
As a matter of fact, these numbers, although frequently referenced,
are likely to be off the mark. Seven hundred hieroglyphs for the classical
period is likely to be an underestimation. Even for the still relatively
limited texts of the fourth dynasty, an actual count gives 719 differ-
ent attested signs (Schweitzer 2005: 195f ). Conversely, five or even
seven thousand for the Graeco-Roman period is a gross overestima-
tion. Both extremes are due primarily to a count of modern printing
fonts. The lower number is based on the elegant set designed for Alan
Henderson Gardiners Egyptian grammar. While comprising all signs
of any significant frequency, close study of the monuments would
reveal numerous additional attested hieroglyphs. Quite ironically, this
does not demonstrate that the hieroglyphs are more complicated than
generally supposed. On the contrary, it shows that what we have here
is an open set where everyone is free to create new signs as long as they
are intuitively understandable to his readers. As a matter of fact, the
additional signs are largely palaeographical variants or detailed forms
of logograms and determinatives whose value was self-evident. They
need no special training to learn, and if anything, they make it easier
to understand the text.
The seemingly enormous number of five thousand or, according to
other voices, even seven thousand signs for the Graeco-Roman period
is based primarily on the font used by the French institute at Cairo and
secondly on the so-called extended sign list, a computer font, which
has served to replace the French lead-based letter-press in recent years.
Since that institution has published many temple-inscriptions from
the Graeco-Roman period, their printing font is relatively complete.
However, many of these hieroglyphs are only palaeographical variants
that do not really need memorizing, or are merely ligatures of two or
more hieroglyphs where only the technical practicalities of modern
printing demand the creating of a new sign in the font. A recent guess
based on the compilation of a sign-list for teaching purposes came to
the result that there are less than twelve hundred signs with a phonetic
value, and, even when including determinatives, the actual number
of hieroglyphs used in this time would not exceed fifteen hundred
to two thousand (Leitz 2004: 10f; similar Kurth 2007: 3 note 1). Still Graeco-
Roman monumental epigraphy is more difficult than ordinary hiero-
glyphs. In order to appreciate it, one should at least note that it had
relatively different aims from many of the earlier inscriptions. It was
less about simply communicating verbal meaning to a circle as large
as possible, and more about conveying an added layer of meaning on
the graphic level for a rather closed inner circle where social separation
worked towards increased complexity of the system whose understand-
ing became also a differentiating hallmark of an elite.
Second, the disregard of vowels: Imagine English (or another European
language) written without any vowels. That would create an enormous
complication. Many words of clearly distinct meaning would simply
show up in the same graphic form. The text might still remain under-
standable, but its correct deciphering would take a prohibitive amount
of time. With the Egyptian language, and similarly with the Semitic
languages, which are genetically related to it, the concept of roots is
important for the structure of the language. A root is a fixed sequence
of consonants carrying one basic concept of meaning. As such, it is
an abstraction and does not occur in the actual language. What we
really have are derivations of that root. Different patterns of vocalisa-
tion, and, in some cases, affixes are used to form the inflected forms of
the verb as well as nominal derivations. Thus, words having identical
consonantal sequences are relatively likely not to have an unbridgeable
gap of meaning between them. It makes writing actually much more
convenient if one can use the same signs for the core part of the root
regardless of the actual specific form, and that concerns particularly
writing systems where a sign can denote sequences of more than one
consonant. I doubt that without the Egyptian precedence of disregarding

the vowels in writing, the northwest-semitic writing system, and with
it our modern alphabet, would ever have come about.
Third, the one consonant missing from the basic graphemic inven-
tory, namely the l, whose phonemic status in Ancient Egyptian is not
completely clear. This does not have a single and unique hieroglyphic
sign. Instead, it can either be noted approximately by using the similar
{
[
sounds r, n and or by specific combinations of several signs,
in the Old Kingdom, p | in the New Kingdom these polygraphic
renderings are always facultative and more often used for foreign words
and names than for indigenous Egyptian words. A true single sign for
the l is only created in the demotic writing of the Ptolemaic period; it is
derived from the sign for r by a diacritical mark. Peust (1999: 107114)
has proposed several more phonetic distinctions among the consonants
not reflected in writing but I doubt the validity of his argumentation
(Quack 2003b: 445f ).
Fourth, polysemy in the sense that a sign can have more than one
value. Such a phenomenon contributes quite a bit to the supposed dif-
ficulty of early writing systems like hieroglyphs or cuneiform. Actually,
the number of cases where a sign can have seriously different values is
rather limited in classical hieroglyph writing. It becomes much more
virulent in Graeco-Roman monumental hieroglyphic epigraphy when
some signs could have ten or more different phonetic values, but that
topic is not dealt with in detail here. In short, the process of creat-
ing sound values that had been operative during the late predynastic
and early dynastic period but rather closed down afterwards, became
functioning actively again. This probably started as soon as the early
first millennium bc, but it became much more pronounced beginning
with the Ptolemaic period. Given that the sound system of the Egyptian
language had evolved considerably by then (Peust 1999), there were
numerous possibilities of words containing only one strong consonant
and capable of being written with a word-sign which thus became a
freely usable one-consonantal sign in this system of writing.
But here I am only concerned with the polysemy in ordinary hiero-
glyphic writing. One fairly common, and fairly harmless instance of
polysemy is that a sign serving as a determinative for a word can also
be used in a kind of abbreviation for that word. For example, the call-
ing man can be used as determinative for verbs of calling, but as
an abbreviation, it can also be used for the specific verb to call. It
is a bit more of a challenge when the same sign also serves as a short
writing for the interjection , but normally the context makes it easy
to distinguish which value is actually used. In other cases, a word sign
might be read in two different ways. For example, the sign of the head
obviously serves to write the word head, be it as a determinative
to a phonetically written word, or as a word-sign on its own. In the
latter case, however, it is not always clear whether it is to be read as tp
or . Still, that rarely affects the meaning of a phrase.
Serious cases of polysemy are encountered when a sign can have
phonetically different values that lead to distinctively different meaning
and words. A case is the sign of the star that can serve to write two
different roots: The one is tw, which probably has the basic meaning
of morning, but with a derived sense to adore because Egyptians
normally sung sun-hymns in the morning. The other is sb, with such
different meanings as the verb to teach and its derivatives, the noun
door, and the noun star, which, however, can probably be attributed
to one basic root (Westendorf 1984).
In the distinct majority of cases, the use of an appropriate deter-
minative makes the choice of the correct reading rather easy. Among
two-consonantal signs, there is, e.g., the sign of the elephant tusk
with the values bh and h w. Normally, the use of phonetic complements
resolves ambiguity in such questions. The number of cases where signs
have several clearly different phonetic values is not very high in ordi-
nary hieroglyphic writing; probably not more than ten signs at most
are involved. In some cases, such phenomena are due to the formal
coalescence of originally distinct sign forms, often brought about by
similarity in cursive writing.
In some cases, polysemy is restricted to certain categories of texts. For
w
example, the sign of the cow-ear , besides serving as a determinative,
has the value sm for the verb to hear and its derivatives. However,
specifically in medical texts, it can also serve as a short writing for the
word r leaf (of a plant). As such, it is typically written without any
phonetic complement, whereas for the root sm, the one-consonantal sign
for m, is usually employed as a complement at the end of the word.
Perhaps these cases can illustrate one important point about the poly-
semy of signs in ordinary hieroglyphic writing. Not only is it a rela-
tively rare phenomenon, but also, the context of the sign takes care of
clearing the resulting ambiguities.
Fifth and finally, some remarks about the relative frequency of signs:
Unfortunately, no one has ever done a large-scale counting of the use
of different signs, at least not in published form. I have counted part
of one hieroglyphic inscription as a sample in order to gauge about the

use of the different categories of signs. As basis, I used a late Middle
Kingdom private stela from Abydos. The amount of text I could process
was limited to a bit more than four hundred signs but it should give
some idea. One-consonantal signs account for a bit less than half of
the inscription, 2-consonantal signs and determinatives are both a bit
below twenty percent, and 3-consonantal signs and word-signs less
than fifteen percent of the whole. To put it into a more global perspec-
tive: With an active knowledge of about 110 signs for the one- and
two-consonantal signs plus a fairly reduced amount of determinatives
of mostly intuitive value, one could already decipher 85% of the text,
and probably the phonetic complements would help enough to guess
most of the remaining words. More simply put, for an ordinary run-
of-the-mill inscription, the amount of active knowledge of the script
you have to master is limited. I would of course admit that there are
much more difficult texts, but in general, the difficulty of hieroglyphs
is far from insurmountable.
Demotic
In cursive writing, some ambiguity is always created by the very process

of simplification, which leads to originally different sign-forms becom-
ing similar or even identical. There seems to have been some sort of
control which kept this from going too far. The actual limits of tolerance
were slightly different at different times. For example, middle hieratic

writing tolerates that the sign for n ( ) and the plural strokes ( )
have facultatively identical forms (a more elaborate form of the plural
strokes remains possible), and also, the more elaborate forms of the
arm, such as Jj , , , sometimes even , can be assimilated
tok . In later periods, these simplifications are no longer usual.
Specifically important for understanding cursive writing is the late
period Egyptian form, namely demotic. It came about in the seventh
century bc, and it first appropriated the administrative texts to its
domain, later the literary texts, and, even for religious texts, came to
rival the traditional hieratic script. Nowadays, demotic is normally
considered to be a highly difficult, almost unreadable script. Even
within Egyptology, it is a niche for the happy few. The main reason
is the cursive character of the script that seems baffling at first: lots
and lots of small signs, and sometimes one cannot feel sure what is
an accidental ink-blot, and what is a crucial sign important for under-

standing the whole.
As a matter of fact, there are some elements which make demotic
more difficult and others which make it easier. The number of signs
in use in the demotic script is certainly considerably lower than in
hieroglyphic writing. There has never been a good inventory. A recent
palaeography of demotic (El-Aguizy 1998) counts about three hundred
different signs. In spite of the problems and limitations of that publica-
tion (See Vittmann 2000), the number might be reasonably accurate;
at least you would not encounter many more genuine demotic groups
of any frequency in the texts. Another list, the sign list of Erichsens
reading exercises (Erichsen 1937), contains about 360 signs, so the
numbers are not too different. It might still be possible to find addi-
tional, often quasi-hieratic signs in certain types of texts, especially if
they use vocabulary that has fallen out of normal use in that period.
But that is hardly of importance for the sort of texts one would nor-
mally encounter when reading demotic. For that, about 300350 signs
would be sufficient, definitely less than for hieroglyphic writing. One
reason for the reduced number is obvious. In a script which is based
on making the signs simple for fast writing, complicated and elaborated
signs or highly specific signs do not make sense. Instead, basic forms
are used and along with only generic determinatives of fairly broad
application, e.g., one has the general determinative for mammals derived
from the animal hide, but normally would not use the determinative
of a specific animal.
Normally, demotists do not care much about a theoretical classifica-
tion of the demotic signs. Since almost all of them have been trained
first as egyptologists in hieroglyphic writing, they simply tend to project
the classification system of the hieroglyphs into demotic. For example,
in the only published palaeography of demotic (El-Aguizy 1998), you
will find the labels of two- or three-consonantal signs liberally attached
to certain demotic groups going back ultimately to signs classified as
such for hieroglyphic writing. However, I would beg to disagree with
such an approach because it does not seem to me to be adequate for
synchronic analysis. The classification of demotic writing should be set
out differently. There are only three fundamental sorts of signs, namely
one-consonantal signs, determinatives, and groups.
One-consonantal-signs and determinatives are, of course, familiar
from the older Egyptian writing system, and they continue their func-
tioning. The category of groups, however, is somewhat new. It
subsumes the earlier distinct categories of two-consonantal signs,

three-consonantal signs, and word-signs. This is due to the way a new
stability is achieved within the system of demotic writing. Two- as well
as three-consonantal signs, and equally word-signs, together with their
standard phonetic complements (and sometimes even determinatives),
are fused together in a new sign which has a fixed value of its own and
cannot be broken down into its original constituents. It is a readable
and recognizable unit of its own. A case in point is the group
K t
for p(.t) work. Historically, it derives from a hieroglyphic group
= (or similar). However, it is quite impossible to dissociate
the first part into anything corresponding to two separate demotic
=
signs for K
and . It works only as a fixed single group. Due to this
process, it is not customary in demotic to use one-consonantal signs
as phonetic complements, except in a few frozen cases like the femi-
nine word wry.t the great one which regularly employs the group for
wr (historically speaking, an old two-consonantal sign wr followed by
a phonetic complement r and a space-filling stroke) followed by the
demotic one-consonantal sign r.
There is, however, a totally different sort of complements in demotic
writing, which deserves more attention, because, from a theoretical point
of view, it is quite remarkable. It consists of indicating either the first
or the last part of a word phonetically by prefixing or suffixing to it a
(short) word that serves as an indication of a syllable with fixed vocalic
value. The most frequent one is probably the word yi to come that
can be used to indicate a stressed final syllable with . Furthermore,
the verb ni to bring is sometimes prefixed to a word (Zauzich 1998:
747), probably in order to indicate a beginning with a syllabic n (which
corresponds to the pronunciation of the status constructus of the verb
ni, being in Coptic). The writing for the verb ri to do can be used
in word-final position to indicate a pronunciation of a final r, espe-
cially after derivations of the root nfr to be good which drop the r in
most, but not all cases (Zauzich 1998: 748f., Quack 1999: 28 note b).
The word r companion can serve to indicate a final syllable in r
(which corresponds to its Coptic pronunciation as M. Such a use of
complements with fixed vocalic value is unusual for the older Egyptian
writing systems, although for the syllabic writing of the New Kingdom,
some scholars suppose a sub-system working with short (one-syllable)
words of fixed vocalic value.
The amount of one-consonantal signs is larger in demotic than in
earlier times, and this is due to a specific process. In earlier times, a
so-called syllabic orthography Already evolved that was based on

original two-consonantal signs with a weak second consonant. They
were used, perhaps originally with a fixed vocalic value, to write single
consonants, normally for foreign words or for those words which did
not have a traditional established orthography. By the time of demotic,
they had lost all pretension to fixed vocalic value as well as all restric-
tions to foreign words and were also freely used for traditional Egyptian
vocabulary. But the old signs were rarely given up completely, so, for
many sounds, there were two or even three one-consonantal signs
possible. The choice was normally made either by considerations of
traditional orthography, or by the possibilities of good optical arrange-
ment. Additionally, from the Early Ptolemaic Period (about Ptolemy
III), the sign for l was clearly differentiated from the sign for r
by the addition of a diacritical marker.
The percentage of demotic words written only with one-consonantal
signs and determinatives, without any groups, is probably higher than
the percentage of words in hieroglyphic and hieratic texts written with-
out pluriconsonantal signs and word-signs. Unfortunately, no scholar,
so far, has made a reliable count of that.
The supposed difficulty of demotic is partly due to the fact that it is
always set out in cursive hand-writing. It is necessary to become accus-
tomed to the way an individual scribe writes his signs that can be a
problem even in modern times, and all the more so if the handwriting
is several hundred years old. For that reason, it takes some time to
get used to a demotic hand, and with a short text, things are generally
much harder than with a long text.
There is however a much deeper problem, namely that demotic
signs of highly different function look nearly or totally alike. I will
give some examples: One sign of mostly identical form can serve as
K
one-consonantal sign for s (hieroglyphic ), as writing of the possessive
article pa he of . . . ([), and, sometimes with a small additional dot
( ), as determinative of the man with the hand to his mouth ( ), a
standard determinative for word of eating as well as of mental processes.
v t
The sign of the suffix s for the third person singular ( ) looks like
the canal-determinative (| ). One single sign can be the sign of the
c fl
child ( ), or the determinative of the old man ( ), or even the deter-

minative of the builder ( ). The sign w ( ) and the group for cop-
per also look quite alike. Even the one-consonantal signs for b ( )
v
and ( |) look alike ( ) in many hands (most Roman-period scribes
differentiate them clearly). One single group can be the group for wr
p
big (
t t
), to call ( ), for the second part of the word mnh be
excellent ( ), and for t district ( ). Actually, these are, of course,
originally quite different hieroglyphic forms, but the way of shortening
them has produced identical movements of lines in demotic.
All these examples and they could be multiplied probably look
terrifying at first sight. This seems like a hopeless confusion, and every
decipherment like a lot of guesswork. Luckily, things are much less
disastrous. While the groups in question might look identical as far
as they go, hardly ever do they constitute the word in its entirety.
Determinatives would be added to the word, or phonetic parts to deter-
minatives. For example, one of the signs mentioned can be read as the
sign of the child on its own, e.g., as a writing of the word r son. If,
however, used as the sign of the old man, it always follows a phonetic
part of the word (normally the root to be big/old), and that part
precludes any mistaken interpretation as the sign of the child.
If complete words become too alike in demotic writing, there seems
to be a tendency towards secondary differentiation by diacritical mark-
ers or additional strokes in one of them. A good case can be found
K
in a group which looks almost identical, in early demotic, for the

p
marker of the negative past tense bn-p ( ) and the word rn name
( ). But already beginning in that epoch, and almost consistently
later on, the word rn name was distinguished by placing an additional
line on the top of the first part ( ). Genetically, it probably derives
from the frequent expression n-rn in the name of ,8 but then it was
generalized, and for n-rn as different from simple rn, an additional n
could be added.
With that, we have advanced quite a bit in the question of how
demotic functioned for its users. One would probably learn the one-
consonantal signs individually; at least there is one remarkable list
giving only one-consonantal signs, not complete words, namely in
papyrus Berlin 23861 (Zauzich 2000). Perhaps this would also work
for the determinatives, although I am not sure about that. But other-
wise, you would not learn individual groups, but complete words. The
Ganzheitsmethode, to use a German term, is fundamental for this
8
This process was misunderstood by Depuydt (2001: 9) who took the line to derive
from an ancient r.
writing (Zauzich 1968: 4f ). As long as one looks at the complete word,

most ambiguities are solved and there is only one possible interpretation.
Actual evidence for this sort of instruction is provided by a number
of preserved school exercises with individual words or simple phrases
(Kaplony-Heckel 1974, Devauchelle 1984).
This is, to some degree, whence our modern problems come. As long
as one has the complete word in perfect preservation, reading is not so
difficult in most cases. If however, the surface is partially abraded, or
the ink faint, or worms have eaten up parts of the papyrus, it soon goes
downhill. From my own experience, I would say that with a demotic
text one tends to loose ones way in broken contexts much easier than
in hieratic texts where the decipherment of individual signs is normally
not in doubt, even if the word is incomplete.
This is, after all, not very different from what I have explained about
polysemy in hieroglyphic writing. There, most ambiguities of the signs
used are also clarified by context, and I think it is more than coincidence
that demotic writing, in spite of its differences, shows fundamentally
similar ways of making writing unambiguous.
After all, it should not be forgotten that Egyptians were actually
able to use their writing system quite successfully, to set down fairly
complicated thoughts as well as to fix legally binding administrative
documents. I would not want to guess how much of the population
was literate but I seriously doubt that the figure of one percent writ-
ten in modern scholarship (Baines & Eyre 1983, Baines 1983) is true.
Especially for the later periods, where there is better documentation,
the amount of different hands during a rather short period of time
from even modest settlements is so immense that one should reckon
on a substantially higher literate part of the population, at least among
the town-dwellers.
Certainly, the writing systems of Egyptian are a lot more complicated
than our modern letters, and the part of the population who was able to
make substantial use of them was less, although perhaps not seriously
less than in the European Middle Ages. Still, the system has no inher-
ent limitations concerning the possibility of expressing everything that
can be thought in the Egyptian language. I would risk the hypothesis
that the limitations of its spread might even be deliberate the read-
ing and writing part of the population at the time was also the ruling
elite, and would not have had any interest in making writing so easy
that everybody could master it (Quack 2006: 96f ).
References
El-Aguizy, O. 1998. A Palaeographical Study of Demotic Papyri in the Cairo Museum

from the Reign of King Taharka to the End of the Ptolemaic Period (68430 bc).
MIFAO 113. Cairo: Institut Franaise dArchologie Orientale.
Altenmller, H. 2005. Einfhrung in die Hieroglyphenschrift. Hamburg: Buske.
Baines, J. 1983. Literacy and Ancient Egyptian Society, Man (NS) 18: 572599.
Baines, J. & C. J. Eyre, 1983. Four Notes on Literacy, Gttinger Miszellen 61: 6596.
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MAYA WRITING: SYNONYMS AND HOMONYMS,
POLYVALENCY AND POLYSEMY
Erik Boot
Introduction
The origins of Maya writing are being pushed back nearly every year,
especially through archaeological discoveries at the Guatemalan site
of San Bartolo. In a recent article, Saturno, Stuart, and Beltrn (2006)
now date the first known example to circa the fourth century bce.
Further discoveries at this site, but also at other sites in the region or
close to where San Bartolo is located (i.e., large sites as Calakmul, El
Mirador, and Tikal [see map in Figure 1] as well as smaller sites as
Cival or La Sufricaya), ultimately may provide yet earlier examples of
Maya writing and possibly the examples of the incipient stages of the
writing system itself.1
The language that gave rise to Maya writing was a lowland Mayan
language, probably an ancestor to (colonial) Cholt (now extinct) and
present-day Chort (Houston et al. 2000). Intensive and long-term
interaction (circa 1,000400 bce) between different but closely related
cultural areas in the Maya lowland region, probably each speaking a
distinct but related Mayan language, may have provided the ground
for the invention and development of a writing system (either through
independent invention and/or adaption of [an] earlier neighboring
script[s] and scribal tradition[s]).2 Including extinct languages belonging
1
A recent study suggests that the earliest syllabic sign inventory hints at a non-
Mayan origin. Based on these syllabic signs, the origin of this inventory probably may
be found in a neighboring Mixe-Zoquean speaking community (Lacadena 2005). If
correct, there would be no incipient stages of Maya writing, but more research is
necessary to substantiate a probable Mixe-Zoquean origin. The earliest now known
example of Maya writing provides ancestors to well-known Classic Maya signs and
pre-dates examples of the Isthmian or Epi-Olmec script (Saturno et al. 2006: 2), for
which a Mixe-Zoquean language has been suggested (Justeson & Kaufman 1993, 1997
and Kaufman & Justeson 2004; but see Houston & Coe 2003 and Mesoweb 2004).
2
Currently I am investigating the possibility that several (perhaps) closely related
writing systems were developed in the Maya area, of which examples can be found at
for instance Kaminaljuyu, Takalik Abaj, Chalchuapa, and San Bartolo. These scripts
254 erik boot
Figure 1. Map of the Mesoamerica and the Maya Area, major sites indicated
(by the author).
to the Mayan stock or family of languages, over 30 different languages

were spoken in an area now referred to as the Maya area. In the present
day some 25 Mayan languages are still spoken in southeastern Mexico,
Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras.
Maya writing is best known through its monumental hieroglyphic
inscriptions produced in the Classic period, a period that began at circa
(to represent a or the Maya language) may have been in competition, in which finally
one script took primacy over the others and became the standard for the whole area
(this does not mean that at one point one script took over, the other script may have
existed for some time; although in China the first emperor of Qin initiated a script
unification in 221 bce, other writing systems still were employed and even continued
their evolutionary path). Some stylistic traits are shared by some of the scripts, but
sign inventories seem to differ (although this observation is based on a database of
only a small number of early texts, both monumental and portable, that is currently
available). This sceneario may explain why certain early signs never are found in later
texts; these did not make it into the final sign inventory as they came to belong to
an obsolete writing tradition.
maya writing 255
250 ce and lasted to circa 900 ce, at now well-known archaeological sites
such as Copn, Palenque, Quirigu, Tikal, and Yaxchiln. Maya writing
is a mixed or logosyllabic script which means that within Maya writing
syllabic signs (i.e., signs that represent CV [consonant-vowel] sounds,
e.g., ba, ma) and logographic signs (i.e., signs that represent CVC or
CVCVC words, CHAN serpent, BALAM jaguar) were employed
to form linguistic items. In total some 650 to 700 signs were developed.
In the early phase of the Classic period, some 125 to 300 signs were
in use; during the middle phase of the Classic period some 300 to 360
signs were in use. In the late phase of the Classic period some 200 to
300 were in use, while in the late Postclassic period (circa 12501500
ce) the Maya screenfold books employed close to 300 different signs
(compare to Grube 1990a: 3841 & Tabelle 1). While there is a tendency
to employ more syllabic signs towards the late Postclassic period, Maya
writing was and always remained a mixed script.
The title of the 2005 symposium that produced this paper was The
Idea of Writing: The Use of Polysemy in Writing Systems. The defi-
nition of polysemy, however, is not an easy one to give. As writing is
based in and on language, I have chosen language as the starting point
for a definition. In this paper I follow the definition given to polysemy
generally followed in the study of linguistic semantics, in which poly-
semy refers to multiplicity in meanings of words (Ravin & Leacock
2000: 1) or, more strictly, the association of two or more senses with
a single linguistic form (Taylor 1995: 99).
In this paper four language and writing based phenomena will be dis-
cussed. These phenomena are synonymy, homonymy, polyvalency, and
polysemy. As will become clear below, within the Classic Maya writing
system in certain cases some of these phenomena overlap or merge.
Synonymy
In a most basic definition, synonymy refers to the existence of two or

more words that can be substituted in a certain context and which are
considered to be equivalent relative to that context. While these two
or more words have the same (or a very similar) meaning, their lexical
origin or etymology may differ substantially.
256 erik boot
For this essay I have chosen the words and signs in Maya writing3
that refer to the concept of first. In Mayan languages there are three
words that convey the concept of first:4
nah first, in front, forward *nah
yax first
bah front, first *bah
(Kaufman 2003: 279, 596; Brown & Wichmann 2004: 167, *bAh
first)
How could Maya scribes and sculptors employ the concept first in
writing? To arrive at the signs referring to the above words for first,
these scribes and sculptors employed the phenomenon of homonymy:
words that are spelled or pronounced the same way, but which differ
in meaning (see below).5 The list of words is as follows:
3
In this note the following orthography will be employed: , a, b, ch, ch, e, h, j, i,
k, k, l, m, n, o, p, p, s, t, t, tz, tz, u, w, x, and y. In this orthography the /h/ repre-
sents a glottal aspirate or glottal voiced fricative (/h/ as in English house), while /j/
represents a velar aspirate or velar voiced fricative (/j/ as in Spanish joya) (Grube
2004). In this essay there is no reconstruction of complex vowels based on disharmonic
spellings (compare Houston et al. 1998 [2004] and Lacadena & Wichmann 2004, n.d.;
for counter proposals see Kaufman 2003 and Boot 2004, 2005a). In the transcription
of Maya hieroglyphic signs uppercase bold type face letters indicate logograms (e.g.,
NAH), while lowercase bold type face letters indicate syllabic signs (e.g., ba). Queries
added to sign identifications or transcribed values express doubt on the identification
of the assigned logographic or syllabic value (e.g., TIWOL?). Items placed between
square brackets are so-called infixed or layered signs (e.g., CHAM[KAWIL]); order
of the transcribed signs indicates the epigraphically established reading order. Older
and obsolete transcriptions and/or transliterations are placed between double pointed
brackets (e.g., cu). All reconstructions (i.e., transliterations) in this essay are but
approximations of the original intended Classic Maya (epigraphic) linguistic items
(Boot 2002: 67), a written language which was employed by the various distinct
language groups already formed in the Classic period. Citing of so-called T-numbers
(e.g., T528) refers to the hieroglyphic signs as numbered and cataloged by Thompson
(1962; the complete list of Thompsons affixes and main signs can be found online at
www.famsi.org/mayawriting/thompson/index.html).
4
The words at the end of each line are preceded by an asterisk (*), which introduces
a reconstructed form in proto-Mayan. Reconstructed forms are based on Kaufmann
2003. If no reconstructed form is provided, it means I have not found it in the literature
available to me at the time of writing this essay.
5
Not all epigraphers identify the GOPHER logogram as BAH (as I do), but prefer
ba. At the end of the Classic period the BAH sign was acrophonocally reduced to
simply ba. It has to be noted that scribes also employed syllabic spellings for nah
and bah first. In the first instance the spelling T23 na was employed for nah, in the
second instance T501 ba was employed for bah. In both cases the scribes employed
abbreviated spellings (as the final -h was not spelled). I am not familiar with a syllabic
spelling for yax with the meaning first.
maya writing 257
nah house (structure) *nhaah

first, in front, forward *nah
yax green/blue *rax
first
bah pocket gopher *bah
face, head *bah
self, image *bah
top *bah
first, front *bah
The reconstructed proto-Mayan shapes (after Kaufman 2003) are
included to show the difference in the origin of the words.6 To represent
the sounds nah, yax, and bah in any context Maya scribes and sculptors
developed a series of signs (Figure 2). As the present identification of
the visual origin of these signs now stands, I interpret the sign for NAH
to represent the base platform of a house (structure) (from *nhaah).
Abstraction, limitation of scribal space, and rotation has led to the fact
that in many cases the sign is not placed horizontally but vertically.
The sign for YAX probably represents an object made of jade, a hard
gem and ornamental stone which is known for its (dark) green to grey
to blue color range (*rax green/blue; but also, white, orange, violet,
and even black varieties can be found). The sign for BAH represents
the head of a pocket gopher, or tuza in Spanish (from *bah). On rare
occasions one of the front paws of the pocket gopher is included (e.g.,
Palenque, Creation Tablet).
It was an ordinal context in which nah and yax were identified by
epigraphers as words for first (Schele 1990: 1) (Figure 3a). In this
context a series of a specific event was counted. To refer to the second
and third counted in order Maya scribes employed two dots for two
(u-2ta-la, u-cha-tal the second counted) and three dots for three
(u-3ta-la, u-ux-tal the third counted). It could, as such, be deduced
that the first reference to the same event, which included the sign for
NAH house (structure), had to refer to first (u-NAH-ta-la, u-nah-
tal the first counted). Indeed, the word nah meant first in several
Mayan languages. The same hieroglyphic sign NAH, to spell the ordinal
6
Absence of a proto-Mayan form only means that this has not yet been proposed
in the existing literature (see note 3). Proto-Mayan forms (when the tentative results
from glottochronology are invoked) are removed circa 1,000 to 1,600 years from the
possible period of the invention (or adoption) of the writing system (circa 1,000 to
400 bce). They are removed some 2,250 to 2,900 years from the Classic period (circa
250900 ce) in which the majority of surviving hieroglyphic texts was produced.
258 erik boot
Figure 2. The signs for NAH, YAX, and BAH (drawings by Mark Van Stone,
after Coe & Van Stone 2001).
word first, can be found in another context (Figure 3b); the spelling
u-NAH-ta-la CHAM-KAWIL-la leads to u-nah-tal chamkawil (it
is) the first counted kawil-taking. This is an event associated with the
taking of office by a king or ajaw; kawil can refer to the god named
Kawil, or to the statuette representing the god Kawil. In an abbrevi-
ated reference to the same event, the word nah first is substituted by
yax first, as in YAX-CHAM[KAWIL] for yax cham kawil first
kawil-taking.
There is another good example of the employment of yax as first
in an ordinal context. A common ceremony among the Classic Maya
was an event that can be described as the binding of the stone (Stuart
1996). This ceremony can be found written in various forms, for instance
u-KAL-wa[TUN]-ni and u-KAL-wa TUN-ni (Figure 4a) for u-kal-aw
maya writing 259
Figure 3. a) The sign for NAH in an ordinal count, b) The sign YAX
substitutes for NAH (drawings by Linda Schele).
260 erik boot
tun he binds/binded stone.7 However, of this kind of ceremony, which

took place every 360 days, there was a first instance. This first instance
is described as u-YAX-KAL[TUN] for u-yax-kal-tun (it is) the first
stone-binding (Figure 4b). The first instance, in this particular example
at Piedras Negras, was celebrated at the Maya date 9.15.0.0.0 (731 ce),
the last day of a circa 20 year period, a so-called katun period-ending.
The Classic Maya katun period-ending was thus considered to be the
first in a series of twenty such stone bindings.8
There is yet another word for first: bah (Schele 1990: 2). An
example can be found in the inscriptions at Palenque (Figure 5). This
example can be transcribed CHUM[mu]- . . . -ni ta-[BAH]hi cho-ko-
le-le 3-KUXAN?-na ma-ta i-tzi-WINIK KUH-BAK-la-AJAW for
chum-(w-a)n- ta bah choklel ux kuxan(?) mat itzi(n)winik kuhul
bakal ajaw sits/sat in first heir-ship, Ux Kuxan(?) Mat, younger
brother, God-like King of Bakal (Palenque).9 Although at any given
time there could be more than one heir to the position of king, there
was only one that was specifically marked as bah chok first heir and
the position to which he acceded or was seated was named bah choklel
7
Most problematic is the interpretation of tense and aspect within Classic Maya
verb conjugations: Does a verb refer to an action performed in the past or the present,
and what aspect does it carry? I take a so-called (Initial Series and) Calendar Round
date in any hieroglyphic text to function as an temporal adverb, as such placing in the
past any action as described by a verb unless a Distance Number carries the action to
the future (compare to Houston 1997, Wald 2000).
8
The Classic Maya employed an ingenious place notational calendar system in
which units or cycles of increasing length were counted, that represented the amount
of days as counted from a zero point. The Maya counted the units of one day (named
kin), of twenty days (winal or winik), of 360 days (tun or hab), of 7,200 days (katun
or winikhab), and 144,000 days (baktun or pik) (these cycles together are referred to
as Long Count). There were even larger cycles. The Maya also employed a combined
calendar that counted and named days in a cycle of 260 and in a cycle of 365 days.
The reconstructed date 9.15.0.0.0, 4 Ajaw 13 Yax in Figure 4b informs us of the fact
that 9 144,000 days and 15 7,200 have elapsed since the zero point and that this
day has reached 4 Ajaw in the 260 day calendar and 13 Yax in the 365 day calendar.
Through a most probable correlation (584,285; see Lounsbury 1982: 166) between the
Maya and Christian calendar, this date can be placed in 731 ce. In all probability, the
Maya calendar (specifically the Long Count), as it is often referred to, was not
invented by the Maya themselves, but adapted from a neighboring non-Mayan speak-
ing community or communities as the oldest examples are found in places encircling
the Maya area.
9
Here - indicates the third person singular of the absolutive set of pronouns, as
employed in intransitive verb contexts, which is empty and thus not pronounced
or written.
maya writing 261
a)
b)
Figure 4. a) The phrase u-kalaw-tun (drawings by David Stuart); b) The phrase

u-yax-kal-tun at G3 (drawing by Mark Van Stone).
262 erik boot
Figure 5. The reference to bah choklel at Palenque (drawing by Linda Schele).
first heir-ship.10 While this phrase may convey a strict ordinal sense
to the position of chok heir, the actual sense it conveys is one of
hierarchy. The bah chok is more important than any other chok. To
this particular case I return below.
10
The noun chok literally means unripe one, young one (youngster). In the
Palenque context the word chok refers to the one who will inherit his fathers kingship.
The meaning heir is thus a semantically derived meaning. That is why he is seated
in bah choklel first heir-ship.
maya writing 263
Within the corpus of Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts that I currently

have available, there is no overlap between nah and yax first on the one
side and bah first on the other. That fact may be based on the context
in which nah and yax are employed, which is ordinal. The context in
which bah first is employed is hierarchical.
Homonymy
In a most basic definition, homonymy (or homophony) refers to the

relation between two or more words that are spelled or pronounced the
same way but differ in meaning. Thus although two or more words are
spelled or pronounced the same way, they differ in lexical origin.
To my knowledge, the phenomenon of homonymy in Maya hiero-
glyphic writing was first described in detail by Stephen Houston (1984).
He described how the signs four, sky, and serpent (Figure 6) could
substitute for each other. In the first example, two variations of the same
nominal phrase provide a substitution between the signs for four and
sky (Figure 7a). The spelling TIWOL?-FOUR-ma-ta is substituted
by TIWOL?-SKY-ma-ta.11 As these nominal phrases refer to the same
person (the father of one of the Palenque kings), the signs FOUR and
SKY should represent the same value. The second example provides
the same relationship statement between two people (Figure 7b).
The spelling u-SERPENT-na bo-bo is substituted by the spelling u-cha-
SKY-na bo.12 As the same relationship statement is recorded, the signs
SERPENT and SKY should represent the same value. As SKY substitutes
for FOUR in the first example and SKY substitutes for SERPENT in
the second example, all signs should represent the same value.
Houston (1984) presented a short table containing linguistic data
through which it became clear that the Mayan words four, sky, and
serpent were very close homonyms (or homophones) and, as such,
11
The value TIWOL? for the sign depicting a LONG.LIPPED.HEAD is tentative.
It is based on other examples of this nominal phrase at Palenque in which the LONG.
LIPPED.HEAD is substituted by a syllabic spelling ti-wo and in which the LONG.
LIPPED.HEAD is postfixed with a sign for la.
12
The hieroglyphic sign for cha in this transcription was not yet deciphered when
Houston presented his case in 1984. This sign for cha was deciphered by Barbara
MacLeod in the early 1990s, based on the logographic value CHAN for all three signs,
as discussed further below in the main text of this essay. It should be noted that there
is growing evidence that the putative cha sign and the serpent logograph actually
form one sign with the value CHAN. Also the sign value bo was not yet deciphered.
264 erik boot
Figure 6. The logograms FOUR, SKY, and SERPENT (drawings by the author).
Figure 7. a) The collocations TIWOL?-FOUR-ma-ta and TIWOL?-SKY-ma-ta;

b) The collocations u-SERPENT-na bo-bo and u-cha-SKY-na bo (drawings
and value assignments by the author).
maya writing 265
Table 1. Words with the meaning four, sky, and serpent

(linguistic data adapted from Kaufman, 2003).
Language Four Sky Serpent
Proto-Mayan *kaanh *kaan *kanh

Yucatec kan kan ka(a)n
Chol chn chan chan
Cholti chan chan
Chorti chan chan chan
the signs could substitute for each other. Recent linguistic research
provides the possibility to expand his original and correct assessment
(Table 1).
The three reconstructed words in proto-Mayan with the meaning
four, sky, and serpent already show that the words were pro-
nounced in a very similar manner. This similarity is also apparent
in Yucatec Maya and in Chol. Most interesting are the entries in
Cholti and Chorti, the eastern Cholan languages, in which all three
words are true homo-nyms.13 If chan is the correct gloss for all three
words, each of the hieroglyphic sign represents the logographic value
CHAN. The spellings in the first example can thus be transcribed as
TIWOL?-CHAN-ma-ta for tiwol chan mat, while the spellings in the
second example can be transcribed as u-CHAN-na bo-bo which is
substituted by the spelling u-cha-CHAN-na bo for u-chan bob.14 In
the last two phrases the relationship statement u-chan would have the
meaning of the guardian of, a suggestion actually based on a close
homonym chaan, a verb root with the meaning to guard (as sug-
gested by Alfonso Lacadena).
Close and true homonyms are the base for a large set of Maya hiero-
glyphic signs that substitute for each other.15 This writing principle
13
Although it has to be noted that Cholti, a now extinct language, is only known
from a couple of seventeenth century sources in which no gloss for the word four
is found. However, as Cholti and Chorti are sister languages, the gloss for the word
four would probably have been a close if not a true homonym to the other words
sky and serpent. According to one group of linguists and epigraphers, an ancestor
to the Cholti language was the language that gave rise to the Maya script (Houston
et al. 2000). Also see Introduction of this essay.
14
Maya scribes abbreviated their spellings in many contexts, especially within
nominal phrases. As the spellings u-CHAN-na bo-bo and u-CHAN-na bo refer to
the same person, the spelling bo is simply an abbreviation of bo-bo for bob.
15
During the Classic period the signs T95 IK BLACK and T503 IK WIND never
substituted for each other, although (if their reconstructed sounds for the Classic period
266 erik boot
is often referred to as the rebus principle. Space and subject limita-

tions for this essay do not permit a further excursion to illustrate a
large variety of examples, but the reader can turn to the examples
of synonyms in the first section above. While nah, yax, and bah are
synonyms for first, the logographic signs employed in the context of
first are based on their homonymic quality (nah house, yax blue/
green, bah pocket gopher).
Polyvalency
In a most basic definition, polyvalency refers to the multiple meanings

or values, related or unrelated, a single item or sign can have while,
relatively speaking, its shape or design is the same.
While such signs exist in Maya writing, either context, the employ-
ment of a semantic determinant, or phonetic complementation actually
set apart signs of similar or the same design. The example I illustrate here
is one often employed in Maya studies (e.g., Coe & Van Stone 2001: 25),
but here I present additional detail in the discussion. The hieroglyphic
sign involved is one cataloged by Thompson (1962) as T528. This sign
occurs in different contexts and within each context it has a different
value (Figure 8). The values are CHAHUK (formerly KAWAK), TUN,
and ku. However, the manner in which the sign T528 is employed in
each context directs the reader to its correct value.
In the descent line on the left T528 is placed within a cartouche, which
Maya epigraphers refer to as a day sign cartouche. In the monumental
inscriptions, as well as in most painted texts, each day sign (of which
there are twenty) obtains a cartouche in the context of its employment
as a day sign. The day signs have a specific order, and T528, with a day
sign cartouche, is the nineteenth day sign. This sign has been ascribed
the value or name kawak in earlier studies, based on the fact that within
the colonial Yucatec Maya calendar the nineteenth day was known as
Kawak (or cauac in the old [colonial] spelling) and was named and
illustrated as such in the Relacin de las cosas de Yucatn as writ-
ten by Diego de Landa.16 However, during the Classic period most of
are correct [e.g., Stuart 2005: 80]) these signs are clearly homonymic. Possibly this is
due to the fact that ik black descends from *ejq or *ehq (note *qeq black for
Highland Maya languages) and that ik wind descends from *iq (Kaufman 2003:
231,492; compare to Brown & Wichmann 2004: Table 5 and 169, *iihq wind).
16
The original manuscript is from 1566 and survives through a copy made in the late
seventeenth and possibly the early eighteenth century. In this manuscript the twenty
maya writing 267
Figure 8. Polyvalency: Different contexts for T528 (drawings by Mark Van

Stone [after Coe & Van Stone 2001], arrangement and value assignment by
the author).
the day signs had a different name since those names were based in a
Mayan language different from Yucatec Maya. That language may be
an ancestor of a language or several languages in the eastern Cholan
day signs are illustrated through their Late Postclassic variants with their Yucatec
Maya names. The manuscript also contains the Landa alphabet, the sign list which
has proven to be the gateway to the decipherment of Maya writing as discovered by
the Russian scholar Yuriy Knorozov in the early 1950s (see Coe 1992).
268 erik boot
language group (compare Houston et al. 2000). Possibly the Classic

Maya name for this day was chahuk thunder; lightning.17
In the descent line in the middle, T528 obtains a -ni phonetic comple-
ment. The sign combination T528ni is read TUN-ni and it occurs for
instance in the spelling po-po-TUN-ni for poptun mat-stone, a place
name. In the descent line on the right, T528 is combined with the sign
for a to arrive at a-ku. Here thus T528 has the syllabic value ku, a value
based on the occurrence of the T528 sign in the alphabet as provided by
Landa (assigned with the value cu, now ku).18 The sign combination
a-ku leads to ak (*ahk, see Kaufman 2003: 634 [Lowland Languages
& Western Mayan]), the word for turtle (this sign combination also
substitutes for the logographic sign AK TURTLE).
There is yet a fourth context in which T528 occurs. It is employed
as the main sign of four Classic Maya month names (actually periods
with a length of 20 days). These month names contain color prefixes
and can be compared to a series of month names still (or at least during
the last century) in use among Qanjobal speakers in the department of
Huehuetenango in Guatemala, namely ik sihom, yax sihom, sak sihom,
and chak sihom (Edmonson 1988, Thompson 1950). The sign T528 in
this particular context may have represented the value SIHOM (after
a suggestion by David Stuart), evidence for which may be found in the
optional phonetic complements -ma (common) and -mo (rare).
Polyvalency of T528 in Classic Maya writing is thus restricted, as
scribes employed different methods to distinguish the same sign or
very similar signs in different contexts. To differentiate between the
different values the scribes employed a semantic determinative (a day
sign cartouche) or phonetic complements (-ni; -ma, -mo). Although
17
I base my assumption on the occurrence of the spelling cha-hu-T528 at Piedras
Negras (Throne 1), although it has to be specifically noted that this example is outside
the context of a day sign. Most commonly, this collocation is transcribed cha-hu-ku
(as T528 has the syllabic value ku; see main text). The word chahuk means lightning
and thunder and it survives in colonial and present-day languages, for instance, as
chaak (Yucatec), chauk (Tzotzil), chahwuk (Tzeltal), chahwuk/chajuk (Tojolabal),
kahoq/kohoq (Pokomchi), and kaaq (Qeqchi). Reconstructed forms are *kahoq in
proto-Mayan and *chahuk in proto-Cholan) (Kaufman 2003: 489). Since kawak has
no meaning in colonial (or present-day) Yucatec Maya other than being a day name, it
actually may be a loan word (but from which language?) or an ancient, obsolete word
for lightning and thunder.
18
It was from the occurrence of multiple signs for one alphabetic letter (representing
a sound as pronounced in sixteenth century Spanish, e.g., /b/ > be, /h/ > hache) and
signs that represented two sounds (ca, cu, ku) that Yuriy Knorozov concluded that
the Landa alphabet actually was a collection of syllabic signs in alphabetic order.
maya writing 269
rare, there are other signs that may be polyvalent, but in which again
context or phonetic complementation indicates the correct value (e.g.,
the sign known as T24 CELT/MIRROR).
Polysemy
In a most basic definition, polysemy refers to a word that has multiple

senses or meanings, which are derived from the same etymology, and
which are employed in different but semantically related contexts. In
the study of linguistic semantics, polysemy refers to multiplicity in
meanings of words (Ravin & Leacock 2000: 1), the association of
two or more senses with a single linguistic form (Taylor 1995: 99).
Polysemy is an important field of study within linguistic semantics.
The analysis of polysemy and the processes that govern the polysemiza-
tion of linguistic forms (leading to different senses and sub-senses) is
regarded to be fundamental for understanding language acquisition and
accurate reading, i.e., word sense disambiguation (compare Geeraerts
2001, Kilgarriff 1997, Ravin & Leacock 2000: 16, Tani n.d.). It is spe-
cifically accurate reading (in the present case Maya hieroglyphic texts)
that involves polysemy. Here I will describe three cases of polysemy.
Based on a variety of Western and Lowland Mayan languages, the
verb root pak- can be found defined as:
pak- to fold *paq
to weed
to turn over, to reverse
to somersault
(Kaufman 2003: 1436; compare to Brown & Wichmann 2004: 176)
Although tentative, the basic meaning of the root pak- may have
been to fold. From this meaning the other three senses seem to
be derived. To weed can be described as to fold the ground in a
turning or reversing motion, which would explain its use as to turn
over, to reverse in other contexts. To somersault is, as such, derived
from the already established senses or meanings, although now in the
context of acrobatics performed with the (human) body. All contexts
involve motion and thus seem to be logically derived in a process of
polysemization.
A first example of the root pak- can be found in a text panel with
accompanying illustration on a bowl now in the collection of Dum-
barton Oaks in Washington, D.C. (Figure 9). The illustration shows
270 erik boot
Figure 9. Panel on a carved bowl, collection at Dumbarton Oaks (drawing by

Simon Martin, value assignment by the author).
a depiction of a Maize God-related deity (cacao pods are attached

to the body) (Martin, in Miller & Martin 2004: 78). His body is in
motion. The particular motion is described in the short hieroglyphic
caption that accompanies the illustration. The first collocation can be
transcribed pa-ka-la-ja for paklaj. Here one can recognize the root
pak-, to which is added the suffix -l-aj. This suffix, common to Classic
Maya and several present-day Mayan languages, occurs on verb roots
that refer to physical states or positions (hence known as positional
verbs) (Bricker 2004: 1063). The senses as mentioned above now come
into play. The motion depicted is one of turning over or reversal; to
somer-sault might be the correct description of the action depicted.
The shape pak-l-aj- would mean (he) somersaults, or in a more
basic sense (he) turns over. The actual name of the deity follows in
the second and third collocation.
The root pak- can also be found in a different, but semantically
related context. Within Maya writing, a large host of objects can be
found, each referred to by its proper name. One of these objects is the
stone lintel, which, at different places in the Maya lowlands, was carved
with short or long dedicatory phrases. One such dedicatory phrase
can be found on a lintel of unknown provenance (Figure 10). After
maya writing 271
Figure 10. Lintel of unknown provenance (drawing by Christian Prager, value

assigment by the author).
the dedicatory verb (i-ka[h]laj- then is presented), one can find

the sequence u-pa ka-bu TUN-ni-li for upak(a)b(u)tunil. This item
can be analyzed as u-pak-(a)b(u)-tun-il, in which one can identity the
root pak- and a -Vb derivational suffix. A lintel is a turned-over or
reversed stone, as the carved side is turned over when the lintel is
finally placed during the building process. Here pak- refers to to turn
over, to reverse and the item u-pak-(a)b(u)-tun-il can be paraphrased
as (it is) the/his turned-over stone.19
A second example of polysemy can be found in the root tzap-. This
root can be found defined in several Mayan languages as:
19
The Early Classic item pak(a)b(u)tun (the date on the lintel falls in 513 ce) or
perhaps pakbutun evolves to pakabtun (pa-ka-ba TUN-ni) or simply pakab (pa-ka-ba)
(the collocations itself were deciphered first by David Kelley) and can, as such, be
found mentioned in dedicatory phrases in the Late Classic (870890 ce) inscriptions
at Chichn Itz (Boot 2005b: 318344).
272 erik boot
tzap- to drive in the ground

to sow (corn), to plant
to superimpose, to put one thing on top of another
to close
(compare to Kaufman 2003: 864)
The widespread distribution of the syllabic spelling tza-pa-ja was first
described by Nikolai Grube (1990b). He transliterated this spelling as
tza[h]paj and identified tzap- as the root for to drive in the ground,
based on a comparison with the root tzap- to sow (corn), to plant. The
verb was followed by a reference to a stela, a standing stone monument
part of which was driven into ground to keep it erect. More recently, it
was David Stuart (2004) who suggested that there might be a logogram
with the value TZAP (Figure 11a). This logogram illustrates a maize
cob resting on top of an earth sign. A knot is depicted to the right of the
two signs (as if these are tied together). To understand this logogram,
Stuart (2004: 2) invoked one of the Yucatec Maya meanings of the verb
tzap-, to put one thing on top of another. I hold his identification to
be correct, specifically as the complex logographic sign indeed depicts
one thing on top of another. The fact that a corn cob is placed above
an earth sign invokes yet another meaning of tzap- to sow (corn),
to plant. The example, as identified by Stuart, can be transcribed
TZAP u-LAKAM-TUN-li for tza[h]p(aj) ulakamtunil driven is in
the ground/planted is the large stone.20 Another example identified
by Stuart (Figure 11b) can be transcribed tentatively as tza-TZAP-ja
u-LAKAM TUN for tza[h]paj ulakamtun(il) driven is in the ground/
planted is the large stone. The common manner to describe this par-
ticular monument dedication was deciphered by Grube as tza-pa-ja
u-LAKAM[TUN]-li for tza[h]paj ulakamtunil (Figure 11c). When the
root tzap- is found in Maya texts, it is the meaning to drive in the
ground/plant that is commonly intended.21
20
In Classic Maya inscriptions, scribes employed a large amount of abbreviations.
These abbreviations occur also in the conjugation of verb roots. Here the logogram
TZAP occurs in a context in which the root tzap- possibly should have a verbal end-
ing -aj (thematic suffix on passives), which is not written (and thus abbreviated). The
common spelling chu-ka-ja for chu[h]kaj captured is on one occasion is abbreviated
to just chu (Kerr No. 2352).
21
There is a passage in the Codex Madrid (Page 112C), dedicated to bee cultivation,
in which one can find the phrases u-tza[pa] u-KAB-ba for utzapa[w] ukab and
tza[pa]-ja u-KAB-ba for tza[h]paj ukab, possibly with the meaning he closes the
beehive and closed is the beehive respectively. Vail and Hernndez (2005) prefer
setting up the beehive for these phrases. Due to the polysemous character of the word
tzap- there is no simple solution to these phrases and their prospective meaning.
maya writing 273
Figure 11. a) The TZAP logogram; b) The spelling u-tza-TZAP-ja; c) The

spelling tza-pa-ja (after Stuart 2004, arrangement and value assignment by
the author).
274 erik boot
The third example of polysemy is a word which has been discussed

above in the section of synonyms, the word bah:
bah face, head *bah
self, image *bah
top *bah
front, first *bah
The context in which it was discussed above was one in which bah
referred to first. As noted above, I have not yet identified a context in
which nah, yax, and bah for first all could substitute for each other.
The words nah and yax were used in ordinal contexts as first, while
bah was used in hierarchical contexts as first.
It is the polysemous character of the senses of the word bah that
may explain its particular usage as first in a hierarchical context. Its
basic meaning may have been face, head and it was this particular
sense employed in other contexts that led to the meanings self, image,
top, and front, first. For an explanation of bah face, head to be
employed as front, first one can even turn to the English language.
For example, there are many masters at a school, but there is only one
head master. There are many offices, but only one head office. The
body derived head for first indicates that the ranking value first
is layered vertically, from top to bottom. This bah first is inher-
ently hierarchical, and thus different from nah and yax first which
are first in an ordinal context which is not hierarchical. To spell bah
not only the logographic sign BAH GOPHER was employed, but also
the syllabic sign ba (as an abbreviated spelling for bah). There are many
examples of bah first in a hierarchical context (Figure 12). As such
there are bah ajaw first or head king, bah chok first or head heir,
bah (y)al first or head of the children (of mother), bah uxul(?) first
or head carver, and bah sajal first or head local/provincial leader.22
The word bah face, head also can be found in the context of por-
traiture. The sign employed is again the BAH GOPHER, thus through
a homonym one arrives at bah self, image, i.e., portrait. The top part
of Naranjo Stela 22 (Figure 13c) provides a portrait of the king Kak
Tiliw Chan Chak Raingod Chak who Kindles the Sky with Fire. The
hieroglyphic signs that spell his name are even contained in his head-
22
There are nearly twenty different titles in which a hierarchical difference is indicated
through the adjective bah head, first (Boot 2005b: 184 [note 7]).
maya writing 275
Figure 12. A selection of bah head, first titles (drawings by various authors).
dress. His portraiture is introduced through the collocation marked by

an arrow and which is shown enlarged directly above the top part of
the stela (Figure 13b). This collocation is spelled u-BAH-hi, employing
BAH GOPHER (Figure 13a). This collocation (for which also u-[ba]
hi can be employed) can be transliterated ubah(il) for (it is) the self,
image (portrait) (of ) (Houston and Stuart 1996), after which the name
of the king follows.
The three examples of polysemy as discussed here were pak-, tzap-,
and bah-. All three examples provided closely related senses or mean-
ings in related but slightly different semantic contexts. The examples
presented here may be considered cases of logical polysemy; the original
276 erik boot
Figure 13. a) The BAH logogram (drawings by Mark van Stone); b) The
spelling u-[BAH]hi (drawing by Ian Graham); c) Naranjo Stela 22, top part
(drawing by Ian Graham).
maya writing 277
sense can still be found within the derived senses through their context-
bound employment.
Final Remarks
In this paper, four writing and language phenomena were discussed,

namely synonymy, homonymy, polyvalence, and polysemy. Polysemy
was the subject of the symposium. As the examples illustrated and
discussed in this essay indicate, cross-overs between the phenomena
can be easily identified.
The synonyms nah, yax, and bah first employed signs that were
chosen for their homonymic or homophonic quality. Nah and yax
meant first in an ordinal context, but bah was employed as first
in a hierarchical context. Thus nah and yax on the one side and bah
on the other side are not true synonyms as their usage is restricted to
context. The meaning bah first was actually a polyseme, as its sense of
bah first was derived from its meaning as bah face, head. In regard
to polysemy, three words and their senses were described (pak-, tzap-,
and bah) as well as their employment in Maya writing.
The polysemous character of words is of great importance in the
construction of word lists, lexicons, and vocabularies. Now that sev-
eral preliminary Classic Maya word lists and vocabularies have been
constructed (e.g., Boot 2002, Montgomery 2002, Stuart 2005: 7990),
research on the polysemous character of words should take a serious
form if we really want Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts to speak for
themselves and convey their true and originally intended sense and
meaning. This means that the study of Maya writing has to be combined,
on any level, with the study of Mayan languages.
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IN THE INTERSTICES OF REPRESENTATION:
LUDIC WRITING AND THE LOCUS OF POLYSEMY IN THE
CHINESE SIGN*
Wolfgang Behr
Introduction
In March 1991, slightly less than two years after the violent crackdown on
student protesters in Tinnmn square in Beijng on 45 June
1989, during which, even according to very conservative sources, at least
four or five hundred people were killed, a poem appeared on the occa-
sion of the annual spring festival on the front page of the overseas edi-
tion of the Peoples Daily (Rnmn Rbo (haiwiban) ).
The poem, entitled Lantern Festival, and, seemingly, a perfectly inno-
cent double quatrain of heptasyllabic lines with a conventional x-a-x-a
rhyme scheme and some tonal patterning, was authored by a certain
Zh Haihng , apparently a UCLA graduate student at the time.
At first sight it looked like one of those poignantly patriotic pieces so
typical of the PRC government controlled newspaper. Poems of this
type, still routinely encountered in contemporary PRC papers and
journals on the more festive seasonal occasions, are rather stunning not
only for their stubborn insistence on a thoroughly pre-modern poetic
form in media otherwise aiming at the propagation of a technocratic
state-designed overdrive modernity, but also for their adherence to
a whole set of thoroughly cliched classic images, intermingled with
socialist buzzwords:
* Part of this essay was written when I was a research fellow at the Swedish Collegium
for Advanced Study in Uppsalla (MarchJuly 2005), the support of which is grate-
fully acknowledged here. I am indebted to Bernhard Fhrer, Alex de Voogt, and two
anonymous reviewers for several insightful comments.
282 wolfgang behr
(1) () Yun xio

dng fng f min cu to LI
yo yng sh ch zhan PNG chng
y pn zho hai XI r li
yu z dng TI s g chng
xi f PNG shng bo gu zh
rn MN y wo shng wn jn
FN q j zhu zhn Hu Xi
qie di shn zhu bin d chn
Lantern Festival (Zh Haihng)1
East wind strikes the face, bringing on the peaches and plums [LI]
Sparrow hawk unfurls its wings, spreading towards a giant [PENG]
future
Moon, like a jade-disk, shines on the sea, DOWN fall his stinging
tears
A sojourner ascends a PLATFORM, thinking of his home town
Never failing, ALL his life, to dedicate himself to the goals of his country
The PEOPLEs nourishing me is worth more than zillions in gold
FURIOUSly I rise to reinvigorate the civilization of China
Waiting for spring to spread throughout this sacred land
As the more perceptive among the readers soon discovered, much to

the dismay of the less attentive frontpage editor of the journal (sacked
shortly afterwards), the poem had an acrostic line embedded, diago-
nally from the last character of the first line to the first character of the
penultimate line, seven,
L Png xi ti png mn fn,
which can be read as either Li Peng step down, appease the peoples
furor! or Li Peng step down, the common people are furious!.
Ending in fn furious, the line joins with chn spring in an impure,
but conventional rhyme2 in the last line (waiting for spring to spread
throughout this sacred land), thus surreptitiously evoking the furor
of the people, and associating it with what had come to be referred to
as the shortlived Beijng spring in Western media.
1
The translation aims at transparency of the embedded polysemies. For a less jar-
ring rendering, which endeavours to maintain the acrostichic structure through poetic
licence in English, see Eoyang (1992: 255256).
2
On rhyming standards in colloquial Mandarin see Li Wen-Chao (2000).
in the interstices of representation 283
Textual Polysemy and Morphosyntactic Structure
Acrostic poems hiding a political message have a long history in China,

going back at least to the first century ad.3 The form sometimes reaches
enormous complexities, especially in the more playful scholarly-religious
environments of Daoism and Buddhism, where verses occasionally allow
for concomitant vertical, horizontal, top down/bottom up and center
in/out readings, in various linear and not so linear directions. In such
frisky albeit not necessarily humorous texts, characters become
polysemous very easily and intricately, and it has often been suspected
that the observable semantic fluidity of a sentence or a text as a whole
is enabled by the fact that Classical and Medieval Chinese (MC), since
the Later Hn period (25220 ad), was typologically a largely isolat-
ing language, quite unlike Old Chinese (OC), which still contained a
quite complex derivational and possibly even traces of inflectional
morphology.4 Indeed, the written language of this period was so fluid
that almost every sinologist will have had the painful experience, at
one point or another in his or her training, of accidentally translating
a longish official title as a straightforward finite sentence, a rhymed
poem as prose read in the wrong writing direction, or the transcrip-
tion of a foreign personal name appearing in the distorting fetters of
Chinese syllable phonotactics as a genuinely Chinese lexeme. Depending
on the intentions of the author, texts can thus either profit from, or,
indeed, badly suffer from, the versatility of a syntactic framework in
which assignments to a particular word class are not encoded by overt
morphological marking.
Another feature of Chinese, commonly perceived as contributing to
the polysemy in the spoken language, is the great amount of homophony
of morphemes. A well-known demonstration of this phenomenon,
crafted, rather jokingly, by Y. R. Chao (i.e. Zho Yunrn ,
18921982, the doyen of Chinese linguistics during the last century,
who, among his many other achievements, is the congenial translator
of Alice in Wonderland into Chinese)5 is the following little story. It
consists entirely of monosyllabic words pronounced as shi, so that all
3
For a good overview of the relevant literature see Fhrer (2002/3 and 2006).
4
For two competing (albeit possibly reconcilable) recent models of Old Chinese
Morphology see Sagart (1999) and Pulleyblank (2000), both summarized in Gassmann
& Behr (2005, vol. 3, chap. 10).
5
See on his academic life and thought S Jnzh (1999); his collected works, projected
to comprise 20 volumes, have recently started to appear (Zho 2002).
284 wolfgang behr
78 occurring characters (32 among them different) are homophones at

the segmental level. Even if further specified by the four contour tones
of Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM), we still arrive at an informa-
tion density of one tonally marked syllable representing no less than
nineteen different words, leaving aside their further lexical semantic
extensions:6
(1) Zho Yunrn : The story of Mr. Sh eating a lion
text msm pronunciation
0 Sh sh sh sh sh
1 sh sh sh sh Sh-sh sh sh.
2 , sh sh sh sh,
3 sh shsh sh sh sh sh.
4 , Sh sh, sh sh sh sh sh.
5 , , Sh sh, sh Sh-sh sh sh, sh sh
, sh sh sh,
6 , sh sh sh, sh sh sh sh sh sh.
7 , Sh sh sh sh sh sh, sh sh sh.
8 , Sh sh sh, sh sh sh sh sh sh.
9 , Sh sh sh, sh sh sh sh sh sh
sh sh.
10 , , Sh sh, sh sh sh sh sh sh,
11 . . . sh sh sh sh, sh sh sh sh . . .
translation
0 The story of Mr. Sh eating a lion
1 Mr. Sh, poet from the Stone Chamber, craved lions.

2 Since he had sworn that he would eat ten lions,
3 he went from time to time to the market to look for lions.
4 At ten oclock, ten lions really went to the market.
5 At that time, just when Mr. Sh went to the market, he saw the
ten lions, and,
6 assuming the position of an archer, caused the ten lions to pass
away (= killed them).
7 He assembled the corpses of these ten lions and went into the
Stone Chamber
8 Since the Stone Chamber was moist, he first had it wiped by
a servant.
9 When the Stone Chamber had been wiped, he first set out to
eat these ten corpses of the stone lions.
6
There are many different versions of this story (Odendahl 1996: 2526). I am
quoting this one from Zho (2002, I: 64).
10 And it was only at the time of his meal when Mr. Sh became
first aware that these lions
11 were in fact stone lions! Now you try to explain that . . .
Of course, this delightful display of overwhelming phono-semantic
ambiguity ignores the fact that MSM words are usually bimorphemic
compounds and that the syntactic and pragmatic contexts of any given
utterance usually work together to disambiguate most of the lurking
polysemies, albeit not all of them, as can easily be put to the test by read-
ing this story aloud to a modern Chinese audience. A major problem
of accounts of the Chinese language, be it within or outside sinology,
is that this apparently fluid state of affairs, based upon reading a story
crafted in semi-classical prose with a modern pronunciation, is noncha-
lantly projected back into earlier stages of the language. This inevitably
results in rather preposterous generalizations about the vagueness of
this and that Chinese text, or, depending on the philosophical prefer-
ences of the respective authors, about the deliberate or inescapable
oscillation and ambiguity of meaning in the harmonizing mind
of the Chinese (e.g., Nakamura 1964: 185190, Rosemont 1974, Hall
& Ames 1987: 261274, Gu 2005: 16880, 23553, to name just a few
of the more extreme proponents). Indeed, one might refer to this
complex of clichs as the continuity curse in the sense that apart
from the more obvious exoticising Western alterity concepts it was
the obstinate refusal of the Chinese writing system to die out like most
other pre-modern logographic systems that has led to the widespread
misconception of an intrinsic and unchanging indeterminacy of the
language it represents. However, once Chaos story is subjected to a
phonological reconstruction diachronically matching its syntactic prop-
erties, i.e. a reconstruction of the Classical Chinese of the last centuries
bc,7 the apparent indeterminacy immediately vanishes:
OC* 0 hlaj ge-q m-lk srij s-r-q
1 dak s-tit s-t N-s-r-s hlaj ge-q gij-s srij.

2 m-tet-s m-lk gip srij,
3 ge-q N-t N-t s-tek d-q N-k-lij-s srij.
4 gip N-t, s-tek gip srij s-tek d-q.
5 de-q N-t, s-tek hlaj ge-q s-tek d-q, ge-q N-k-lij-s de-q gip srij,
6 N-t-q hlij-q het-s, s-r-q de-q gip srij N-tet-s hlap-s.
7 ge-q gup de-q gip srij hlij, s-tek dak s-tit.
7
Here and elsewhere throughout this paper, Old Chinese reconstructions are based
on the system of Baxter (1991), as amended by Sagart (1999), rewriting the final glottal
stop as *-q and type A syllables by notationally doubling the root initial.
286 wolfgang behr
8 dak s-tit hp, ge-q s-r-q N-t-s hlk dak s-tit.

9 hlk dak s-tit, ge-q hl-q hlk-s m-lk gip srij hlij.
10 m-lk N-t, hl-q s-tk-s de-q gip srij hlij,
11 m-lit gip dak srij! hlk-s hlak de-q m-s-r(-q)-s . . .
What we are left with at this level is a diversity of twenty-two lexical
roots and not a single fully homophonic pair of words. In short, poly-
semy is no more pronounced than it would be in an Indo-European
language specimen of the same length, nor is it dependent upon the
writing system used. It is simply based upon the morphosyntactic struc-
ture of an anachronistically represented language, such that comparable
phenomena are bound to occur in all languages tending towards an
isolating typology and written in conservative orthographies. Where is
it, then, that polysemy emerges at the level of writing?
Polysemy and the Written Sign
Terminological Preliminaries
Assuming a deliberately nave stance vis--vis the intricacies of discus-
sions of polysemy in current linguistic theories, we may proceed from
the traditional view of a correspondence between a word (form), a
meaning (referent), and a written representation of both or, in semiotic
terms, between linguistic, mental and written signs. The relationship that
maps a linguistic sign onto a mental referent is known as semasiology,
while the converse relationship, associating a lexical item with a refer-
ent, is referred to as onomasiology. The relationship between semasi-
ology and onomasiology gives rise orthogonally to polysemy (a form,
or cognate forms, related through etymology, denoting two or more
referents) and synonymy (two or more different forms denoting one
referent). This dichotomy can in turn be contrasted on yet another level
with homosemy (one form having one and only one particular referent)
and homonymy (a form or contingently identical forms, denoting two
or more referents). The relationship between a linguistic sign and its
referent is typically characterized by several structural homologies. Yet,
as the very slight difference between polysemy and homonomy already
shows, these might be far from perfectly parallel. Consequently, much
of the debate in semantics about these relationships is concerned with
the question of whether they are really characterized by simple polar
oppositions, and how they are mediated by an interpretation and refer-
ence mechanism in the semiotic triangle. More specifically, one might
ask, how more general mechanisms of cognition, how the outside world
or a particular culture and similar parameters influence the mechanism

by which a speaker/listener identifies meaning in a particular pragmatic
setting. Even more recently, neurolinguists and psycholinguists have
been looking into the way in which the involved concepts are stored
and accessed in the brain.8
If we attempt to transpose the semantic concepts sketched above to
the level of the written sign, assuming again that the ensuing relation-
ship will be characterized by a structural homology, the problem arises
that there is simply no well-established terminology in the theory of
writing which had it not been for the cannibalizing appropriation of
the term by deconstructivist literary theory might simply be called
grammatology. More often than not, the semantic concepts character-
izing the relationship between (B) and (C) in the following graphic
summary (2) are simply extended to the relationship between a written
symbol and a linguistic form (A). However, we do occasionally find
the term polyvalency or polyphony (rather than polysemy) for a written
symbol representing multiple linguistic forms or readings, and rebus
or paronomasia (rather than homonymy) for a linguistic form refer-
ring to multiple meanings, unrelated by any semantic or etymological
proximity (e.g. Coulmas 1989: 8284, 217; 2003: 177184; Boltz 1994:
passim; 1999: 117121):
(2)
PRAGMATICS
GRAMMATOLOGY SEMANTICS
poly- : homosemy
sign type: written (polyvalency) linguistic semasiology mental

tradition: symbol (S) word (W) meaning (M)
level: representation (rebus) form onomasiology referent
homo- : synonymy
A B C
reference
(thought,
interpretation,
culture)
domain: Semiotics
8
For good overviews of recent approaches see, e.g., Deane (1988), Klein & Murphy
(2001), Klepousnioutou (2002) on the cognitive processing of polysemy, Nunberg (1979),
Panman (1982), Ci (1987), Hospers (1993), Taylor (2003) on semantic theories, and
Behrens (2002) on its challenges for a theory of the lexicon.
288 wolfgang behr
The question, then, is how this set of conceptual homologies is

structurally built into the elements of a non-alphabetic writing system,
and, more particularly, which levels of its representation need to be
distinguished in Chinese writing.
The Locus of Polysemy in the Chinese Graph
a. Structural Levels of the Graph

Prior to more elaborate theoretical considerations, one might assume
that a word consists of a semantic, a morphological and a phonological
layer (leaving prosodic, cognitive, pragmatic and other considerations
aside for the moment). One might then differentiate further between a
semantic core (a prototype or class) on the one hand, and its concrete
denotational extensions on the other, which componentially or hierarchi-
cally contribute to that core at the semantic end. In a similar way, the
morphological level will minimally distinguish a lexical root (a stem)
from further affixal material, be they of a derivational or inflectional
nature. On the phonological level, the onset and the rhyme portion of
a syllable, and, possibly, several further autosegmental layers will have
to be distinguished. Note that the affixal structural position covers
albeit obliquely non-concatenative morphology, such as transfixation
or circumfixation, as well as root-internal ablaut, since morphologi-
cally conditioned root vowel alternations can always be reinterpreted
as infixing of minimally zero-morphemes into the root. A maximum
representation (3), taking into account some well-known extreme cases
in the typological literature,9 could take this shape:
(3) d1, d2, dn
denotation (D) class/prototype (C)
semantic (s)
word
morphemic (m) phonemic (p)
root (r) affix (a) onset (o) rhyme (rh)

nucleus coda
r1, r2 rx a1, a2 a14 o1, o2 o4 n1, n2 n5 c1, c2 cX
9
For instance, A14 is allegedly attested in some Yeniseian and Athabascan languages,
N5 in some Tai-Kadaiic languages.
The next question to be answered is whether the written sign includes

representation sites for all three linguistic levels of the word (as in (4)),
or if it only targets parts of it, which seems overwhelmingly likely from
the viewpoint of practical processing constraints in reading. The writ-
ten representation must then be either systematically underspecified,
or, at least organized in such a hierarchical way that informational
transparency of targeted features at the linguistic end is warranted by
some rigid mapping and tracking mechanism. For instance (as I will
argue below) the phonological level of the linguistic sign is, with rare
exceptions, largely invisible to the written representation in Old Chinese,
since it is hierarchically subordinate to the morpho(no)logical node(s)
during this early period (5):
(4) SEMANTIC (5) SEMANTIC
WORD WORD
MORPHEMIC PHONEMIC MORPHOPHONEMIC
MORPHEMIC
PHONEMIC
However, the process of morphological attrition and final complete loss

of morphology must have been completed in Central Chinese dialects
some time during the late Classical or Six Dynasties period, although
there were very small remnants surviving in or even beyond Middle
Chinese into the peripheral dialects (Sagart 2001). The phonological
level thus successfully ousted the morphological. What became visible
to the graphic sign at this point was its phonological, or even surface
phonetic shape, since in a largely isolating language such as Middle
Chinese most morphology is compounding, i.e. word-level syntax.
b. Representation of Structural Levels in Ancient Chinese Writing

In order to capture different types of relationships between the written
and the linguistic sign in Chinese writing, we here propose a hierar-
chical, bipolar notation that associates [] a word W with both its
semantic s and morphonemic mp constituents, including their further
subcategories, to a written symbol , by linking the semantic and
phonetic representation sites of it:
290 wolfgang behr
(6)
denotation [D] class [C]
semantic representation [] semantic form [s]
symbol[] word [W]
phonological representation [] morphonenic form [mp]
morphemic [M] phonemic [P]
root [R] affixes [A] onset [O] rhyme [Rh]
Equipped with this notational toolkit, and, gratefully acknowledging

its indebtedness to formats of representation commonly used within
non-linear or government approaches to the phonology of natu-
ral languages, we may then proceed to describe the different types of
character structures attested in Chinese writing throughout all periods
of development. I will qualify symbol-word relationships as bound
if a semantic or morphonemic property, or one of its subcategories
within the word, has a representational locus in the structure of the
written character and symbolize this by a continuous line. Conversely,
a purely conventional relationship, in which the semantic or morpho-
nemic property of a word is not represented in the written character or
unbound, will be marked by a dashed line. By specifying the associations
obtaining in any given character in this admittedly formalistic fashion,
it is hoped that the model may eventually be employed to make some
easily falsifiable predictions, for instance, about the non-occurrence
of certain theoretically possible structures in the historical record, the
occurrence frequency within a given corpus, or the cognitive processing
load involved for a given character type.10
With respect to polysemy, as a one-to-multiple mapping relationship
between a word and its mental referent as described in (2), this allows
us to specify its locus in the graph more precisely. The model predicts
that polysemy arises at the level of the written sign, whenever there is
10
For which and I mention this only as a curiosity a genetic basis is now some-
times claimed in the literature, cf. Evans & Seymour (1997).
a possibility of realigning an unbound dashed association line in the

representation to a semantic node or subnode at the level of the word.
Moreover, it allows us to identify certain character structures beyond the
coverage by the traditional six scripts (lish ) theory of the Hn
dynasty,11 whose inadequacies have long been noted and discussed.12
Character Structures Attested in Chinese Writing
The following section will present a catalogue of attested character

structures in the model outlined above, along with some illustrative
examples for each category and some minimal commentary. Where
necessary, examples of characters from oracle bone inscriptions (OBI;
chin. jiaguwn ) or bronze inscriptions (BI; chin. jnwn )
will be quoted. If a particular category has a corresponding classifica-
tion in premodern indigenous theories of the Chinese writing system,
these are noted in brackets.
(7)

!"# %&&'# ()*'# +&'(,(!-*%.'%#
/ 0

11
Pictographs13 are structured such that the semantic node of the written
sign is attached to the semantics of a word by way of some degree
11
The classical formulation of this theory, dominant throughout the grammatologi-
cal tradition in China, is due to the first lexicographer Xu Shns (58148). For
good, if not always unanimous, introductions to the theory of the six scripts see Unger
(1969), Wiedenhof (1985), Boltz (1994: 143155), Winter (1997: 109150), Bottro
(1996: 1741, 4958, 1998).
12
For well-argued critiques see, for instance, Boodberg (1937, 1940) and Y M n (1979).
13
These are sometimes referred to as zodiographs (Boodberg 1937, Boltz 1994) on
the assumption that the processing of this character type involves a certain amount of
phonological recoding after all. Two good arguments, why characters in logographic
scripts such as Chinese and Egyptian can never be meaningfully analyzed as pictographic,
are elaborated by Boltz (2006) and Jespersen & Reintges (2008). I maintain the term
here merely for easier cross-reference to the sinological tradition.
292 wolfgang behr
of conventionalized iconicity, while the phonetic representation site

is unlinked. This means that phonetic detail is not visible to the
graph, which is merely conventionally associated, and thus marked,
by a dashed line. Nor does the graph indicate any distinctive semantic
level, i.e. core vs. denotations.
(8) II: simple phonetic loan, rebus [~ jiaji bnz ]
s exx. ( , , , )
W gloss 1. r. hand 2. assist 3. again 4. have
mP OC 1. *w, 2. *w-s, 3. *w-s, 4. *w-q
m P MSM 1. yu, 2. yu, 3. yu, 4. you
R a
In a simple phonetic loan or rebus, the phonetic node of the graph is still
attached to the morphological node of mp, but the node is dominated
by the phonological node of the represented word at a higher level. This
domination relationship is reflected notationally in the dominating node
by capitalizing P. Notice that the phonological node of the graph does
not specify the entirety of the words phonological structure but only its
lexical root R stripped off of all affixal material. Since the semantic rep-
resentation is not in the least bound, all morphonological structures
sharing the same R can be written by one and the same sign .
(9)

!"

$ % &'%(&'%()"
* +

, -

+
. /0 1: (
/0
/0

The character resembling the panicle of a specific grain14 is glossed as

A grain and as B harvest/year by specialists in osteographic studies,
and assigned two different pronunciations along with this metonymic dif-
ferentiation. These cannot be etymologically reconciled, since OC *ggoj
and *nnin do not share a lexical root in anyones theory. Characters
of this type are thus an exact mirror image of phonetic loans and have
been called polyphonic or polyvalent (Boodberg 1937, Boltz 1994)
in the sense defined above. Since subsequent evolution of the writing
system would have quickly erased most traces of such structures, and
since any proliferation within the writing system would have consider-
ably delayed processing and retrieval in reading, the category remained
marginal throughout the development of Chinese writing.15
(10)

" # "
$ %%% &'((

$ &'((())
* + *,
$ % &'((())
- . -

/0

1 23()
. (
$ /
This is the most successful building type in the development of the

Chinese writing system, and, indeed, the only one according to which
sizeable numbers of new characters were created as late as the late 19th
century ad. Witness, for instance, the prominent case of the translation
of chemical element names into Chinese (Wright 1997, Zhng Ho
2000). It is a structure in which the morphonological node of a graph 1
is associated with the lexical root of the word to be represented, i.e. its
V, CV, or CVC skeleton in accordance with type II (simple phonetic
14
In all likelihood a variety of millet, the staple food of early China, cf. Sagart (1999:
17679).
15
It is presently unclear, although likely (cf. Ln Yn 1997), whether semantic loans
can be identified with the elusive category traditionally labelled as mutually comment-
ing characters (zhunzh ).
294 wolfgang behr
loan), while the semantic node of another, diachronically secondary

sign 2. This secondary sign, often referred to as the semantic determiner
(det), attaches to the free semantic class node C of the word. The
main problem for a retrospective understanding of the script today is
that the targeted root R has, in many cases, undergone massive sound
change diachronically, and that we are only just beginning to under-
stand the comparatively rich derivational morphology implied by its
extensions in a.16 Consider, e.g., the following series of tautoradical
words with their greatly divergent MSM pronunciations:
i. [r *lut]
MSM y < MC *ywit < OC *(C-)lut
gloss 1.stylus, 2. follow, 3. a particle
MSM b < MC *pit < OC *p-lut [det: bamboo]
gloss stylus, writing brush
MSM l < MC *lwit < OC *C-lut [det: step]
gloss 1.pitch pipe, 2.law, standard
(. . .)
ii. [r *l]
MSM y < MC *yi < OC *l
gloss 1PPr. I
MSM ti < MC *thoj < OC *hll
gloss 1.n. of a star, 2.senex, 3. loan for to use ()
MSM di < MC *dojX < OC *ll-q [det: corpse]
gloss 1. be dangerous; endanger s.o., 2. almost, 3. interrogate
MSM sh < MC *syiX < OC *hl-q [det: woman]
gloss begin; be first, originate
MSM x < MC *siX < OC *s-hl-q [det: wood]
gloss fine hemp
MSM ch < MC *trhiH < OC *hl-r--s [det: eye]
gloss 1. stare (at), gaze
MSM ye < MC *yX < OC *lla-q (< ** ll-X--q)
gloss 1. to melt, 2. to adorn [det: ice]
(. . .)
iii. [r *pu]
MSM zhou < MC *tsyuwX < OC *t-pu-q
id. [det: bamboo], id. [det: grass]
gloss 1. broom, 2. to brush, sweep
MSM f < MC *bjuwX < OC *N-pu-q [det: fem.]
gloss 1. female; spouse, lady, 2. mother-in-law
16
For the concept of the identity of phonophorics with lexical roots in homophono-
phoric (so-called xishng ) series employed here, cf. Sagart (1999), H & Jn (2001).
MSM sao < MC *sawX < OC *s-tu-q (< **s-t-pu-q ?)

MSM id. [det: earth / det: hand]
gloss to brush, sweep, wipe
(. . .)
(11) V: associative, syssemantic [~ huy ]
D C i. OBI ( ) be cruel
MSM n < MC *ngjak < OC *(r)awk
s 1 ( ) OC *nin man
2 ( ) OC *k-lla-q tiger
1 W 2
ii. OBI ( ) name of an insect
mp MSM zao < *tsawX < *ttsu-q
1: ( ) OC *w-s hand
2: ( ) OC *xxuj creeper
This type of character, immensely popular in graphic folk etymologies

and premodern analyses of character structures, identifies a word by
associating the semantic docking sites of two graphs with both the
denotational extension and the semantic class of the corresponding
word, while the phonetic nodes are completely unbound. Occasionally,
identification will target two different denotations, skipping the cor-
responding semantic class node. Obviously, characters belonging to
this type, especially if composed of more than two elements, create
enormous cognitive processing difficulties. This is because a semantic
class has many more possible denotations than the one relevant for
the identification of the particular word in question, but it cannot be
disambiguated by means of phonetic information in this structure.
Rather, it has to rely heavily on pure convention of association, i.e.
rote learning. The category is therefore much more marginal than
traditionally assumed, although probably not completely elusive, as
claimed by Boltz (1994), even during the earliest phases of Chinese
writing.17 However, there can be no doubt that it was used in learned
graphic creations during the Medieval period. Compare, for instance,
the following derivation of a pejorative Daoist character for the name
of the Buddha by the concatenation of eight exclusively -bound signs
17
For a critique of Boltzs delightfully heretical view on this matter see Bottro
(1996, 1998) and Behr (2006).
296 wolfgang behr
nested into four constituent semantics wise man from the western
territories:
(12)
[[

!""#
It has to be stressed, however, that these are rare oddities in the lexicon
and that the number of genuine cases encountered in everyday usage
is exceedingly small.
(13)

!"#$%
' $ '
(

) * ##"+ !,#%
) - ) **
. #* !/","0#%
1 / 1

)2
!$3%
Direct proof of the existence of one peculiar type of syssemantic char-

acters, even during the earliest phases of the Chinese writing system,
is provided by the category of homosomatic associative characters,
which are created by combining up to seven shape-identical semantic
elements,18 without binding any position in the morphonological node
of W. The semantics of the composite graph is only partially retriev-
able from the semantics of its constituent 17, which are not specified
for a fixed denotation D. Rather, it originates from a conventionalized
combination of the class semantics of with properties such as plural-
ity, genericity, intensity, adversity, rapidity or diminutivity, contributed
to W iconically by virtue of notions associated cross-linguistically with
reduplication and concatenation. It is scarcely surprising, then, that
many lexicographically attested characters of this type have no fixed
pronunciation.
18
Which would have to be termed (iso)di . . . heptaplogram in Boodbergs (1957)
learned neo-latinate terminology.
(14) VI: simple ambiphonetic [~ chngshngz ]
s Bi 1. sit cross-legged
2. n. of a feudal state (EZ)
1 W 2 read 1. MSM j < MC *giH < OC *N-k(r)-q
2. MSM q < MC *khiX < OC *kh(r)-q
Mp
1: MSM j < MC *giX < OC *N-k(r)-q
R a 2: MSM q < MC *gi < OC *g
Ambiphonetic characters are petrifications of simple phonetic loans

(type II) or, more rarely, straightforward pictographs (type I), aug-
mented by secondary phonophorics, at a point in time when the
phonetic value of the original phonophoric has become inapplicable
to the target W, due to the workings of diachronic (or, possibly, dia-
lectal) sound change. Just as in a simple rebus type loan, 1 and 2
are linked to the root node of W and remain indifferent to the added
affixal elements. Since this secondary augmentation procedure may in
principle apply iteratively across time on the basis of an already exist-
ing phonosemantic (type IV) or associative (type V) character, we also
find the following category:19
19
(15)

!"#
$%& '"(

*+,#
-.

/ / /

.
0

1 23
4
5 5, 6 5* 5
0

17(
5,
0

& '(
8 8 9 8 5*

$" 23:&'1(
0

19
See on this type of character formation W Zhnw (2003) and Behr (2005); on
this particular example cf. also Baxter (2001).
298 wolfgang behr
In this example, the Confucian key term rn sociable, humane, also

written as a phonosemantic character composed of a phonophoric qin
and a heart/mind semantic in bronze inscriptions, is encountered
as with a replacement phonophoric shn body in recently
excavated bamboo texts from Gudin , but it is also represented
as with yet another additional phonophoric rn in a seal inscrip-
tion (Guxi #5382). While this might be interpreted as a case of add-
ing a secondary phonophoric to a phonosemantic graph, including
a diachronically -delinked 1-phonophoric, it should be borne in
mind that all three phonetics are also semantically related to the word
represented. Moreover, the replacement phonophoric shn (OBI s)
is in turn paleographically derived from rn (OBI ), just as qin
(OBI o) is too, even if this was no longer transparent synchronic-
ally at the time of the creation of the peculiar seal character. We have
thus come full circle.
(16) II-b: complex phonetic loan [~ jijiz ]

s OBI ( ) office, official
MSM gun <MC *kwan < OC *kkon
1 2 W 1: ( ) platoon, OC *dduj
2: ( ) roof, house, OC *men
Mp i.e. 1+ 2 many people in a room,
barracks guan lodging, hostel
R a
Complex phonetic loans are constructed by reanalyzing pictographic

signs as phonophorics and combining them into a new sign, which is
phonetically not, or only distantly, related to the constituent phonopho-
rics, and to bind this new complex phonophoric to the morphonological
root node R in the word to be designated. Thus, in the example above,
gun is used for guan lodging, hostel on the strength of its
phonetic properties, which are not in any way derivable from either
du or min .
Characters of this type are thus good examples of the high degree of
modular recursiveness built into the Chinese writing system.20 Consider
20
See Mattingly & Hsiao (1999) on implications of recursiveness for a psycholin-
guistic account of the Chinese writing system and Ledderose (2000) for a fascinating
perspective on the anthropology of modularity in Ancient China.
for an admittedly extreme example of this phenomenon the following

character:
(17) MSM < MC *dzej < OC *ddzj < **s-llj to ascend to
It occurs in the Tin ch ( Hunting Chariot) stone drum inscrip-

tion, probably dating from the 5th c. bc:
(18) [I] use it (the chariot) to ascend to the high plains
The character is constructed in the following complex way (Types

involved in the derivation are marked by their respective numbers in
brackets.):

> > )

300 wolfgang behr
Here, every relationship between subgraph constituents (except the ini-

tial A12) becomes part of a phonophoric reinterpretation at one point
or another in the seven-level derivation process. Notice the very odd
percolation of a phonetic value to a phonosemantic character FG-4,
which is maintained at level F-5, even after the original phonophoric
has been discarded, but before the new triple phonophoric + +
() is combined with the mound-semantic at level 7. On a
more formal plane, complex phonophorics such as this, featuring con-
catenative -binding to the Mp-node of W, are veritable fossils of the
constant urge to maintain morphonemic transparency in the writing
system, against all threats of diachronic sound change.
(19) VII: explicit sesquiphonetic [] (i.e. lento-forms, cf. Behr 1998)
D C byng < OC *p-le

1: a verb-negative
s s 2: be full, fill
text (Maoshi 179.7)
W 1 W 2 tr.the great kitchen will be filled
com. ,
pm Mp
A R
Explicit sesquiphonetics, a category not recognized by the tradition,

reflect the likelihood that Old Chinese, far from being a strictly mono-
syllabic language, had quite a sizeable proportion of words featuring
reduced (schwa-vocalized) iambic presyllables in front of the lexical
root, thus matching a syllable structure widely attested in Austroasiatic
languages (cf. Pn Wyn 1998, 2000, Sagart 1999).21 Occasionally, the
sesquisyllabic structures will escape their notorious non-representation
21
The idea that the Chinese writing system quite successfully hides an underly-
ing non-monosyllabic language is already present in an essay by the famous anti-
Manchurian reformer and radical critic Zhng Tiyn (a.k.a. Zhng B ngln ,
18681936), entitled Y z chng yn shu [Discussion of one character
representing two sounds], included in his Gug lnhng [Weighed dis-
quisitions on the foundations of the Chinese nation], see Chn Pngyun, ed. (2003:
2223). Zhngs idea and its phonologically more sophisticated modern successors also
to a certain extent undermine the theory that monosyllabicity of the lexical root was
a precondition for the emergence of logographic writing in China and the Ancient
Near East. This was first adumbrated in Steinthal (1852) and has been independently
rediscovered by Daniels (1992) and Boltz (1994).
in a Chinese character, leading to a situation, in which two graphs

respectively bind the affix and the root nodes of the W to be represented.
Accordingly, the semantic representation of both constituent , or, as
in the present example from the Book of Odes, the oldest collection of
Chinese poetry, only one of the two , is discarded. Loosely attached
presyllable structures of this type are often only very vaguely reflected
in the series of characters constructed from identical phonophorics,
such that external (i.e. comparative) evidence is usually needed for
corroboration.22 23
(20) VIII: phonanalytic-intrasyntactic []
s s MSM bng < Y.23 *1pu dont (have to)

1: MSM b < Y. *4puh NEG
W 1 W 2 1: MSM yng < Y. *3juh
use; have to
pM mP
4
p{ uh + 3j}uh : 1pu
m P
O Rh
Phonanalytic-intrasyntactic characters take the principle of sesquisyl-

labic characters one step further, by constructing a character phone-
mically from an analysis of the monosyllable to be represented by one
each into an onset and a rhyme part. Concomitantly, the semantic
nodes of these two are linearily strung into a syntactic phrase, such
that all - and -nodes are bound to W. This very ingenious character
construction only appears since the very late Medieval period and stays
unproductive in mainstream Chinese, although quite a few W ,
Yu , and M n dialect characters belonging to this type are known.
The type is much more productive in the adjacent Southern Chinese
writing systems of Sino-Vietnamese, Sino-Sui, Old Yi, as well as Tangut
writing in the north. There can be little doubt that a further develop-
ment of this type of character segmentation at the crucial phonological
joints of the syllable could easily have led to the emergence of a regular
alphasyllabary for Chinese, leaving the logographic stage behind.
22
Cf., e.g., Written Burmese pr, Kachin pjri, Mikir, ple full, Written Tibetan
ling-ba wholepiece etc., possibly all going back to a Sino-Tibetan root *s-b-li (cf.
STC #40, HPTB 281/2).
23
Late Middle Chinese (LMC) and Early Mandarin (Yun = Y.) dynasty re-con-
structions are quoted from Pulleybank (1991).
302 wolfgang behr
(21) VIII-b: intrasyntactic semantic loan []
D C MSM q < LMC *4khjih

to not use discard
s ~ q < LMC *4khjih
discard
W
mP
Yet another step further in the character structure recycling chain, we

encounter intrasyntactic semantic loans, which take a phonanalytic-
intrasyntactic graph of type VIII in example (20) and, by delinking its
phonological nodes from W, associate its semantics with a synony-
mous (but allophonetic) word which is thus phonetically not bound
at all. In the example at hand, from the Lngkn shujin
[Handy mirror of the Buddha prayer niche], a dictionary of 997 ad
including 163.170 obscure characters in the Buddhist canon compiled
by the Khitan monk Xngjn , we find the phonetic gloss
(pronounced as q < LMC *4kji) for the graph, which elsewhere has
maintained the phonanalytic-intrasyntactic pronunciation bng to this
very day.
(22) VIII-c: phonanalytic transcription []

s s for Sanskrit -khya-
1: MSM q < LMC *khji
W 1 W 2 2: MSM ye < LMC *jia
*kh[ji + j]ia : *khia
pm mP
m P
O Rh
Finally, we encounter the exceedingly rare category of phonanalytic

transcriptions in Chinese Buddhist texts. Characters of this type,
which again imply an underlying onset/rhyme analysis of the syl-
lable to be represented, simply project the technique of explicit Old
Chinese sesquiphonetics onto the Medieval Chinese monosyllable in
the context of transcriptions of Sanskrit and other Medieval Central
Asian loanwords. In this example, taken from the Dfng guang ps

cng Wnshl gnben gu jng [Stra
on the basic precepts of Majur [belonging] to the Mahvaipulya-
bodhisattva-pit aka], the second syllable of the Sanskrit term sakhya
(the name of one of the schools of Hindu philosophy), gets represented
by writing -khya- as *k[ji+ j]ia *kia phonanalytically.24 In the
compound character, none of the semantic nodes binds W, while the
phonetic nodes properly represent the P-node under mP, as far as we
can see from the reconstruction of Late Middle Chinese of the 9th or
10th c. ad.
All other character structures recognized by the tradition, such as
the so-called jiny also semantic or yshng also pho-
nophoric types, can be either modelled as combinations of the types
analyzed above,25 or refer to merely spatial, not structural considerations.
This is, for instance, the case with so-called hwn or ligature
characters, regularly employed in OBI and BI, such as= xiaoz
little child (a title),= () Zu dng (name of a Shng king),=
xiy next [cyclical day] y , etc. Hwn simply write two distinct
characters into the space of one, without, presumably, altering either
the semantic or morphonemic properties of the merged characters.
Finally, under the model developed here, the well-known category of
indexical-deictic zhsh (, , , etc.) or abstract chuxing
characters (, , , , , , , etc.),26 arises from further
specifications of the s-D-relationship of the represented word, i.e., by
different types of involvement of the interpretative component assign-
ing a meaning in the semiotic triangle.
Polysemy can thus be shown to stem either from purely semantic
extensions of denotations associated with a particular graph, or, in the
model outlined here, by the re-binding intentional or not of any
dashed mapping line to a free semantic structural node of the word.
While the first phenomenon is unrelated to the type of the writing
system and can be shown to be operative in all languages making use
of metaphors, metonymies, and the like, to enrich the text beyond its
straightforward surface semantics, the second one is more intimately
24
Taish (20.0901a); cf. Zhng Xinzhngs work (2004: 7475) on qishnz
or cut body characters.
25
Compare in this direction the notion of structural blendings discussed in Jing
Xuwng (2004).
26
For a good discussion of this distinction see Qi Xgu (1988: 110121).
304 wolfgang behr
linked to the peculiarities of logography. Since structural properties are

often best visible from the vantage position of exaggeration, let us now
briefly take a look at the behaviour of some of the sketched logographic
hyphenation points in ludic usages of writing Classical Chinese.
Ludic Writing
Phonetic Conundrums
Phonetic conundrums, or puns in some definitions of this elusive
term, are based upon varying degrees of similarity between a linguistic
and/or orthographic form and two or more different associated words.
Dienhart (1999), with twinkle-in-the-eye, convincingly identifies the
following cline of similarity relationships involved in the construction
of English riddles:27
(23) similarity hierarchy

polysemy >> homonymy >> homophony >> paraphony >> hahaphony
The rhetorical functions of these similarity relationships are by no means

limited to the realm of wit, irony, persuasion or aesthetic pleasure in
most ancient textual traditions. Quite to the contrary, paronomastic
homonomy or paretymology, more often than not, is a serious device
to unfurl an epistemological effect, for instance, in Ancient Egyptian
literature, where it acquires an almost magical sense, by establishing
conceptual contiguity via phonetic proximity (Loprieno 2001: 135).28
Another common field of application is name-tabooing practices, fig-
uring prominently in the rituals governing the usage of posthumous
royal names in Ancient China.29 Nor is the phonetic conundrum a
27
Where paraphony refers to near-homophony, i.e., the relationship of two words
being semantically related, albeit distantly, forcedly, and orthographically dissimilar
(e.g., gnawing vs. knowing), and hahaphony (of hahafunny!), where the relationship is
created by deliberate pseudo-morphemic re-analysis, typically resulting in the cre-
ation of new words (e.g.: spooketti vs. sphagetti), cf. Dienhart (1999: 109). For a more
sophisticated classification of the concept of phonological similarity involved in such
puns, see also Zwicky & Zwicky (1986).
28
Cf. for a collection of fascinating Egyptian examples Sander-Hansen (1948) and
Loprieno (2000, 2001). For comparative perspectives see also the contributions to Noegel
(2000) on ancient Near Eastern literatures, Klein (2000) on Old Indic, Louden (1995)
on Homeric Greek, and Frank (1972) on Old English.
29
On the cultural history of name tabooing in Ancient China see Emmrich (1992)
and Wng Jin (2002).
phenomenon limited to premodern texts, as the language of advertising

shows just as clearly as, say, Heideggers frequent attempts to employ
paronomasia to convey the monstrative or apophantic powers of
language (Eiland 1982).
Consider for a typical polysemous example, constructed along the
principles of simple phonetic loans (type II), i.e., by an association of
two different lexical items enabled by the non-bound semantic nodes,
the following passage from a wickedly cunning dialogue with Confucius,
narrated by the Zhungz (25.9):
(24)
: ,
, , :

Zhngn inquired with the Grand Scribes Big Bowcase, Elder Aloof-
a-lot, and Leathery-like-a-hog, saying: Now, Duke LNG [of Wi]
was a drunk and indulging in pleasures so much that he paid no atten-
tion to the administration of the state and the big families, he was so
much into net- and-arrow-hunting that he did not react to the contacts
between the many lords. On account of what, then, was he canonized as
the numinous (LNG) duke? Big Bowcase said: It was precisely this
on which it was based.
Here, the conundrum works on account of the fact that lng < OC
*C-rre represents a polysemous word, which not only designates
the spiritual or numinous ruler posthumously, but also a chaotic,
muddleheaded person, even if we do not know whether this second
meaning arose by metonymical extension of the first, or if it is merely
phonetically evoked. Since the reading process in a logosyllabographic
writing system involves a more complex type of phonological recoding
than in an alphabetic one,30 phonetic conundra tend to be less transpar-
ent to the reader. This is all the more true if they occur in premodern
examples which necessitate a phonological reconstruction beyond the
level of synchronic phonological processing. Moving down along
the similarity hierarchy a little bit further, we find examples such as
the following late premodern one, appearing in a dialogue between the
famously witty scholar uyng Xi (10071072) and the cur-
rent chancellor Go Ynf :31
30
See for a recent model focussing on Chinese e.g. Zhou & Marslen-Wilson (2000).
31
Recorded in the Guqinzh [ Memoirs from Retirement] of Li Q
(12031250), quoted from Odendahl (1996: 2425).
306 wolfgang behr
(25)
chancellor: ?
Who are You?
ouyang: ?
I am Ouyang Xiu. And who are you?
chancellor: ?
I am the the chancellor. How come you do not know this?
ouyang: ,
a. I [Xiu] do not know you [chancellor], [and] you [chancellor] do
not know me [Xiu]
b. I [Xiu] do not know you [chancellor], [but] you [chancellor] are
shameless.
Here, the phonetic conundrum, which allows the scholar to poke fun
at his superior, rests on the fully contingent homophony of the two
characters xi (LMC *siw) the cultivated, i.e., the personal name
of Ouyang, and xi (LMC *siw) shame in late Middle Chinese. The
conundrum is thus not based on the properties of the writing system,
since a similar homophone association can be found in languages using
alphabetic writing, or, indeed, even in non-verbal performance. Student
protesters during the Beijng spring of 1989 were very much aware of
this effect when they threw little bottles (xiao png ) out of the
windows of their dorms to express criticism of Chinas leader Dng
Xiaopng (19041997). It is only the degree of the collateral
semantic deflection in the detection of the conundrum, which makes
the case logographically different from its alphabetic or syllabographic
counterparts.
Graphosection
Ludic graphosection (xz ), a widespread mantic and poetic
practice in premodern China,32 involves the analysis of complex char-
acters into their constituent elements, or even into single strokes, and
the semantic reassociation of these parts to unrelated lexical items. In
the following example, an undated premodern synthanalytic poem
(lhsh ) found on a stone slab from the Peach Blossom Spring
(Tohuyun ), a Daoist sanctuary area in Northwestern Hnn
founded during the late Tng period, characters are read in an outward
spiralling direction (quoted from Zhu and Zhu 1987: 7677):33
32
For a good introduction to its history and sources see Fhrer (2002/3) (in print).
33
The spirals in the charts (ac) indicate reading direction. Notice that, unlike in
the poem quoted in (1), there seems to be no other possible reading direction (either
(26)

! "
# $ % & ' (
) * + , - . / 7

In order to arrive at a classical heptasyllabic poem of eight lines, each

line final character will have to be dissected into two parts, of which the
second, i.e., right-hand or lower () part then functions as the first
character of the next line. Depending on the function of this unhitched
part in the composite line final pivot graph as either phonophoric
(p) or a semantic (s), the type of realignment imbuing the dissected
character with polysemy, will be either semantically or phonetically
motivated (types 8 or 9 above):

!"#

$

!"#
% % "& !"

" ' "* !" ! +

& "
+ % % , - !"

%
./ !"

"

& #
&
!

"
"
vertically, or horizontally, or diagonally) which would result in a meaningful text,

although given the polyvalent nature of the script and the largely isolating literary
Chinese it represents one could be enticed to muster a forced attempt at a non-
spiralling analysis.
308 wolfgang behr
e. translation:
4d3e Cowherds and weaving girls gather for tryst TIME
3e6b Under the MOON, playing the zither and reciting POETRY
6b2d The MONASTERY is silent, just a bell and drum to be heard
ECHOING
2d6f When the sounds stop, I first sense the stars are MOVING
6f7a So MANY (yellow caps =) Daoist priests go back to their
SHRINE
7a1a Having gained INSIGHT into it, they are blissfully at ease with
forgetting the CRUX of life
1a1g WHEN will I get to peach blossom CAVE
1g7g to play a game of chess with those immortals?!
While graphosectional techniques are employed here in a position

predictable by the overall poetic form into which they are playfully, but
regularly, embedded, the form eventually reaches mind-boggling com-
plexity in a type known as the inscrutable knowledge genre (shnzht
) or riddle representation poetry (mxingsh ),
first mentioned in Sng Shchngs ( born ca. 1140) Huwn lij
[Anacyclical texts grouped into categories].34 An undated
late Imperial example by an otherwise largely unknown 18th c. author
Chn Zhanhu , in which the character constituents are not
only dissected along the phonosemantic demarcation line, but also
inverted, mutilated or reanalyzed into syntactic phrases, is the fol-
lowing poem entitled Gu qng or Vestal feelings. Moreover,
the metalanguage describing these character transforming operations
becomes part of the text again, in which a maiden, longing for her
distant lover, sighs (Zhu and Zhu 1987: 49):35
(27)
a. text: b. reading: c. transcription:
b m b chng min
jng fn zi jng qin
w xn s dun mng
fan p hn chng qin
d. translation:
1 Closing my eyes I cannot get to sleep
2 A hairpin [lies] open, in front of the mirror
34
See on this important collection Odendahl (1996: 812).
35
Obviously, examples such as this verge on being well-nigh undecodable, without
explanations by their creators or early collectors/commentators.
3 I (do not have the heart =) am not in the mood

to think of interrupting my dreams
4 But I fear I would hate if it continued for long.
In character (1a), the semantic (s) determiner eye, usually added to a

phonophoric people to construct the phonosemantic character (type
IV) min sleep a structure which we could notate as ps[det[]
+ phon[ mn]] is closed, i.e., blackened, so that the blackened
eye and people do not compose the character sleep any more.
Transposed to the metalanguage level of the lyric ego, the maiden can-
not get to sleep. The phonosemantic character (2a) chi hairpin,
structurally ps[det[ metal] + phon[ ch, pin]] (2b), is not writ-
ten as such, but by separating p and s, such that not only the character
chi is dissected, but, on the metalanguage level, hairpin, the object
designated by it, [lies] open as well. Moving then, from the level of
the written language not to that of descriptive metalanguage, but to
the corresponding referents in the real world chi , the hairpin,
not only stands dissected in front of the character jng (2c), it also
lies open or fn in front of the mirror. s to think of (in all
likelihood an associative character (type V) with the structure ss[det[
heart]+sem[= fontanel]]) appears here without the semantic
heart (3a), which translates into a metalanguage description w xn
have no heart, which is then reinterpreted as part of the poetic
line [to] not dare to, not feel like. The object of this verb phrase is a
complement clause, construed by adding the undissected character s
and appearing in the metalanguage description, to yet another verb.
This verb is generated by cutting the next character mng dream
into two pieces (3bc), which, for once, do not get recycled with a new
semantic association. Rather, it is only the metatextual description
which becomes operative again by identifying to cut with one of its
many conventional semantic extensions as to interrupt, stop. In the
last line, the phonosemantic (type IV) character p (4a) to fear
is inverted (turned by 90 degrees), and thus semantically associated
with the character representing the word for to invert, reverse, fn
, which is also used, however, as a sentence-initial conjunction but,
on the contrary in Classical Chinese. The original p to fear is
maintained as the main verb of the main clause, to which a minor clause
is added by using the graphical description of the last character hn
(4b) hate. Since the character appears in an unusual oblong shape,
it can be described in the metalanguage as being chng qin or
torn long, which, if reinterpreted temporally rather than spatially, and
reinserted into the poem, obviously means to continue for long.
310 wolfgang behr
Conclusion
Obviously, examples for the exploitation of open interfaces within the

structure of Chinese characters for the creation of polysemy are much
more diverse and layered than I have been able to demonstrate in this
short essay. For instance, the possibility of altering the whole language
system underlying a Chinese graph to generate polysemy be it in the
context of dialect writing, the representation of foreign loans, or of
whole foreign languages with Chinese characters had to be neglected
here, as was also the difficult field of phonanalytic name association
in Old Chinese historical narratives. Both areas doubtlessly offer rich
hunting grounds for examples not covered above.
It has become clear, I hope, that it is important to distinguish between
polysemy as a cross-linguistically available, universal function of the
linguistic sign on the one hand, and as a particular capacity, hard-
wired into the structural properties of the Chinese writing system on
the other. Given its great diachronic persistence despite all changes
in the anthropology, sociopolitical setting and material culture, it is
tempting to assume that the success of the Chinese writing system
is somehow related to the flexibility and economy of the structural
devices it makes use of to represent meaning, and, indeed, more than
just one meaning, per sign.36 It would be interesting to see, then, if the
structural model outlined here is robust enough to be extended to other
non-alphabetic writing systems.
References
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Studies and Monographs; 64). Berlin & New York : De Gruyter.
. 2001. Aspects of Old Chinese morphology: Reading between the characters in
early Chinese texts. Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Classical
Chinese grammar, UBC Vancouver, 1719. August, 22 pp.
Behr, Wolfgang [B ] 1998. Jiaguwn suojin rugn shnggu Hnyu fshngmu
wnt lc [Desultory jottings on the
problem of initial consonant clusters as reflected in oracle bone inscriptions].
Shngyn Lncng , Vol. 6, pp. 471530.
[B ] 2005. Wich tngju weng cng Zhngu chngshngz h zhyn
xngshngz tnq
[Maintaining aural stability: on the implications of Warring States phonophoric dou-
36
See Ricoeur (1973) on the crucial role of synonymy for linguistic creativity in
general.
bling and replacement]. Paper presented at the International Symposium Paleography:

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TOWARDS ANOTHER SCRIPT
EGYPTIAN WRITING FOR NON-EGYPTIAN LANGUAGES
AND VICE VERSA: A SHORT OVERVIEW
Since my contribution about the writing of foreign words has already

induced me to give some remarks about the use of Egyptian writing
systems for writing foreign languages, I will provide a separate discus-
sion for them here. The fact that the Egyptian writing could be, and
was used for writing other languages is of some theoretical interest.
The following documentation (see Peust 1999: 74f and 78), will only
consider cases where not only single words were rendered but also
connected texts of at least one sentence in length.
The literary letter of the New Kingdom, attested mainly in papyrus
Anastasi I, contains, besides many deliberately chosen individual for-
eign words, in 23, 5 one single phrase entirely in a Semitic language
(Fischer-Elfert 1983: 138, 1986: 152, Hoch 1994: 20f). The language is
obviously chosen because the sentence is supposedly spoken by Asians,
thus it adds a local dimension. We can suppose that at least part of the
intention was to convey the semantic meaning as well as the fact of its
foreignness to the educated reader.
The ostracon Cairo CG 25759 rt. comes from the Valley of the
Kings at Thebes and dates to the twentieth dynasty (ern 1935: 79
and pl. XCVI, 92*, 93*). On the recto, it is written in hieratic script,
but does not seem to be Egyptian in language. It has been analyzed
as a North-West Semitic text concerning an everyday affair (handing
over of a goat) (Shisha-Halevy 1978). The imperfect preservation of
the piece as well as the small extent of the text renders all interpreta-
tions problematic. It might be not a connected text at all, but a list of
words or even personal names, e.g., the first entry could be analyzed as
a mixed Egyptian and Semitic name t-n.t-m she of the goats. The
scanty remains on the verso are definitely in Egyptian. If this really is
a business text in Northwest-Semitic, it would be due to the fact that
many Asiatics were settled in Egypt during the New Kingdom, and
they might have occasionally used their own language even if sticking
to the local script system. Thus, this would be a conveyer of semantic
meaning, even more so than in pAnastasi I.
The magical-medical papyrus London BM 10059, rt. 7, 17 contains

a sequence of seven short spells in non-Egyptian language (although
the practical indications for drugs and application are in Egyptian)
(Leitz 1999: 6163 and pl. 32). One of them is explicitly designated as
being in the language of the Keftiu (probably the Cretans) while the rest
does not have any intrinsic ethnic attribution. They have been analyzed
as Northwest-Semitic language, except for the one spell attributed to
Cretan language (Steiner 1992). Recently, it was proposed to see real
reflections of language transmitted in the Linear A tablets in the latter
one as well as in one directly following it which Steiner had analyzed
as Semitic (Haider 2002) although the proposal to analyse also the
one without explicit attribution to the Cretan language as such was
recently criticised (Lange 2007: 54). The spells are directed against
skin-diseases, which also mostly have names of foreign origin or are
designated in Egyptian as The (disease) of the Asians, thus it is not
unlikely that the incantations as well as the disease itself came from
the outside to Egypt.
Within the hieroglyphic texts accompanying the depictions of the
festival of Min in the Ramesseum and at Medinet Habu (Gauthier 1931:
188199), there is a section containing, besides clear Egyptian texts,
also some passages which do not make sense as Egyptian language, and
which are repeated twice with only slight variations. (Medinet Habu IV,
pl. 203, l. 20f and 28f; and 213, l. 4648). Especially given that the god
Min has strong connections with the south and southeast, and that there
is a heading entitled The spells of reciting; what the negro of Punt says
directly following, there is some possibility that this is a sentence in a
language from that south-eastern area, which became fixed as liturgical
formula. For the Egyptians of the New Kingdom, it can hardly have
been more than pure sound without intrinsic meaning.
Within the magical papyrus Harris, which dates probably to the
later part of the twentieth dynasty (Quack 1998: 311), there is one sec-
tion of a bit more than 4 lines standing on the verso separately on a
page of its own (the last page of the manuscript) that clearly is not in
Egyptian language (Lange 1927: 98f, Leitz 1999: 49f and pl. 23). It has
been understood as Canaanite incantation for lion hunting (Schneider
1989). The preceding sections of the verso contain incantations sup-
posedly taken over from the mouth of herdsmen (Quack 1998: 311),
and they are mainly concerned with driving away dangerous animals.
Since they show strong influences of northwest-Semitic mythology,
they would be consistent with the use of an incantation completely
egyptian writing for non-egyptian languages 319
in a foreign language. Some other parts of the manuscript also show

occasional strange words which are either gibberish or non-Egyptian
language of an as yet unresolved nature.
Within the Book of the Dead there is a group of chapters already
designated as supplementary by the Egyptians themselves. They might
have been composed for a restricted group of users in the Ramesside
period and began to be attested in private funerary texts sporadically
in the twenty-first, and more often from the twenty-sixth, dynasty
onwards (Yoyotte 1977). Those, and some related spells that are
attested in individual manuscripts but did not make it into becoming
a regular part of the Book of the Dead (Allam 1992), contain short
sound sequences (probably more than single words) of very foreign
character. They are nowadays mostly supposed to be some Nubian
language (perhaps proto-Meroitic) (Vernus 1984, Lesko 1999, 2003,
Zibelius-Chen 2005).
Of somewhat related nature are certain strange invocations preserved
in funerary papyri of the twenty-first dynasty (Golnischeff 1927: 123).
It is not entirely clear whether there are real phrases or only isolated
names and epithets, but they clearly represent a non-Egyptian language
addressed to the god, followed, however, by a quite normal Late-
Egyptian text.
Considerable discussion has been devoted to a magical spell against
scorpions dating to about the fourth century bc and written in Demotic
in the Wadi Hammamat. The title and the indications for the manual
act are in contemporary Demotic language, but the spell itself (3
lines) creates difficulties. Originally, most of it was understood as
sheer magical gibberish (Vittmann 1984). Later, there were proposals
to read parts of it either as unorthographic Egyptian (Zauzich 1985;
Cruz-Uribe 2001: 51f and 54; against this Vittmann 1989) or as Semitic
(Steiner 2001). The final verdict does not yet seem to have been reached
(Vittmann 2003: 119).
The famous papyrus Amherst 63 is written entirely in Demotic script
but Aramaic language. It has only been partially published, and inter-
pretations of the details are far from unanimous (see, e.g., Vleeming &
Wesselius 1982, 198384, 1985, 1990; Nims & Steiner 1982, Steiner &
Nims 1984, 1985, Steiner 1991, Kottsieper 1997a, 1997b). Most of the
content seems to consist of hymns and invocations, including a fairly
direct parallel to psalm 20, but the last (and longest) section is a story
of Assurbanipal, his brother amaumukin and the fall of Babylon.
Unfortunately, hardly anything is known about the original context
of the manuscript. Most important would be the question of why the

individual or community using the text had recourse to a writing system
which was quite exotic for an Aramaic-speaking person, and which
gave only a limited rendering of the meaning because the distinction
between voiced, voiceless and emphatic sounds, crucial for Semitic lan-
guages, could not be adequately represented in Demotic writing. Were
the users more at home with the Egyptian writing system, or did they
use the manuscript only as a conveyer of supposedly powerful sound,
regardless of any semantic content?
The late Demotic magical papyri from the Roman period contain
several sequences that show a phonetic rendering of Greek language,
sometimes intermixed with Semitic forms (Quack 2004a). By far the
most important source is the demotic magical papyrus of London and
Leiden (pBM 10070, pLeiden I 383) (Griffith & Thompson 19041909).
The sequences themselves are typically short, and many are problematic
in the precise analysis. One of the longest and also one were most of
the interpretation seems rather certain is gyre the pysytw ek--ymy
tm (demotic magical papyrus of London and Leiden vs. 13,17) which
I have proposed to analyse as Lord
God, I believe, I am Adam (Quack 2004: 464).
It should be noted, however, that the scribe has not declared such
sections as Greek and we have no indication that he was aware of their
semantic meaning. As a matter of fact, we even can prove the contrary
in some occasions. In the demotic magical papyrus of London and
Leiden, rt. 16, 2, there is a word el--e with a Greek gloss which
is a reasonable rendering of the Hebrew word god. But directly above
it, the scribe has noted a variant []. This is obviously no more
than a reading mistake ( understood as ), but it is annotated with
a demotic nfr sp 2 very good, which shows that it brought about the
desired effect in an actual use. So, it was the effectiveness that counted,
not the linguistic affiliation nor original semantic. Whenever the scribe
was clearly aware that the formula was Greek, he actually preferred to
write it out in Greek letters (thus rt. 4, 919, rt. 15, 2528, rt. 23, 920;
Dieleman 2005: 123138). Discovering traces of Greek language among
the invocations written out in Demotic is thus a modern detectives
work uncovering the prehistory of the formula, but the scribe did not
have the intention of rendering Greek language with semantic mean-
ing in Egyptian writing. He intended to write down powerful words of
invocation operating by their very sound; and actually, in most cases the
Demotic rendering of those formulae is accompanied by a supralinear
Greek version. This conclusion can be strengthened by the fact that even
originally Egyptian words in those formulae which had passed through
a Greek phonetic rendering were quite often not reconstituted in their
correct Egyptian orthography, but given in a phonetic equivalent of their
Greek rendering which often is only a poor approximation due to the
fact that several Egyptian consonants did not exist in Greek language
(Quack 2004, Dieleman 2005: 6980).
Two spells also claim to be in Nubian language (Thissen 1991: 371f
and 375f; Dieleman 2005: 138143). One is preserved in papyrus British
Museum 10588,7,15 (Bell, Nock & Thompson 1932: 12f; Ritner 1986:
98f). In this papyrus we have also the sequence hrbb brskhs (7,2),
and this seems like a bad segmentation for hrbb brskhs, the second
element obviously being the well-known magical word Abrasax. This
casts quite a bit of doubt on the true linguistic affiliation of the text,
in any case it seems to have passed through a stage of being written
in Greek letters. The other one, in the demotic magical papyrus of
London and Leiden vs. 20, 45 does not contain any equally evident
clues, but is also not unlikely to be based on a Greek vorlage. In any
case, the scribe did not choose to write them in Meroitic writing (which
he probably did not master).
In summation, we have to note that there are guaranteed cases where
Egyptian writing was used for non-Egyptian language, even though
they are quite few in number. In most cases, however, the text after-
wards tended to loose its semantic component and to be employed as
an invocation gaining its power from the preservation of the sound.
The sections in foreign language are typically quite short, about one
to a maximum of four lines, and they are completely embedded in an
Egyptian-language context giving, for example, manual instructions
for the rituals and conjurations. The single obvious exception is papy-
rus Amherst 63, which is both a very extended manuscript (at least
twenty-one columns), and (according to the actual state of publication)
completely free of any evident Egyptian-language setting; it remains to
be seen whether it had meaning as semantic structure or only as sound,
although the first one is not improbable.
This use of an Egyptian writing system for preserving rather the
effective sound than the meaning of a passage has, I think, a good
parallel in inner-Egyptian renderings. There are some cases were clas-
sical Egyptian language mostly of ritual or liturgical content is written
down in Demotic script even though preserving its original language
characteristics (Smith 1977, 1993, Vleeming 1990, 2004, Widmer 1998,
2004, Quack 2001, Hoffmann 2002, Stadler 2005). Since many of the
syntactical constructions and much of the vocabulary did not have
any established Demotic orthography, their writing is often highly
unetymological, using completely different Demotic words, perhaps
sometimes for deliberate puns, but often simply in order to convey to
the reader/recitator the actual sound.
Besides, there is of course Meroitic, which I have deliberately not
treated here (See the contributions of Rilly in this volume.) and which
is evidently the rendering of a non-Egyptian language by a writing
system developed out of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and cursive writ-
ing systems. But up to now, there are no preserved testimonies of the
intermediate state which could rightly be called Meroitic language
written in Egyptian script.
On the other hand, there is also the option of writing Egyptian
language in foreign writing systems. The best known case is the use
of the Greek alphabet which, in combination with a few signs taken
over from the indigenous Demotic writing system, led to the Coptic
writing system.
Much older is the case of cuneiform writing, although it never
came so far as to really write out whole sentences. There are quite a
few Egyptian names and lexical items rendered in cuneiform in the
correspondence between Egypt and other Near Eastern areas, as well
as, remarkably, a lexical list giving equivalents between Akkadian and
Egyptian the last also written in cuneiform (Izreel 1997: 7781). From
its place of discovery in Amarna, this list is likely to have been used by
the Egyptians. It keeps a unity of the media by exclusively using the
foreign writing system incising the Egyptian words as hieroglyphs
into the clay did not seem appropriate to whomever made this tablet.
One item also most probably attests to the use of Aramaic writing for
the rendering of Egyptian. We have scanty remains of a leather manu-
script pBerlin 13443 (Porten & Yardeni 1999: 137) in which the text
makes no sense if read as Aramaic, but several sound sequences would
lend themselves to an analysis as Egyptian language (Vittmann 2003:
117119, Quack 2004b: 360). The manuscript is too fragmentary and
the interpretation not yet far enough advanced to present a definitive
assessment of the contents, although it is not unlikely that it consisted
of invocations or liturgical passages.
While the use of Greek writing finally, due to the political dominance
of a foreign elite, succeeded in not only producing substantial amounts
of text but even completely replacing the older indigenous system of

writing, the other cases rest isolated and sporadic occurrences without
long-term impact.
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THE CAROLINE ISLANDS SCRIPT:
A LINGUISTIC CONFRONTATION
Alex de Voogt
The Caroline Islands are located in the Federated States of Micronesia

in the western Pacific Ocean. According to Sohn (1975), the Caroline
Islands refer to the islands of Woleai Atoll, Ulithi, Fais, Sorol, Eauripik,
Faraulep, Ifaluk, Elato, Puluwat, Lamotrek and Satawal. These are also
known as the Outer Islands of the Western Carolines. Outer specifies
their distance from Yap, the center of the traditional hegemony as well
as the present administration.
Woleaian is spoken with dialectal differences on Woleai, Eauripik,
Faraulep, Elato, Lamotrek, Puluwat, Satawal and Ifaluk. It is on this
group of islands that the Caroline Islands script was found. For reasons
of convenience Riesenberg & Kaneshiros (1960) term Caroline Islands
script is used and the islands and the language are referred to as the
Woleai group and the Woleai language. In 1975, there were approxi-
mately 1,500 speakers of Woleai on the various islands. Similar to
Trukese and Ulithian, the language can be classified as a member of
the Trukic subgroup of the Micronesian group of the Oceanic branch
of the Austronesian language family.
The invention of the Caroline Islands script at the beginning of
the twentieth century and the subsequent dismissal of the script by
linguists in the latter half of that century illustrate a conflicting view
on the usefulness of this script that was dominated by linguists rather
than the users of the script. Linguists have contrasted the script to a
phoneme inventory but their conclusions depended on the adequacy
of the phonological analysis that they provided.
In 1909 the Hamburg Sdsee Expedition visited Woleai. Their ethno-
graphic work was not published until 1929 and later so late, that one
of the principal ethnographers, Sarfert, had died just before the 1938
publication of his work. Damm & Sarfert (1935) describe examples of
the script from both Ifaluk and Faraulep.
During a brief visit shortly after the Hamburg expedition, Brown
(1914) collected a series of characters but, according to Riesenberg &
Kaneshiro (1960: 276), he did not collect the complete set. Few others
328
alex de voogt
Figure 1. Map of the Caroline Islands. Encircled is the Woleai group, where the Caroline Islands script was found.
the caroline islands script 329
Figure 2. Examples of the Caroline Islands script (Brown 1914).
have commented on the script. Imbelloni (1951: 164) and Barthel (1971)
speak of a possible link between the undeciphered Easter Island script
and the Caroline Islands script. Riesenberg & Kaneshiro mention a
Japanese scholar, Someki, who visited the islands. He recorded thirty-
eight characters collected from different islands.
There are two sets of characters. The origin of the two sets of symbols
form an important part of Riesenberg & Kaneshiros research.
Type 1 and Type 2
Type 1 and type 2 are the names for two sets of symbols making up the
Caroline Islands script. From 1954 to 1957, Riesenberg & Kaneshiro
conducted fieldwork and obtained a list of the symbols. They also
330 alex de voogt
Figure 3. Example of a text written in the Caroline Islands syllabary.

(Riesenberg & Kaneshiro 1960).
collected inscriptions on canoes, houses, and on people (as tattoos).

Type 1 (see figure 5: only the first 26 are shown) bears little resemblance
to any other script (including the Easter Island script). Type 2 (see fig-
ure 4) appears to derive from an European source, since it resembles
Roman alphabet characters. The two types are complementary and
together form the script used in the Caroline Islands.
The symbols represent syllables, as Brown discovered in 1914. He
also found that the names for the individual symbols are equivalent to
their sound value.
Riesenberg & Kaneshiro (1960: 282) found 78 characters of type 1
and 19 of type 2. They state that this was a system of writing that was
developed some time before 1909. The difference between the two types
was pointed out to them by indigenous informants. In their research,
Riesenberg & Kaneshiro translated this distinction into a type 1 and a
type 2 script. They reconstructed the history of type 2 symbols and found
that all type 2 symbols ended in an -i. They attributed this to the intro-
duction of an alphabet whereby the names of the symbols were taken as
their syllabic sound value. The islanders learned the alphabet by using
the names for the letter symbols. These names then became the values
of the symbols, i.e., a consonant and a vowel -i, or a vowel on its own.
The number of inhabitants who knew how to write the script in the
1950s was minimal. On Faraulep, Woleai, and Ifaluk, there were a few
old people who knew the script; on Elato and Satawal, the last experts
had died. According to Riesenberg & Kaneshiro (1960: 277), there is
evidence that in 1909 both types of symbols were known on Woleai,
Faraulep, Puluwat and possibly Satawal. In 1934, when Someki visited,
both systems were known on Ifaluk and Elato as well. But, as suggested
by the number of persons able to write in the 1950s, knowledge of the
script was in decline.
The knowledge of the script was distributed over a distance of three
hundred miles between several islands. There is little evidence that
European traders or missionaries frequented those islands, so Riesenberg
& Kaneshiro (1960: 284) assumed that the islanders themselves were
more active agents in the dispersal of the script at that time than were
traders, explorers, or missionaries.
Type 2 script appears to be an adaptation of the alphabet created
by the missionary Logan, who, in 1878, was assigned by the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to write religious texts
in the Trukese language. H. Damm (1935) suggested that a missionary
from Truk, who had been shipwrecked on Eauripik, was instrumental
in transferrring the Trukese alphabet to Woleaian, which then became
the source of the type 2 script. Various stories were collected that spoke
about a missionary shipwrecked with his companions who taught the
Trukese alphabet to the people of Eauripik and later Woleai. Riesenberg
& Kaneshiro (1960: 288289) identified this missionary as Alfred
Snelling, a missionary in Truk at the beginning of 1888. He had been
lost at sea in 1905 and happened upon Eauripik, after which a Woleaian
chief brought him to Woleai. One surviving companion, Airas, later
confirmed this story to Frank Mahoney, the district anthropologist in
Truk in the 1950s.
Riesenberg & Kaneshiro compared the alphabet of Trukese with the
type 2 writing of the Woleai group. Logans alphabet appeared to be
close enough to the type 2 to conclude that the Truk area must have been
the source. Airas, Snellings companion, also pronounced the consonant
letters with i-endings in later interviews with Frank Mahoney.
Type 1 writing (see figure 4) was then developed after the syllables
with endings in -i were found to be insufficient. This development
occurred in the course of teaching type 2 to other people by the island-
ers. Riesenberg & Kaneshiro suggest a sequence of inventions, because
332 alex de voogt
Figure 4. Type 2 script (Riesenberg & Kaneshiro 1960).
they found symbol variations. The characters of type 1 appeared to have

a certain order, but, after the first fifty syllable symbols, more variation in
this order was found among the users than at the beginning, which sug-
gests a later invention of characters at the end of the order. Confusingly,
the two types of script are named 1 and 2 by Riesenberg & Kaneshiro
although their chronological order would suggest the opposite.
Type 1 symbols have values with vowels other than i. Riesenberg &
Kaneshiros informants agreed that type 1 was invented in Faraulep. They
even called it the Faraulep writing. Their statements suggest that the
script was learned through correspondence between islands. Even people
who did not master the script recognized it as the script from Faraulep.
It is said to have been invented after the big typhoon. Riesenberg
& Kaneshiro reconstruct this date to 1907, so that the invention must
have taken place between 1907 and 1909 when the Hamburg expedition
found the writing on various islands.
Figure 5. Example of type 1 script (Riesenberg & Kaneshiro 1960).
The values of the type 1 characters are the same as, or close to, the
names of the objects they represent. Riesenberg & Kaneshiro (1960:
297) had their informants identify the characters and they appeared
to be parts of canoes, certain fish, body parts, et cetera.
In sum, the Caroline Islands script as it was used by the Caroline
Islanders, seems to have developed after 1907 (from a type 2 script) and
then developed further into a syllabary on Faraulep (a combination of
type 1 and 2). Frequent communication between the islands allowed the
script to spread to many of the islands in the Woleai group. However,
the script was already in decline in the 1950s.
334 alex de voogt
Linguists and the Script
In their analysis of the Caroline Islands script, Riesenberg & Kaneshiro

(1960: 299) considered phonemes and phonemic combinations. Based
on Smiths (1951) orthography of the Woleai language, they assumed
that Woleaian had fifty phonemes, of which there were twenty-four
vowels eleven long and thirteen short. There were also two semivow-
els, w and y, and twenty-four consonants. The official orthography
by Smith was at that time proposed to the Trust Territory administra-
tion. Riesenberg & Kaneshiro used this orthography in the remainder
of their study.
Riesenberg & Kaneshiro found 97 characters in the Caroline Islands
script (78 of type 1 and 19 of type 2). All of them have consonant + vowel,
semivowel + vowel or vowel values. According to Riesenberg &
Kaneshiro, Smiths phonemic analysis indicates that there is a theoreti-
cal possibility of 24 26 = 624 syllables of consonant and vowel and
an extra twenty-four vowels as independent syllables. In their sample
of 301 words written in the script, only 175 syllables occurred with a
projected maximum of 250, or 300 if larger texts would have been used.
The phonemes d and ngh in Smiths orthography do not occur in the
syllabary in initial position at all and some consonants (ch, j, n, rw, th, z)
have only one or two entries.
The total number of possible syllables was probably even smaller,
since the distinction between long and short vowels did not seem to
be necessary, its opposition indeed being very infrequent. Long vowels
occur infrequently (Sohn, personal communication) and no characters
were needed to represent them. In this arrangement, only 338 syllables
and thirteen vowels as independent syllables can occur. In addition,
most characters representing vowels also represented the semi-vowel +
vowel combination (10 out of 13).
Riesenberg & Kaneshiro (1960: 303) stated that there is considerable
variation and that it is obvious that the system is inadequate for truly
phonemic representation (in Smiths phoneme system). They found that
many of the 97 characters must serve for several combinations. There
is an overall lack of exact correspondence between characters and syl-
lables. Not only must one symbol serve for several different syllables,
but also some syllables may be represented by different symbols. They
found that where it is necessary to represent a sound not represented
in the script, the choice has to be made between two or more sym-
bols whose attributed values are closest phonologically (Riesenberg &

Kaneshiro 1960: 304).
Riesenberg & Kaneshiro admit it is possible that they misheard some
of the tape-recorded values. Other inaccurate correspondence might be
due to dialect differences. For instance, a and aa in Smiths orthogra-
phy are separate phonemes on Woleai and Faraulep (Smith 1951: 40)
and on Eauripik (Rehg, personal communication). Sometimes infor-
mants used more syllables for a word than Smith recorded, which tends
to support dialect differences (Riesenberg & Kaneshiro 1960: 304).
There is consistency for the choice of end-consonants. Riesenberg
& Kaneshiro suggest that when the script was invented, a weakly-
pronounced vowel might have been present, as in some other Malayo-
Polynesian languages, so that the character whose full syllabic value
includes the vowel sound was formerly terminal. Sohn (1975: 1822)
confirmed that there are voiceless end-vowels, which supports Riesenberg
& Kaneshiros theory. Perhaps, as a second option, the informants
anticipated vowels which appear only when additional syllables are suf-
fixed to the same word. Although they present a series of explanations
for the consistencies in the script Riesenberg & Kaneshiro (1960: 307)
did not find a clear rule.
In the last part of their study, they compare two texts written by two
informants. Riesenberg & Kaneshito conclude that there is freedom
in expression and preference when choosing between one symbol or
another. Within a single individuals writing, however, there is much
consistency.
Smiths Orthography
Smith (1951) designed the first official orthography of the Woleaian
language. His work on Woleaian for the United States Trust Territory
of the Pacific Islands extended to other islands of the territory as
well. Smith designed an orthography, which was adapted for use by
Riesenberg & Kaneshiro, without diacritical marks (see Table 1).
Smith (1951) introduced fifty phonemes for the Woleaian language
with single phonemes represented by more than one symbol in more
than half of the proposed alphabet. In contrast, the syllabary represents
different combinations of phonemes with the same symbol. To solve
this ambiguity in the script, readers have to rely on the context of the
written words. This context is created by Smith, who introduces one
or two additional symbols that always accompany the first symbol to
336 alex de voogt
distinguish it from other phonemes. The letter o is used for o but

also for the long vowel oh and for the vowel oa and its long variant
oah (see Table 1). Adequacy and efficiency of such an orthography
becomes, therefore, difficult to assess since different techniques create
different problems. The syllabary has symbols representing different
sounds, the alphabet has letters used in different letter combinations
to represent different sounds. They both depend on the context of the
symbols that should prevent ambiguity.
Riesenberg & Kaneshiro (1960: 299) offer the following opinion
about Smiths orthography:
Smiths published work is non-technical in language, and his phonemes
were established by means of minimal pairs. The values indicated below
are, in Smiths words, only a meager approximation indeed. For this
reason we are not satisfied that our transcription in his orthography of
the attributed values of the various characters in figs. 25 and 26 is always
accurate.
Sohns Orthography
Sohns orthographic design for Woleaian was developed for a gram-
mar and dictionary of the language, the first of their kind. In 1984
Sohn suggested improvements to this orthography and pointed out
considerable differences from Smiths orthography (see Table 2). He
states (1984: 217):
The spelling proposed by Smith (1951), which is an alphabetic writing, is
an example of an orthography based on a poorly analyzed sound system,
in which Smith sets up too many letters and poor spelling conventions.
If Sohns analysis of the Woleai language had been taken into account,
a different evaluation of the Caroline Islands script would have emerged
than the one put forward by Riesenberg & Kaneshiro.
First, lengthening is not represented for all vowels in Sohns list.
Lengthening is also an infrequent opposition in the transcribed texts
of Riesenberg & Kaneshiro (1960). It appears that the Woleaians can
do without length-representation in their spelling (Sohn, personal
communication). Second, semivowels are predictable in most environ-
ments (Sohn 1984: 215) and do not always need to be represented by
a symbol. The Caroline Islander script has been criticized for variation
in symbol values and dismissed for its inadequacy by Riesenberg &
Kaneshiro (1960: 311). Smiths orthography of the Woleaian language
shows so many inaccurate transcriptions of the Caroline Islands script,

and contains so many superfluous letters and poor spelling conventions
that a comparison between the Caroline Islands script and Smiths
orthography does not warrant a dismissal of the script.
One may add that the syllabary never developed into a standard
form and as a consequence, different writers of the syllabary solved
spelling problems in different ways. This does not, however, represent
any obstacle for a writing system. Other syllabaries have functioned
quite satisfactorily with such a system. This flexibility of the script also
allowed dialect differences (Woleai, Faraulep, etc.) to be represented by
the script (Riesenberg & Kaneshiro 1960: 304). Finally, consistency was
found when writers had to decide on the end-consonant and individual
writers were consistent within their own writing, suggesting a writing
system that was both appropriated by the speakers of the language and
served the local needs for writing.
Was the research of Riesenberg & Kaneshiro to be repeated and
a comparison with a more accurate orthography made, then Sohns
orthography proposal would be more appropriate for such a purpose.
But Sohn made a new proposal and dismissed the syllabary without
making a new comparison. His arguments, presented in a paper pub-
lished a decade after the publication of the Woleaian-English dictionary
and reference grammar, have a different background.
Sohn (1984) argued that syllabaries and ideographies are inadequate
for languages, especially those with a complicated syllable structure.
These writing systems need too many symbols in order to represent a
language systematically. In Sohns view, only systematic writing sys-
tems should be developed, because this makes it easier for outsiders
to learn and to investigate the language. Sohn (1984: 216) stated that
syllabaries are adequate only in such a language as Japanese where
there are a relatively small number of different syllables. Sohn adds:
wol [Woleai] has a syllable structure as simple as Japanese, but has
many more vowels and consonants. This fact makes it disadvantageous
for Woleaians to have a syllabary. The Caroline Islands script was, by
(Sohns) definition, inadequate. Similar conclusions could be drawn for
most scripts found elsewhere in this publication.
DeFrancis (1989: 231) stated that in the case of Japanese there are
105 or 113 syllables and 46 syllabic symbols to represent them. The
46 symbols are juggled around in various well known ways so as to
handle all of the syllables, in somewhat the same way that we combine
338 alex de voogt
t and h to represent the sounds in this and thin. Thus, not even
the Japanese represented all the possible syllables in their language. It is
interesting to note that with a phonemic spelling as proposed by Sohn,
and disregarding vowel length and geminated consonants, the total of
possible (open) syllables in Woleaian is just 15 8 = 120 and 8 syllables
for single vowels. This number is rather close to that of the Japanese
language. Apparently, the indigenous writers of various languages of
ancient and modern times were and are not much concerned with the
particular features of syllabaries that Sohn finds so inadequate.
Though Sohn set criteria of strict sound-letter correspondence for an
ideal alphabetical system, he admitted that the present orthography for
the English language fails to pass these criteria. To this, the majority
of writing systems can be added, since languages change over time. As
soon as a writing system is standardized, which, according to Sohn, is
done easily with a strict sound-letter correspondence, further changes in
the language become difficult to be represented in the orthography.
Although Sohns analyses are insightful linguistically, his orthography
proposal has a number of rules and spelling conventions that complicate
the Woleaian orthography if they are implemented. According to Sohn
(1984: 223), there are five consonants that do not have corresponding
double consonants. These consonants are doubled for grammatical pur-
poses. Sohn (1984: 222) states that, for example, doubled |x| becomes
|kk|, doubled |s| and |r| become |cc|, and doubled |l| becomes |nn|,
Instead of introducing more consonants, Sohn provided a small list of
exceptions with their representation.
In a subsequent paragraph, Sohn (1984: 223) stated, that with the
deletion of i, the consonants l and s are collapsed to |cc|. In the same
way, l + r = |cc|, l + t = |tt|, and l + s = |ss|. These alternations are pho-
nologically instead of grammatically conditioned. Vowels have even
more extensive phoneme alternations, according to Sohn (1984: 223).
For instance, the word that means name is phonemically represented
in three different ways, |iite|, |ite|, and |ita|. Sohn lists five different
environments that are involved in determining the right representation.
Here Sohn (1984: 223) makes a strong argument for using a base form.
Since the different realizations of the word name are due to sound
environments such as neighboring vowels, the word boundary, and
the presence or absence of a modifying word, we can easily imagine
that there is a base form in terms of their sound environments . . . [The
different realizations of the word name] are derivable from the base
form . . . by means of a few general phonological rules.
Sohn (1984: 228) proposed three alternatives for an adequate orthog-

raphy (1984: 229):
a. Phonetic spelling, where words are written in letters corresponding to

their actual pronunciation. Many sound alternations may, however,
be predicted from the sound environment. Therefore, this alternative
should be dismissed, according to Sohn.
b. Phonemic spelling, where words are written according to their
phonemic representation (that is, according to the proposed list of
alphabetic symbols).
c. Base form spelling. Sohn (1984: 229) stated: As we have seen, base
forms of words are set up by reducing any sounds caused by environ-
ments to their source sounds, that is, to those sounds which would
be pronounced if no sound environment were present. Option (b)
is closer to the phonetic spelling, but option (c) gives less variation
of the spelling of a morpheme.
Sohns appendix (1984: 233234) lists spelling conventions following

the general recommendations of the Yap outer Islands Orthography
Committee (Kuroiwa 1973). He stated:
Almost all native speakers seem to prefer tradition and convenience to
linguistic simplicity and clarity, at least at this stage of linguistic sophis-
tication . . . This is understandable when we take into account the popular
notion that writing systems are only for those who know the language.
He concluded that the spelling conventions they adopted are not
those of the base form spelling, but a more phonemic spelling; i.e., the
spelling adopted in the dictionary (Sohn 1975) and reference grammar
of Woleaian (Sohn & Tawerilmang 1976).
In order to reach a strict sound-letter correspondence or a base form
spelling, Sohn had to introduce a number of rules that make the spell-
ing hardly more convenient than the Caroline Islands script, especially
for the beginning writer, student and outsider for whom he thought
an orthography should be designed.
The Caroline Islands Script
Between 1907 and 1909 the idea of writing introduced by outsiders was
adapted and developed into a syllabary by the islanders of the Woleai
group for writing their own language. The script did not receive serious
340 alex de voogt
attention until 1960, when Riesenberg & Kaneshiro described and

analyzed the script using the few writers left on the islands. They used
the official and the only available orthography at that time by Smith
to transcribe the syllabary symbols.
Riesenberg & Kaneshiro (1960) stated that the Caroline Islands script
was used for personal correspondence, a catechism, records of chants
and magical formulae, accounts of travel and even for some govern-
ment orders. The Caroline Islanders also used the script in tattoos and
decorations of boats and houses. The wide use of this script suggests that
it was appropriated by the indigenous people. Even though Riesenberg
& Kaneshiro were aware of the different uses of the script, they did not
appreciate the fact that these uses justified the existence of the script.
If the script served such a variety of purposes, then there was and is
no reason to replace it.
New linguistic research in the 1970s by Sohn and Tawerilmang made
clear, however, that Smiths orthography was a poor one. The number
of letters and possible syllables of the language was much lower than
Riesenberg & Kaneshiro had assumed. The script appeared to have
been unjustly dismissed as an inadequate orthography. Sohn (1984)
suggested that the Caroline Islands script posed several learning and
research difficulties. When the Trust territory of the Pacific Islands
replaced the indigenous writing with an alphabet for the Woleaian
language, this appeared to serve only the purposes of the outsiders.
Sohn also dismissed the script, but not based on a new transcription
of the syllable signs with his own phonemic analysis, but on general
principles of adequacy and practicality. Since he did not make a new
comparison, he overlooked the fact that his arguments did not apply
to the Woleaian case. Linguistic analyses had the possibility of assisting
in the improvement of the Caroline Islands script, instead they left it
no future.
References
Barthel, Thomas S. 1971. Pre-contact writing in Oceania. In Current trends in linguistics

8: 11751187. The Hague: Mouton.
Brown, J. MacMillan. 1914. A new Pacific Ocean script. man 14: 8991.
Damm, H. & E. Sarfert 1935. Inseln um Truk. In G. Thilenius (ed.), Ergebnisse der
SdseeExpedition, Band 2, 6:2.
DeFrancis, John 1989. Visible speech: the diverse oneness of writing systems. Honolulu:
Imbelloni, Jos 1951. Las Tabletas parlantas de Pascua, monumentos de un sistema

grfico indo-ocenico. Runa 4: 89177. Buenos Aires.
Riesenberg, S.H. & S. Kaneshiro. 1960. A Caroline Islands Script. In Anthropological
Papers, No. 60. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington.
Smith, Alfred G. 1951. Guide to Woleaian spelling. Saipan: Department of Education,
Trust Territory government. (Woleaian version published as Gamwoelhaelhi
ishilh Weleeya. Honolulu: Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, Department of
Education)
Sohn, Ho-Min & Anthony F. Tawerilmang 1976. Woleaian-English Dictionary. Honolulu:
Sohn, Ho-Min. 1975. Woleaian reference grammar. Honolulu: University Press of
Hawaii.
. 1984. An orthographic design for Woleaian. In Studies in Micronesian linguistics,
Byron W. Bender (ed.). Pacific linguistics, C80: 215236.
Tawerilmang, Anthony F. 1982. A study of Woleaian grammar for the bilingual educa-
tion program in Woleai. University of Hawaii.
Voogt, Alexander J. de 1993. The Caroline Islands Script. ma-thesis, Pacific Island
Studies, University of Hawaii, Honolulu. Ann Arbor, Michigan: umi.
342 alex de voogt
Table 1. Smiths phoneme inventory
a father ch choose
ah father f aloof
aa fat j (a strong h)
aah fat k kid
ae fed l bottle (Brooklynese)
aeh fed lh balle (French)
e father m some
ee safe mw someway
eeh safe n man
i sea nh manikin
ih sea ng sing
ii sit ngh singer
o oak p up
oh oak r Brritish (trill r)
oa off rw Irwin (trill r)
oah off s sow
oe hors doevres sh show
oeh hors doevres t pat
u boot th pitepat
uh boot z adze
uu Nrnberg Hyphen () used for onglides or escrescent
uuh Nrnberg vowels in reduplicatives
v (like oe but with the tip of
vh tongue curved up and back)
w wood
y yes
b upward
c juice
g Bach
d bad
Table 2. Sohns and Smiths orthography. This table presents a comparison

between two Woleaian orthographies. Although, the comparison is speculative,
it illustrates the strong differences between the two.
Consonants Vowels
Sohn: Smith: Sohn: Smith:

p p i i
pp ii ih
t t e ae (?)
tt th (?) ee aeh (?)
ch ch a a
k k aa ah
p b iu uu
bb eo oe
f f u u
ff uu uh
s s o o
ss oo oh
sh sh oa oa
l l aa
r aah
m m ee
mm eeh
mw mw ii
mmw oah
n n oeh
ng ng uuh
nng ngh v
c vh
g g
d (?) extra speculative
j
lh
nh
rw
z
y y
w w
THE INTERACTION OF SYLLABIC AND ALPHABETIC
CUNEIFORM WRITING IN UGARIT
Introduction
The ancient city of Ugarit was located ca. 10 km north of the Syrian
city Latakiah (classical Laodicea) on the Mediterranean coast. It was
the capital of a small city-state of which the borders coincided with
natural barriers in the north and west (see map). Only in the south
was the border less clearly defined and there it had to be determined
by political means. The city was an important trading center and lay on
the crossroads of the main overland route from north to south (Egypt
to Hatti v.v.) and the main route from west to east (Cyprus to the
Euphrates region v.v.). The rich archaeological finds attest to the wealth
that this trade generated and the advantageous position and the profits
of the city did not go unnoticed. The great powers of the period, Hatti,
Egypt and Mittani, all tried to incorporate this small city-state into their
empires and to exploit its material wealth for their own purposes. Until
ca. 1330 bc Ugarit had been part of the territory controlled by Egypt,
but around that date it became part of the Hittite empire.
It is only after Ugarit came under Hittite control that writing is
attested in the city on a large scale. Although the earliest traces of
occupation on this spot go back as far as the middle of the seventh mil-
lennium and the site knew more or less continuous occupation there is
no trace of scribal activity in the city itself before the last phase of the
Late Bronze Age (ca. 13301180), even during the second millennium
bc. The only exceptions are a few letters written at Ugarit around 1350
and found in Egypt, but at that time there was apparently no local
bureaucracy. Of course, the lack of texts could be due to the fortuitous
results of excavation but at least from the late second millennium
there seems to be enough evidence to rule out mere chance (although
a detailed study of earlier layers could change this view). The begin-
ning of Hittite rule and the (re-)introduction of the script are probably
connected. Parallels in other Syrian cities (Alalakh, Qatna, Emar) sug-
gest that smaller city-states were able to manage their administrative
the interaction of syllabic and alphabetic scripts 347
affairs basically without literacy. Empires like Hatti, on the other hand,
show a continuous use of writing from the seventeenth century bc
and when smaller local centers were added to their sphere of influence
the formal relationship was not only sealed by a treaty in which the
rights and obligations towards their overlord were stipulated but they
also became part of the imperial bureaucracy. The reasons for this are
not difficult to understand. First, the Hittite king and his viceroy in
Carchemish on the Euphrates exchanged letters with the vassals on a
regular basis, which needed to be answered, for not answering meant
risking the wrath of the king. Secondly the empire imposed payment
of tribute on its vassals and the best way to exercise control over this
was through a local bureaucracy. Taxation texts from Ugarit show how
this tribute was exacted from all the professional groups and towns of
the city-state.
The script that was used in the city in the fourteenth century was the
Babylonian cuneiform script, in which the Mesopotamian languages
of Sumerian and Akkadian and the Hittite language in Anatolia were
written. Importantly, however, the script was probably not borrowed
directly from Mesopotamia. Until ca. 1340 the empire of Mittani ruled
over North Mesopotamia and local scribes trained there were among
the ones who brought the script to the west of Syria, as can be shown
by interference phenomena in the earliest texts written at Ugarit. The
language of Mittani was Hurrian, a language totally unrelated to either
Akkadian or Hittite and closer in structure to the Caucasian languages.
After Mittani had disappeared around 1340 Mesopotamian scribes
could come to Ugarit directly and the script and the language changed
accordingly over time (Van Soldt 1991: 519f ). Towards 1200 bc there
was an Assyrian scribe working in the archive of the atammu rab,
the chief administrator. At the same time some texts also testify to
the possible activity of scribes from Hatti in the city.1
The Cuneiform Script
When the Mesopotamian script was introduced in Syria it had already

seen a long development. Originally, the script was devised for the
linguistically isolated Sumerian language (around 3000 bc), but from
1
See Neu, in Dietrich-Loretz (1995: 115f ).
the middle of the third millennium we also find an increasing amount

of documents in Akkadian, the Semitic language of Mesopotamia.
After 2000 bc, when Sumerian had become extinct as a spoken lan-
guage, Akkadian can be divided into two main dialects, Assyrian in the
north and Babylonian in the south. However, Babylonia and its dialect
remained the prime focus of Mesopotamian culture throughout its his-
tory. Originally the script was used for Sumerian only and the signs
were to be read as Sumerian. For example, a picture of a foot could to
be read gub meaning to stand. But it could also be read as du mean-
ing to go. However, these values could also be used as syllables in
words that needed to be spelled phonetically. For example, the sign E
could be read as the word e meaning dike, but it was also used as the
grammatical element -e. When the Akkadians started to use the script
for their own language they primarily used the signs for their syllabic
values and less frequently as word-signs. Nevertheless, the originally
Sumerian word-signs remained an important element in cuneiform
writing and we now usually refer to word-signs as logograms or ideo-
grams and to syllabic signs as syllabograms. The logograms can also
be used as semantic indicators (so-called determinatives), for example
to determine the category of the word that precedes or follows it (like
gi, wood), while the syllabograms can be used as phonetic indicators
(so-called phonetic complements) which help to determine the correct
reading of a word, especially when a word-sign is used.
Examples of a semantic indicator are gin, (wooden) bed (writ-
ten before a logogram) and gigu.za, (wooden) chair (preceding a
Sumerian(?) word spelled with syllabograms).
An example of a phonetic indicator is GUB-az, to be read as Akkadian
izzaz, he stands (logograms in Akkadian words are usually spelled
with capitals).
Akkadian Texts at Ugarit
The language that was written with the Mesopotamian cuneiform

script in Syria was a form of Babylonian that was influenced by the
teachers who taught the script and the language(s) as well as by their
students. Only a few of the teachers and none of the students were
native speakers of Akkadian. With this script and this language the
scribes conducted the correspondence with the outside world, first of
all with the Hittite king and his viceroy in Carchemish, but also with
the other vassals in Syria and elsewhere, for example, with Cyprus. In
the local bureaucracy Akkadian was used for juridical documents and
administrative records.
It was probably the use of the Mesopotamian cuneiform script that
prompted an important invention in the city of Ugarit, an alphabetic
script written with cuneiform signs. The alphabet used in the city (and
a wider area around it) contained thirty signs, 29 of which had pho-
nemic status. The thirtieth was probably used to express an allophone
of /s/ and can be seen as a late addition. Three signs are used for a
single consonant, the aleph (glottal stop), but they differ in their vowel
segment: a, i, u. The alphabet itself is probably an adaptation of an
already existing linear script existing in the south (Canaan) where it is
attested as early as the middle of the eighteenth century.
This new script was first of all used to put the local literature in
writing. A number of important literary texts, myths and epics, have
been recovered. But the script also played an important role in the local
cult, as shown by the many rituals and incantations that have come
to light. By gradual steps the alphabetic script also came to be used
for texts which had been in the domain of the syllabic Mesopotamian
script, and many administrative records and even juridical documents
were drawn up in this local cuneiform. Most striking is the frequent
code-switching within the texts. Scribes could easily change from one
script to another and vice versa if they found this more convenient.
Thus, many administrative records written in alphabetic script also
contain captions in syllabic Akkadian, for example, to write numbers
with figures (which occur in the syllabic script) rather than spelled out
(as in the alphabetic script).
Schooling
Learning the Mesopotamian cuneiform script took several years and

involved the writing down of school material from dictation (originals
from outside Ugarit, which could have been used as Vorlage, have hardly
ever been found). In the first phase, the students started with simple
lists of syllables and continued with lists of signs, the pronunciation
and meaning of which had to be memorized. These lists were didacti-
cally arranged with the most difficult texts at the end of the curriculum.
Since neither Sumerian nor Akkadian were native languages at Ugarit
the scribes sometimes added an extra column to their schoolbook in
which they presented the words in their own language. An example is

the entry for man. The first column has the sign with its Sumerian
reading, the second the Akkadian translation, the third the translation
into Hurrian (probably for the teacher), and the fourth is the Ugaritic
column.
ZA = amlu = taruwanni = bunuu
The first phase,the teaching of so-called lexical texts, was followed by
a second phase in which words were practised in context. For this the
students wrote literary texts from Mesopotamia as well as rituals and
other cultic texts. Naturally, learning the indigenous alphabetic script
of just thirty signs was much easier and as a consequence the number
of exercises are fewer than those in syllabic script. However, it has
recently been suggested that quite a number of the alphabetically-
written religious and literary texts from Ugarit form as much part of
the school curriculum as their syllabic counterparts. For the literary
texts this can indeed be shown from the colophons at the end of the
tablet, in which the scribe identifies himself as a student. This may be
an indication that the scribes took the teaching of the alphabetic script
as seriously as that of its syllabic counterpart.
The Differences between the Alphabetic and the Syllabic Scripts
Unlike the syllabic cuneiform script from Mesopotamia which was able
to express both consonants and vowels, the alphabetic script was basi-
cally consonantal. It indicated three vowels, but only when they occur
as a segment to the already mentioned aleph-signs.
The main advantage of the syllabic script was that it indicated all
vowels, but its disadvantage was that it could not indicate all the dif-
ferent consonants occurring in Ugaritic. The alphabetic script had
a sign for each individual consonant, but ignored the vowels almost
completely. Fortunately, both scripts were used in the administration
to write Ugaritic words and the different spellings complement one
another to give us a more accurate phonological shape of these words.
Thus, for example, the word for slave, servant appears as ab-du in
Mesopotamian cuneiform, but as bd in the local alphabet. A combina-
tion of these data leads to abdu, a form identical to the word of the
same meaning in Arabic.
Idiosyncratic Use of the Syllabic Script
Since probably all professional scribes in Ugarit learned both scripts and
used them side-by-side in the same document there is a considerable
number of instances where the syllabic script was adjusted to scribal
needs. As we have seen, they always learned the Akkadian meaning
of the Sumerian logograms, but in daily practice they often skipped
the Akkadian and simply used the logograms for their own Ugaritic
words. This is most obvious when they wrote terms for professions,
for which they used both the logograms and their Ugaritic transla-
tions. The Akkadian translations are given below to show that they
are different from the corresponding Ugaritic words. In texts these
Akkadian translations are hardly ever attested, only those in Ugaritic.2
After the Ugaritic word the spelling in alphabetic cuneiform has been
added between brackets.
Logogram Akkadian Ugaritic Translation
l
TG3 alku kbisu (kbs) fuller, washer
l
SANGA ang khinu (khn) priest
l
MU nuh atimmu piyu (apy) baker
l
GAR.KUR akin mti skinu (skn) governor
The same procedure can be found in the many personal and place
names in the syllabic texts. Here, too, the logograms serve as a means
to write indigenous Ugaritic words, but personal names, of course,
could not be translated into Akkadian. The logograms may have been
used for their brevity. Note that sometimes rather rare logographic
meanings were applied, which the scribes had probably learned during
their training.
Logogram Akkadian Ugaritic Translation
pd
UTU-LUGAL (ama-arru) apu-malku (pmlk) apu is king(!)
p
ia-ku-SIG5-ma (damqu) Yaku(n)-nama (yknm) Yakunama (acc.)
uru
GETIN-na (karnu) Yn (yny) Wine (city)
uru
SAG.DU (qaqqadu, ru) Rau (ri) Cape
uru
SG (ptu) aartu (rt) Wool
uru
hu-ri-KA (bsu) H uri-subi (h rsb) Hyenas lair
2
An obvious example is the prevalent use of the Ugaritic word skinu, although the
corresponding Akkadian word akin mti is also frequently attested in texts written at
Ugarit, see van Soldt (2001: 5834).
3
The semantic indicator l before a logogram marks it as a profession.
The underlined elements refer to that part of the name which is spelled
with a logogram. The first name is remarkable because of the gender of
the second element. In Mesopotamia the Sun (Utu, ama) is mascu-
line, in the Levant (apu, amu, eme) feminine. The second name
probably means The gracious one (truly) exists (SIG5 and damqu
means good). It is a personal name that came to be used as a place
name. Yakunamu, Yn (from ynu, wine)4 and aartu have been
discussed in a recent monograph (van Soldt 2005).5
In particular the equivalent of KA in the last example is quite rare
and is in Mesopotamia almost only attested in texts written in the
standard literary Akkadian of the first millennium. In the older periods
it is attested as a personal name.6 Note that KA is used for a different
word in an example discussed below.7
The following examples concern cases in which the syllabic value of
the sign as used by the Ugaritic scribe is different from the ones cur-
rent in Mesopotamia.
Sumerogram Mesopotamia Ugarit Translation
dan-GI danni greatly
pd
U-sa-DUGUD () Balu-saduqu (blsdq) Baal is just
uru
MI-hu (sl) Silhu (slh ) Irrigated area(?)
uru
ZUM-du (rk) Raqdu (rqd) Resting place(?)
uru
-NIR-ba-a (nir) Tallurb (tlrby) Plum (city)??
As can be seen, the differences are usually rather small and they mainly
concern the nature of the vowel or of one of the consonants. The first
example is an Akkadian word for which the scribes used a value (n)
that in general rarely occurred in Mesopotamia, but which was widely
used in the periphery.8
For the second example, see the discussion in Ugarit-Forschungen
33, 2001, 594f. The syllabic value duqu for the sign DUGUD was not
used in Mesopotamian Akkadian.
4
Compare Hebrew yayin, which came into Dutch as jajem, a word for gin in
Dutch.
5
For Yakunamu, see pp. 175f., for Yn, 25 and 176, and for aartu, see pp. 44
and 184f.
6
Akkadisches Handwrterbuch s.v. bsu I.
7
See already van Soldt (1990:324).
8
See von Soden (1991: 30, no. 156). In Mesopotamia this value is mainly attested
in texts from the Middle Assyrian period. Note that n is once attested in a Standard
Babylonian text, see Farber (1977: 232, 60 with commentary on p. 256).
The value sl of the third example goes back to the Akkadian equiva-
lent sillu of the Sumerian word spelled GI.MI, shadow, which we
find written as MI in personal names.
The syllabic value raq of the sign ZUM (in Akkadian used for rk)
is so far only attested at Ugarit.9 A similar value rakx is attested in the
divine name Ninkarrak and in the Akkadian word abarakku (see van
Soldt 1991: 268, note 41). The value lurx is confined to the place name
T allurb (van Soldt 2005: 46f ).
There are other examples which show how signs and their meanings
can be used for etymological speculations. In a number of cases these
spellings served as a bridge between the Akkadian and the Ugaritic
words, in other cases they were probably meant to show off the pro-
ficiency of the scribe.
Sumerogram Mesopotamia Ugarit Translation
A.GR-D ugru; nru Ugar-it Field+river
field; river
KI-dIKUR aru; Adad Gi-Bal (gblly) Land(?) of Baal
place; Adad
KUR DUGUD-ri (kabtu, Mt Kapturi (kptr) Crete
heavy, important)
M.TIL(.LA) mu gamru sax-mid = samid it has been
full price transferred (land)
NA4 KA.BI aban gab abn srp alum
Read: aban ga14-b abnu surra-p
AL.TIL qati GUD.H I.A it is finished
(tablet)
Read: AL.BE alp
The first of these examples tries to etymologize the name of the town
of Ugarit. It does so by explaining the first part as the Akkadian word
ugru, (agricultural) land (written with the logogram A.GR) and
the second as the Sumerian word d, river, read t for this occasion.
In this way the scribe explained the toponym as a combination of two
important topographical features of the city-state of Ugarit (van Soldt
2005: 169).
In the second example the scribe tried to find a connection between
the Ugaritic element gi in the place name Gi-Bal and the Akkadian
word aru, place, by using the sign KI = aru. However, although
this could point to the meaning of gi it is not certain that this element
9
For the various syllabic spellings of the town Raqdu, see van Soldt (2005: 41).
of the Ugaritic toponym indeed has to be understood as place (van

Soldt 2005: 171).
The third example could be an attempt at an etymology, but this is
far from certain. Perhaps the scribe just wanted to use the logogram
DUGUD as a syllabogram. For another unusual spelling involving this
sign, compare the name Balu-saduqu discussed above.
The fourth example is more complicated. The Sumerian expression
sa10(M).til.la.bi. means for its full price (Akkadian ana miu
gamri) and is abbreviated to the signs M.TIL.LA or M.TIL.
However, in some Akkadian contracts from Ugarit the expression
does not refer to the full price, but to the fact that the property has
been transferred from one owner to another. In syllabic spellings this
word appears as the verb samdu, to (legally) bind (to). Since the
sign TIL also has the value mid it is possible that the scribe wanted to
create a bridge between the Sumerian expression and the terminology
used at Ugarit.10
Such a bridge between the two languages was clearly being con-
structed in the fifth example, in which the scribe(s) wrote the sign
KA (to be understood as ga14) instead of the more appropriate GA.
The reason for this was that KA offered a better opportunity for an
etymological explanation. In this particular case the word for alum,
Ugaritic abnu surrapi,11 literally stone for dyeing, had to be connected
with the Akkadian aban gab, the etymology of which is unclear. This
could be achieved by explaining NA4.KA as surru, flint, and taking
it as a syllabic constituent of surrapi. The last syllable was supplied by
the sign BI (van Soldt 1990: 324).
The last example occurs in a colophon to a copy of the lexical school-
text H arra-h ubullu 3 from the Maison-aux-tablettes (van Soldt 1988:
317[t]) in the Ville Sud12 of the city. The scribe wanted to write it
(the tablet) is finished, but instead of the usual AL.TIL (Sumerian til
means to finish) he wrote the signs GUD.H I.A, oxen. The solution
is to be found in its Akkadian counterpart alp, accusative/genitive alp,
oxen.13 The sign TIL also has the value BE and if we read the signs
as AL.BE we find the connection that the scribe had in mind: GUD.
10
For a discussion, see van Soldt (1991: 244, note 9).
11
This vocalization is not entirely certain.
12
For its location and contents, see Yon (1997: 105f ) and van Soldt (1991: 182f ).
13
Ugaritic also has the word alpu, ox, but its accusative/genetive plural is al(a)
pma.
H I.A => alp => AL.BE => AL.TIL. Since oxen has no meaning in
this context, the spelling was probably no more than Spielerei.
In the preceding pages I have given a number of examples which

show the versatility and inventiveness of the Ugaritic scribes in their
use of the Mesopotamian cuneiform script. Our explanations why
the scribes spelled words the way they did is mainly possible because
of the two different scripts used in the city. In other West-Semitic
speaking areas where Western Semitic speakers can be seen to have
used Mesopotamian logograms and syllabograms (Emar, the Amarna
archive), similar phenomena may have occurred, but they are more
difficult to discern because of the dearth of documents in the native
language.
References
Dietrich-Loretz M. 1995. Ugarit. Ein ostmediterranes Kulturzentrum im Alten Orient.

Ergebnisse und Perspektiven der Forschung. Mnster: Ugarit-Verlag.
Farber, W. 1977. Beschwrungsrituale an Itar und Dumuzi. Wiesbaden: Steiner.
van Soldt, W. H. 1988. The Title ty. Ugarit-Forschungen 20:313321.
. 1990. Fabrics and dyes at Ugarit. Ugarit-Forschungen 22:321357.
. 1991. Studies in the Akkadian of Ugarit: dating and grammar. Kevelaer: Butzon
& Bercker.
. 2001. Studies on the sakinu official (1). The spelling and the office-holders at
Ugarit. Ugarit-Forschungen 33:579599.
. 2005. The Topography of the City-State of Ugarit. Mnster: Ugarit-Verlag.
von Soden, W. 1991. Akkadisches Syllabar. 4. Auflage.
Yon, M. 1997. La cit dOugarit: sur le tell de Ras Shamra. Paris: ditions Recherche
sur les Civilisations.
WRITING DANCE
Joukje Kolff
Dance is, like any performing art, an ephemeral art. However, unlike
works of art in music and drama, that are usually preserved in writ-
ten documents, dance, with relatively few exceptions, can only endure
in memory, images, reviews, articles, sometimes in film and, during
the last few decades, on video. None of those media is a score in an
accepted system of notation that outlines the structure of the piece and
the dancers movements. While students of music and drama practice
and learn about their art form through performing the work of their
predecessors, dance students seldom get to perform pieces of repertoire
work. This is unfortunate. As a result dancers and their audience know
relatively little about their history. Unlike the other performing arts,
different interpretations of and responses to a work in modern dance
are rare.1
Although many systems of notation have been put forward over the
centuries (we know of around 87 [Guest 1989]), dance notation is still
sparsely used. I will discuss some possible reasons for this later. First,
I will focus on the characteristics of a few systems of dance notation
developed for Western Dance since the fifteenth century, finishing with
three twentieth century systems: Labanotation, Benesh and Eshkol-
Wachmann. I am particularly able to expand upon the Labanotation
system.
Another overview of dance notation systems has been written by
Brenda Farnell (Farnell 1996), an anthropologist with a dance back-
ground, who has employed Labanotation as a research tool, document-
ing, for example, sign languages. Most research in this area, however,
has been done by Ann Hutchinson Guest. Without her valuable contri-
butions, we would still know very little about the many dance notation
systems that were put forward over the centuries.
1
It is more common in ballet. Reconstructions can vary from variations of a theme
or a story, to attempts to replicate the steps to some degree.
358 joukje kolff
Different Dance Notation Systems
Guest divides dance notation systems into five categories (Guest 1989).
Those using:
1. Word abbreviations
2. Track drawings
3. Visual representations (a stick figure)
4. Music notes adapted for dance
5. Abstract symbols
There is some overlap, or integration, between the categories. For

example, floor plans showing the pattern of the dance on the floor are
used in most notation systems. Music notes can be seen as just another
kind of abstract symbol. Abstract symbols can be based on a visual
representation and a system of notation that is based on the stick figure
can use abstract symbols to show movement details. Also, word notes
can be given to complement the symbols in any system.
I will, however, keep to Guests division, and show examples of one
or more notation systems in each category, as they do illustrate the
various approaches to notating dance.
Besides the above categories, that demonstrate different ways of rep-
resenting movements, there are also different ways of looking at and
analyzing dance. Also the various systems take different viewpoints.
For example:
What system of reference is used? Where is forward and where is up
for the notator and dancer? Forward can be seen as where the dancer
is facing or it can be towards the audience or the front of the room. Up
can be in the direction of the spine or head or it can be up in relation
to the line of gravity, no matter whether the dancer has bent the trunk
or is lying flat down on the floor. Where do the arms go when they go
up?
Is the dancer looked at from behind or from the front?
Is the movement, its direction and distance, written or is it the result-
ing position or series of positions?
And there are various other questions one can ask about a system:
How does one cope with the three-dimensionality of the body? How
is that transposed to two-dimensional paper?
How precise can one be in timing?
writing dance 359
How much detail can be included in the score? And how much detail
is desired and needed? How much is left open to the dancer to add
using knowledge of the style of the dance, of the choreographer and
of the piece?
Over the centuries many systems of notation were used and then aban-
doned. Usually the elements and possibilities of the system responded
to the style of the dance for which they were created. For example,
if arm movements and carriage of the torso were clear to those who
studied the dance form, they did not need to be written in the score. As
dance evolved and dance styles went out of fashion, so did the notation
systems based on them.
Systems Using Word Notes/Abbreviations
The earliest known systems of notation were used in the fifteenth century
and were based on letter codes relating to the names of the steps in the
dance. In different European countries the names for these steps vary
slightly and sometimes a different letter was used. The following letter
abbreviations indicate one of the five steps of the Basse (meaning low)
Dances in French, Italian and Spanish:2
R reverence, the formal bow which commenced and concluded
each dance
s simple, a step forward followed by a closing of the other
foot
d (or de) double, two steps forward followed by a closing of the feet
r (or re or Z) reprise, a backward step
b (or 9) branle, a swaying step that consisted of two lilting steps in
place.
These letters could be placed under the appropriate music notes to
indicate the correlation with the music. The first printed book using
this established letter code was LArt et instruction de bien dancer,
published in France in the late fifteenth century, from which Example 1
is taken.
Of course, word notes are a great memory-aid for dancers, even now.
But they are useful merely for those dancers who already know the
dance and the style. As a document for future generations of scholars
2
Step information is from Guest 1989.
360 joukje kolff
Example 1. LArt et instruction de bien dancer (late 15th century). (Example 2

from Guest (1989); printed with permission from Ann Hutchinson Guest.)
and dancers, scores based on word notes are not sufficient. Not only
do they lack detail, one must also cope with their changes in language
over time.
Feuillet: A Track Drawing System
The system that has been the most widely used in its time is the Feuillet
system, developed by Raoul Feuillet. It is also called Beauchamp-Feuillet,
as there is some evidence that it was originated by Pierre Beauchamp.
The system was first published in 1700 in a book called Chorgraphie ou
lart de dcrire la dance. The system was very popular with the educated
classes, who strove to master the intricacies of dancing. Many dances
were published, to which we still have access today.
The Feuillet system could show considerable detail in a simple way,
such as positions of the feet, variations of the steps, and such as bending
writing dance 361
Example 2. Feuillet notation. (Example 15 from Guest (1989); printed with

permission from Ann Hutchinson Guest.)
or rising on half-toe, sliding, turning, a spring and some leg gestures

as well as some simple arm gestures and the holding and releasing of
hands. Carriage of the body was understood. The wide adoption of the
system, and the fact that it was in use for almost a century, allowed it
to develop in response to practical needs. Such development is essen-
tial for successful application to various dances. Most dance notation
systems developed since then, did not get the chance to be expanded
so extensively.
362 joukje kolff
The notation in Example 2, the Boure dAchille by Pecour, shows

a couple starting at the back of the room holding hands, the man on
the left, the lady on the right. They move forward, then turn away
from each other before moving on quarter-circle arcs to meet again
and continue towards their starting position on a straight path. The
pins at the start show the starting positions of the feet (fourth posi-
tion). The man starts with steps on the left-right-left, the lady starts
on the opposite foot. Releasing of the hands is shown at the end of
the first straight path. The lady ends her dance with a backward step.
The strokes crossing the central line correspond to the bar lines in the
music notation, which is also shown. Arm positions are not specified
in this piece of notation.
Saint-Lon: A Stick Figure System
Arthur Saint-Lon published his system, called Stnochorgraphie, in

Paris in 1852. The book included the notation of the Pas de Six from his
ballet La Vivandire. Example 3, shown here, represents the Cavaliers
solo from this dance.
The system was based on the image of a stick figure. It uses a single
upper line for the body on which the positions for arms, body and head
are indicated pictorially. The upper body images can be clearly seen on
the top line in Example 3. The body is seen from the point of view of
the audience, which means that, when reading the notation, one has to
swap right and left: the limb which is right on the paper, is in fact the
dancers left limb. Underneath this upper line, there is a five-line staff
for steps and gestures of the legs. Travelling is indicated by moving the
figures down- or upwards on the five-line staff. Upward is travelling
away from the audience. Supports are indicated on a line, jumps above
a line. Positions of the legs, although based on a picture of legs, are
slightly more abstract, as the notator deals with showing forward and
backward on 2-dimensional paper. The drawings in Example 4 show
one leg supporting, indicated by the thicker line, the other gesturing.
Stepanov: A Music Note System
Vladimir Stepanov created a dance notation system based on music

notes, which was published in 1892 in a book entitled LAlphabet
writing dance 363
Example 3. Saint-Lon notation. (Example 31 from Guest (1989); printed

with permission from Ann Hutchinson Guest.)
Example 4. (Example 48 from Guest (1989); printed with permission from

Ann Hutchinson Guest.)
364 joukje kolff
des mouvements du corps humain. The system was adopted by the St.
Petersburg School of Dance and taught there for a number of years. It
was the first system after Feuillets that functioned and was employed
amongst quite a few dance professionals. Stepanov died at the age
of twenty-nine and, therefore, could not develop his system further.
Alexander Gorsky took over the responsibility for the system and devel-
oped it slightly. As the system was adopted and used for a number of
years, quite a few ballets were recorded in this notation system.
Regisseur, Nicolai Sergueyev, brought thirty or so Stepanov scores
to England from Russia from which he revived several works for ballet
companies. These scores are now housed in the Harvard Library Theatre
Collection in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Leonide Massine (dancer and
principal choreographer of the Diaghilevs Ballets Russes from 1915 to
1921) used the Stepanov system as a tool for choreographic develop-
ment and expected his choreography students to be able to master the
system well enough to read his movement studies. Vaslav Nijinski based
his own system on that of Stepanov.
Example 5 is from the Princes variation in Act III of The Sleeping
Beauty. Dr. Hutchinson Guest wrote a translation of the notation in
words specifically for this chapter, using French ballet terms. One can
imagine that a description in common English would be a long text
and take a lot of time to write. The arms for the last section have not
been included:
The Princes Variation, Act III in Sleeping Beauty
Waltz time.
Measures 18: start in fifth position, right foot front, facing the left
front corner (crois), the arms in low fifth. Entrechat quatre, entrechat six
turning 1/4 to face crois the other side. Repeat entrechat quatre, entrechat
six turning 1/4 to face crois again. Next a pas de poisson turning to face
the right wall, landing on the right foot in arabesque. Immediately spring
up into an assembl turning to face the left front corner again. Repeat
the pas de poisson and the assembl.
Measures 916: repeat measures 14 but end landing crois on the right
foot in attitude, but with the arms down. Now travelling forward with a
temps lev (hop) into a small jet en avant followed by a larger jet into
attitude, the arms in the low open (welcoming) gesture. A glissade en
avant follows leading into a jet en avant in attitude.
Measures 1724: the dancer now travels backward on the same room
diagonal with a glissade turning around to the right into a cabriole en
arrire landing on the right foot and facing the front left corner, followed
by an assembl, right foot front. A pas de poisson landing on the left foot
writing dance 365
Example 5. Stepanov notation. (Example 74a from Guest (1989); printed

with permission from Ann Hutchinson Guest.)
366 joukje kolff
is followed by the glissade turning to the right and travelling backward

on the room diagonal. The last four measures are then repeated.3
Stepanov uses a nine-line staff divided into three sections, the two top
lines are for the head and body, the following three lines for the arms
and the bottom four lines for the legs. Right and left limbs are indicated
by direction (up or down) of the stem of the note. Directions of limbs
are indicated by placement of the music notes on the staff. As in music,
whole notes, quarter notes, et cetera, are used. They have an oblong
shape to show contact with the ground and are round for gestures in
the air. Timing is not as obvious as one might think. There seems to be
confusion over whether the position indicated is reached at the end of
the duration of the note or at the beginning. According to Guest, the
position was reached at the moment the note begins in the Stepanov
system. This indeed poses a problem. How does one notate the timing
of the first movement?
The Twentieth Century: From Dance to Movement Notation Systems
The twentieth century has seen the development of Modern Dance:

from Isadora Duncan to Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Merce
Cunningham and the Judson Church Postmodern dance happenings.
These artists rebelled against established classical ballet and renewed
dance, inventing and introducing a different use of body parts, new
movements, music, theatre spaces, sets and costumes. Consequently,
anything can now happen in a dance, support can be on any part of
the body, the torso can be involved in many ways, any type of prop
may be used, movements may not even be set. As a result notating
has become more complicated. We now need a flexible system able to
describe all movement.
Labanotation: An Abstract System
The basic principles of what Laban called Schrift Tanz (the staff and
direction symbols, for example) were devised by Rudolf von Laban
and were first published in 1928. The system has been developed
further by others and is now called Labanotation in the United States
3
By Ann Hutchinson Guest, February 2009.
writing dance 367
and England and Kinetography Laban in Germany and France. The

names stand for slightly different dialects in the system. I have learned
Labanotation. Notation was only one aspect of Labans many activities
in Germany, Switzerland and England. His Space Harmony theories
and practice still have an enormous influence on dance today. Laban
was interested in the roots of movement, in motivation and dynamics
and in affinities between shape patterns in space and dynamics, called
Effort/Shape qualities.
Many dances, excerpts and classroom combinations have been
notated in Labanotation and there are various publications of dances
and books about the system, most of them produced by Ann Hutchinson
Guest, who dedicated most of her life to the advancement of the sys-
tem. The Dance Notation Bureau in New York houses many dances
and arranges permissions and score hire for those wanting to access
the scores for educational purposes, research or formal stagings.
Practitioners of Labanotation around the world discuss the system
and its uses at the biennial conference organized by the International
Council of Kinetography Laban (ickl). It is there that changes or addi-
tions to the system can be proposed and decided.
Because of its use in many different situations, the system has been
advanced to be able to describe many types of movements appropriately
and in great detail.
Labanotation, as well as other dance notation systems, is used descrip-
tively. A prescriptive use would be interesting and not impossible.
Most choreographers are not literate in the system or have found it
too cumbersome to work with in creating dances. The simpler form of
Labanotation, called Motif, in which symbols describe a concept, such
as travelling, jumping or balancing, can be used more easily to prescribe
an outline for a dance and it is indeed used to that purpose.4
Labanotation is read along a staff that runs from the bottom of the page
to the top. The staff is divided into columns and, as far as possible, it
reflects the symmetry of the body. The two center columns are used for
indications of support, so a symbol in the right support column will
usually indicate a step of the right foot (support on other parts of the
body, e.g., hands, is also indicated here). The other columns represent
parts of the body, as indicated in Example 6. Movements of the right
leg and arm are written on the right of the center line, movements of
4
For more information see Guest & Curran (2007).
368 joukje kolff
Example 6. Labanotation: the staff.
Example 7. Labanotation: the symbols.
the left on the left. There are also torso and head columns and columns
for fingers, eyes and other parts can be inserted as needed. For clarity
columns can be left blank.
Direction symbols indicate the direction of limbs or travel. The
column in which a direction symbol is placed, sometimes along with
the sign for a certain body part, will make clear which part is moving.
Travel is indicated when a direction sign is placed in one of the support
columns. The direction symbols are shown in Example 7. The shape
of the symbol indicates the direction on the horizontal plane, while its
shading indicates the vertical level. High level is indicated using slanted
lines, middle by a dot in the center of the symbol and low level by the
black symbols.
The length of the symbols indicates the duration of the movement. A
notation for a walk with simple arm gestures is shown in Example 8. The
symbols in the arm columns here are longer than those in the support
columns, indicating a longer duration. The vertical center line is divided
into regular beats using short strokes, four beats in this example, and
the time signature is given at the start of the excerpt. Measure and beat
writing dance 369
Example 8. Labanotation.
numbers can also be given and, generally, the staff is divided into bars
with lines across the staff (here only one bar is given). In this example
the feet start together with arms hanging down. There is one step on
each beat starting with the right foot; the right arm moves forward and
the left to the side (to shoulder level) in the first two beats; on beat
three and four both arms move up to a vertical position.
Signs for body parts are used to indicate a relationship to a body
part, e.g., in touching. They are necessary for movements of the torso,
head and parts of the arms and legs (e.g., lower leg or hand). The main
parts can be seen in Example 9.
Example 10 shows page 17 from the score of Trio A by Yvonne
Rainer, notated by Melanie Clarke and Joukje Kolff. Here is a descrip-
tion in words of what happens in the first part of this example: Before
the beginning of the staff, the reader is reminded that the legs/feet are
held parallel (not turned out) and that the s/he is facing the audience.
Subsequent steps on the spot on the right and left are indicated, while
turning 180 (the turn sign is further out to the right of the staff ). The
resulting facing away from the audience is indicated. The dancer then
does a deep pli (bending the knees), the arms moving slightly away to
the side. Led by the fingertips and palms of the hands facing forward,
the arms move up, while the legs come out of pli, continuing up to
relev (on toes).
Any other type of movement such as turning, jumping and torso tilts
can also be indicated in Labanotation. For more information about the
Labanotation system please refer to Guest (2005).
370 joukje kolff
Example 9. Labanotation: the body parts.
Example 10. Labanotation.

writing dance 371
Benesh: A Visual System (Abstracted Stick Figure System)
The Benesh system was devised in London by Joan and Rudolf Benesh
and presented in the publication An Introduction to Benesh Dance
Notation in 1956. Although first devised to notate ballet, the system
has been applied to other types of movement and has been developed
in order to do so. The Royal Ballet adopted the system and is one of
the few companies in the world that employs full-time notators. The
Royal Academy of Dance in London now houses the Benesh Institute
of Choreology, established in 1962 to provide notator and reconstruc-
tor training. Use has spread around the world and many scores have
been written.
Benesh adopted the five-line music staff to represent the body, as
can be seen in Example 11. The bottom line represents the floor, and
subsequently higher lines represent the knees, the waist, the shoulders
and top of the head. It seems a handicap that there is not a line for
the hips, but the system has provided for movements of these joints
in other ways.
Here is a translation of Example 11, written by Liz Cunliffe:
Excerpt from Swan Lake Act II: Two Leading Swans recorded in Benesh
Movement Notation.
The notation shows one leading swan entering from the upstage left
wing mirrored by the other leading swan. They travel forward along semi-
circular paths passing one another upstage centre to finish downstage
in the left and right corners of the stage. This information is written
beneath the stave.
The information written in the stave shows a time signature of three
beats to the bar (Tempo di Valse). There is a two bar introduction then
during the next four bars the leading swans execute the following move-
ment phrase: pos temps lev in third arabesque, step forward and galop
arms in second position, step run and grand jet arms passing through
bras bas and first into second arabesque, coup under arms returning to
first position. In Bars 710, the phrase is repeated on the other side. In
Bars 1113 the movement phrase is again repeated but with subtle differ-
ences in the movements of the head and in the directions faced.5
As opposed to the Saint-Lon system, the Benesh figure is always seen
from the back, so we, as readers, do not have to reverse left and right in
our minds. Movement lines give a visual representation. Signs indicate
5
By Liz Cunliffe, February 2009.
372
joukje kolff
Example 11. Benesh Movement Notation. (Excerpt from Swan Lake Act II: Two Leading Swans; printed with per-
mission from The Benesh Institute in London.)
writing dance 373
whether an extremity (hand or foot) is in front of (vertical stroke) or

behind (black dot) the lateral plane of the body or whether it is on the
plane (horizontal stroke). Placement of the mid-joints, the elbow or
knee, is indicated by crossing the strokes and by an x instead of the
black dot. Bending is thus indicated. Timing is indicated by putting the
figures under the music notation or by using Beneshs set of signs for
beats and subdivisions of beats. Walking, rotating, turning and jumping
are also accommodated.
Ann Hutchinson Guest said of visual systems based on stick figure
drawings: Visual systems are based on the idea that all dance is visual,
that movements are designed to make pictures. This may have been
true of classical ballet with its vocabulary of selected, clearly defined
positions, but not all movement has picture making as its purpose, and
to try to describe such action in those terms is to force movement into
a straight jacket and thereby change its nature. (Guest 1989: 64). One
might wonder whether this cannot be said of all movement notation
systems as we can only notate what we see. Labanotation also describes
gestures generally as a flow of positions, although motion descrip-
tion (leaving the exact destination undefined) is also a possibility. In
both systems movements for different limbs can overlap, although Liz
Cunliffe, director of the Benesh Institute, states that the over-riding
objective is to show as clearly as possible how one action co-ordinates
with another.6 And both systems can describe movement in various
ways and in more or less detail in order to reflect the purpose of the
recording or convey the choreographic intention.7 Cunliffe writes: An
interesting difference between bmn and Labanotation is the fundamental
point from which they reference time: bmn uses the moment of arrival
in a position, Labanotation uses the moment when a gesture begins.
Although both systems can specify both the start and end of an action,
within the structure of their systems Benesh is generally less specific
about the timing of the start of an action.8
Eshkol-Wachman: An Abstract Symbol System
The Eshkol-Wachman system was first published in London in 1958.

Noa Eshkol studied Labanotation with Sigurd Leeder. Ann Hutchinson
6
From correspondence with Liz Cunliffe, October 2007.
7
8
374 joukje kolff
Guest writes that Eshkol found Leeders presentation of the system

too free and unformulated (Guest 1989: 118). She was interested in
intervals in movement comparable to intervals in music. To her and
Abraham Wachmann, an architect, movement should be described
without regard to dynamics, expression or intention. Indeed the system
is geometrically based, using numbers to indicate direction and amount
of each limbs movement. The body is seen as a series of connected rods.
Since describing all movements, in even a simple action as bending the
legs, involved quite a few numbers and signs, the system incorporated
some conventions and abbreviations; thus the action can be treated in
a more, or a less, detailed manner.
The Movement Notation Society, the official organization devoted
to Eshkol-Wachman movement notation, is based in Israel, but use of
the system has spread across the world.
Eshkol-Wachman notation does not include separate signs for parts
of the body, but has a staff, read from left to right, with rows for the
limbs. Only the rows of those limbs that move need to be shown.
Eshkol-Wachman sees all movement of a single limb as circular.
There are three types of circular movement and each is indicated with
a different symbol:
1. Rotary movement, indicated using

2. Plane movement, indicated using an arrow
3. Curved movement, indicated using
In rotary movement the limb moves about its longitudinal axis, so the
axis of the movement is inside the limb. The axis of plane movement
runs at a 90 angle to the longitudinal axis of the limb. The limb thus
moves in a plane. And the axis of curved movement is at an acute
angle with the longitudinal axis of the limb, so the action of the limb
creates a conical shape.
Along the staff, the above signs are written to show the type of cir-
cular movement. The row the sign is in will make clear which body
part is referred to. Additionally one can write a number to indicate
the amount of movement around the circle. The 360 of the circle are
usually divided up in eight parts and numbered 07, so 1 = 45. But
the unit can also be 30, or any other degree, so long as it is an aliquot
division of 360. Assuming the unit is 45, number 4 would indicate
circular movement of 180, for example, rotating the lower arm 180
writing dance 375
Example 12. Eshkol-Wachman notation. (Printed with permission from

The Movement Notation Society.)
376 joukje kolff
Example 13. Eshkol-Wachman: positions.
from a position where the palm of the hand faces inward resulting in
it facing outward.
The numbers can also be used for indicating a position. In this case,
the numbers are written one above the other and are enclosed within
brackets. The one on top indicates vertical direction, the one below
expresses the horizontal coordinate. Example 13 shows the positions.
Imagine that the center of this globe is put on the joint of a moving
limb to determine its direction. Downward is 0 and forward is 0.
The direction of forward depends on whether it is judged using an
absolute system of reference or a body-related one. An absolute
horizontal zero (forward) is selected at the beginning of a work. It is a
direction relative to the surrounding space, e.g., the audience, and, for
the rest of the piece, this is the ultimate direction for reference. The
orientation is indicated by a space labeled Front. Turns of the body
as a whole are related to it. Movements and positions of the parts of
the body can also be written either in relation to the absolute system
of reference, or body related.9
Timing is indicated by vertical divisions in the staff, which correlate
with musical beats. A movement starts in the beat where it is indicated
and lasts until another indication is given or until a thick or double
line occurs.
9
From correspondence with John Harries, October 2007.
writing dance 377
Support is represented by a short T in the foot row, indicating con-

tact with the floor.
Example 12 gives an idea of what the notation looks like. The fol-
lowing is a description of the first movements in this example, written
by John Harries
The dance is scored for three dancers. The metronome mark indicates
126 time units to a minute.
The starting position is upright standing, with the head and neck (which
move as one) inclined forward (45 degrees). The arms are downward,
with the palm sides facing forward.
On the upbeat, the left leg is flexed as the right foot leaves the ground,
the foot dorsiflexing. The right lower leg is downward, relaxed, and the
thigh moves into the right diagonal.
During a single time unit (column) head and neck are brought, still
inclined, into the right forward diagonal as the right forearm is turned
outward, and the right heel first taps the ground (rapid contact and
release), and the thigh is then brought into the left forward diagonal.
Over the next two time units, head and neck move into the left forward
diagonal; the right forearm begins to rise upward. The right heel taps the
ground, then the thigh is carried to the right as the left leg is straightened
and then flexed again. (The whole forearm movement continues through
five time units).
Over three time units, head and neck move to the right side, still
inclined, and the right forearm continues its upward movement through
45 degrees. The right heel taps the ground, and the foot is then relaxed,
as the left leg straightens fully; the right thigh is brought round to the
left so that it touches the left thigh.
Over four time units, head and neck are brought to the left side, still
inclined. The right arm is raised 45 degrees, so that the forearm is now
horizontal. The right toes now tap the ground, then as the left leg flexes
the right leg is brought to the right diagonal, and is horizontal; then the
thigh is lowered through 45 degrees and the lower leg is relaxed.
This ends the phrase, two columns from the end of the first line of
the score.10
What I appreciate in the system is that, generally, an indication of
motion is given, thus not focusing on positions when motion is meant.
It seemed to me that this would cause a situation in which, if one mis-
reads one movement, all subsequent movements will be in the wrong
place. However, I am assured that at points where one might need to
check, a mute position is inserted in the score.11
10
By John Harries, February 2009.
11
378 joukje kolff
Eshkol-Wachman notation has been adopted by scholars studying

animal behaviour. Although Labanotation has also been adapted for the
description of animal movements such as spiders, many publications can
be found using Eshkol-Wachman to show movements of, for example,
birds and crabs. The system has also interested those attempting to
formally represent movement in a computer.
A significant disadvantage of the Eshkol-Wachman system is that
it is so abstract and visually unlike the human body in motion, that
it does not immediately appeal to dancers, who do not tend to think
about their movement in terms of numbers and degrees of circling.
However, John Harries wrote: Practical experience shows that for
dancers who have actually learned to read EW this is not a problem.
The system becomes transparent, and they are able to focus on the
visual and physical aspect of bodily movement.12
Value of Dance Notation
One reason for the fact that notating dance is unpopular among most
dancers, is, first, they have not grown up with notation as a daily tool,
and, second, the body in motion is complicated to document fully
and notating a dance is generally thought to be cumbersome, time-
consuming, and therefore expensive. Another reason might be that
dance has not always been valued as an art form nor has documenta-
tion of it.
Also, one might wonder if, by recording the movements of a dance,
one has actually recorded the dance piece itself. Sometimes the story
line of the dance piece is most important, thus various versions exist
of Cinderella, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. Or the development of
the dynamics and virtuosity in the piece is what makes the piece what
it is. Indeed could not thirty-two fouetts be substituted by another
impressive accomplishment and still make the point of displaying a
grand virtuosic feat (Anderson 1975)? If the choice of movement is
arbitrary, what is the point in notating it? Whether it is useful to notate
a dance depends on what one values in a dance work and on the dance
work itself. There have been periods, as in the late nineteenth century
in dance, when the movement itself was not the main point of the piece
12
writing dance 379
and was subordinate to the story, music, costumes and design. It is

this view of dance that makes notation insufficient and unpopular and
can cause an existing notation system to be abandoned, which is what
happened with the Stepanov method. With the advent of the twentieth
century Modern dance, which involved examination in and renewal of
movement , the movement itself became more important, and so we see
an increased interest in notation in this period. Now, with the advent
of video, the pressure to use notation has declined.
On a more positive note, many notation scores already exist and are
in demand for reconstructions. The heritage they provide for future
generations and their educational value would be impossible without
notation. Also, by learning a dance notation system and therefore ana-
lyzing movement, one acquires a better understanding and awareness of
movement. If children would learn notation from a young age, along
with dancing itself, it would probably become a natural part of their
equipment, as music notation is for music students.13, 14
References
Anderson, Jack 1975. Idealists, Materialists, and the Thirty-Two Foetus. In Copeland,
R. & Cohen M. (eds.) 1983. What is dance? Oxford University Press.
Benesh, Rudolf & Joan Benesh 1983. Reading dance, the birth of choreology. London:
Souvenir Press Ltd.
Farnell, Brenda 1996. Movement notation systems. In Daniels, P. T. and Bright, W.
(eds.) 1996. The worlds writing systems, pp. 855879. New York, NY: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Eshkol, Noa & Wachmann, Abraham 1958. Movement notation. London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson.
Eshkol, Noa 1979. Movement notations: a comparative study of Labanotation (Kineto-
graphy Laban) and Eshkol-Wachman movement notation. Israel: The Movement
Notation Society.
Faulkes, Zen 2003. Extracted from http://panam2.panam.edu/~zfaulkes/ew_page
.html.
13
Indeed, children respond well to the learning of Motif (Guest & Curran 2007).
Its use has spread to Japan, Mexico as well as the USA. The recently established dance
program by the New York City Board of Education includes the Motif symbols from
the Movement Alphabet and is now taught in all its schools.
14
The following are some useful websites:
www.benesh.org (Benesh Institute)
www.dancebooks.co.uk
www.dancenotation.org (Dance Notation Bureau)
www.ickl.org (International Council of Kinetography Laban)
www.lodc.org (Language of Dance Centre)
380 joukje kolff
Goodman, Nelson 1988. Languages of art: an approach to a theory of symbols. Hackett

Publishing Co.
Guest, Ann Hutchinson 1984. Dance notation: the process of recording movement on
paper. London: Dance Books.
1989. Choreo-graphics: a comparison of dance notation systems from the fifteenth
century to the present. London: Gordon and Breach.
2005. Labanotation: the system of analyzing and recording movement. Routledge.
Guest, Ann Hutchinson & Curran, Tina 2007. Your move. (Second edition) London:
Routledge.
AUTHOR INDEX
Western first names have been abbreviated. Diacritics and markings for tone have
been largely omitted.
Abu Bakr, A. M., 74, 88 Benesh, R., 371, 379

Aguizy, O., see El-Aguizy Berger-El Naggar, C., 224, 234
Aikhenvald, A. Y., 143, 172, 173 Bernal, M., 179, 195
Akkeren, R., 156, 172 Betr, M. C., 88
Albertz, R., 89 Biggs, R. D., 11, 24
Albright, W. F., 80, 88 Black, J. A., 24
Allam, M. Z., 319, 323 Blench, R., 177
Altenmller, H., 237, 250 Blundell, D., 114
Amdework Mitiku, 188, 194 Boltz, W. G., 287, 291, 293, 295, 300, 311
Ames, R. T., 285, 312 Boodberg, P. A., 291, 293, 296, 311
Amha, A., 179198 Boot, E., 4370, 129178, 253280
Anders, F., 165, 172 Bopearachchi, O., 217
Anderson, J., 378, 379 Borchers, D., 1, 5
Ariga, Chieko, 40, 42 Boremanse, D., 137, 173
Asher, F. M., 210, 217 Borger, R., 10, 12, 13, 24
Asher, R. E., 180, 183, 194, 221, 234 Borges, V., Castillo, 48, 69
Asres, Yenesew, 179, 194 Bottro, F., 291, 295, 311
Attinger, P., 24 Branner, D. P., 101, 113
Aulie, E., 58, 67 Brasseur de Bourbourg, Abb Ch. E., 44,
Aulie, W., 58, 67 45, 67
Aveni, A. F., 69, 175, 279 Braswell, G., 177
Ayele Bekerie, 179, 194 Bresciani, E., 88, 236, 250
Azzoni, A., 85, 88 Breyer, F. A. K., 237, 250
Bricker, V. R., 45, 48, 67, 131, 138, 155,
Backhaus, P., 201, 205 173, 270, 278
Bade, B. L., 155, 177 Bright, W., 15, 24, 48, 67, 115, 195,
Baines, J., 249, 250 250, 379
Balbir, N., 217 Browder, J. K., 158, 173
Bandini-Knig, D., 213, 217 Brown, C. H., 130, 145, 151, 152, 173,
Barrera Vsquez, A., 43, 50, 55, 58, 67, 256, 266, 269, 278
140, 172 Brown, J. M., 327, 329, 330, 340
Barrois, R. R., 157, 172 Bruce, R. D., 137, 173
Barthel, T. S., 155, 172, 174, 278, 329, Bryce, T., 118, 127
340 Buccellati, G., 117, 127
Bautze, J. K., 217 Bumann, W., 313
Baxter, W. H., 285, 297, 310 Bush, F., 119, 127
Baye Yimam, 179, 183, 186, 192, 195 Bynon, J., 325
Behr, W., 281316
Behrens, L., 287, 311 Campbell, L., 130, 131, 133, 137, 138,
Beliaev, D., 177 140, 142, 145, 153, 166, 167, 173, 175
Bell, H. I., 321, 323 Carpenter, J. T., 35, 42
Beltrn, B., 131, 153, 157, 176, 253, 279 Carrasco, D., 177
Bender, M. L., 183, 186, 195 Carrier, C., 224, 234
Bender, B. W., 341 Cerny, J., 317, 323
Benesh, J., 379 Chang Bi-yu, 114
382 author index
Chang, Yu-hung, 93, 104, 113 Dietrich-Loretz, M., 347, 355

Chappell, H., 313 Diringer, D., 1, 5, 179, 181, 188
Charlot, J., 163, 176 Dixon, R. M. W., 143, 172, 173
Chen Jie, 314 Djamouri, R., 311
Cheng, R. L., 99, 113 Dong Zhongsi, 113
Choi, Y.-H., 152, 173 Downing, P., 311
Chuchiak IV, J. F., 45, 69 Drewes, A. J., 179, 195
Chung, K. S., 93, 113 Dreyer, G., 237, 250
Ci Jiwei, 311 Dcker, B., 324
Cialowicz, K. M., 91
Ciudad Ruiz, A., 174, 278 Edel, E., 80, 89
Civil, M., 24 Edmonson, M. S., 44, 68, 268, 278
Clarysee, W., 212, 217 Edzard, D. O., 24, 127
Claudi, U., 324 Eide, T., 224, 234
Cochavi-Rainey, Z., 80, 91 Eiland, H., 305, 311
Coe, M. D., 4446, 48, 54, 67, 253, 258, Eisei Hurimoto, 195, 196
266, 267, 278 El-Aguizy, O., 245, 250, 251
Cogolludo, Fr. D. Lpez de, 44, 67 Elias, D. L., 181, 195
Cohen, M., 379 Emmrich, Th., 304, 311
Colas, P. R., 62, 67 Englund, R. K., 24, 25
Cole, M., 201, 204, 205 Engsheden, , 85, 89
Cooper, R. L., 184, 191, 195 Eoyang, E., 282, 311
Copeland, R., 379 Erichsen, W., 84, 89, 245, 250
Coulmas, F., 100, 102, 113, 179, 183, Ernst, W., 251
195, 287, 311 Eshkol, N., 357, 373376, 378, 379
Cowley, R., 183, 195 Estrada-Belli, F., 43, 68
Cruse, D. A., 311 Ethnologue, 94, 113
Cruz-Uribe, E., 319, 323 Evans, S. T., 152, 173
Culler, J., 313 Evans. H. M., 290, 311
Curnow, T. J., 133, 173 Eyre, C. J., 249251
Curran, T., 367, 379, 380 Eyre, J., 249, 250, 251
Dahlin, A., 131, 170, 173 Falk, H., 207219

Dahlin, B. H., 131, 170, 173 Fang-long Shih, 114
Dakin, K., 133, 142, 169, 173 Farber, W., 352, 355
Damerow, P., 24, 25 Farmer, S., 207, 217
Damm, H., 327, 331, 340 Farnell, B., 357, 379
Daniels, P. T., 15, 48, 67, 115, 179, 195, Faulkes, Z., 379
237, 250, 300, 311, 379 Fell, D., 114
Davidson, J. W., 97, 113 Fialko, V., 157, 168, 174, 175
Davletshin, A., 158, 177 Fields, V. M., 174, 176
de Voogt, see Voogt Finkel, I. L., 925
Deane, P. D., 287, 311 Fischer-Elfert, H.-W., 79, 89, 317, 323
DeFrancis, J., 1, 5, 337, 340 Flchelle, C., 227, 230, 234
Depuydt, L., 237, 248, 250 Ford, A., 176
Derchain, Ph., 86, 91 Forrer, M., 35, 42
DeSilva, M. W. Sugathapala, 197, 198, Frstemann, E. W., 44, 68, 154, 174
205 Francfort, H.-P., 207, 217
Devauchelle, D., 249, 250 Frank, R., 304, 311
Dieleman, J., 86, 89, 320, 321 Freidel, D., 149, 157, 176
Dienhart, J. M., 43, 50, 53, 5759, 68, Fritz, S., 198, 205
135, 137, 138, 140, 142, 145, 147, Fhrer, B., 281, 283, 306, 311
150152, 173, 304, 311 Fukui Katsuyoshi, 195, 196
author index 383
Gallo, P., 88, 89 Hoch, J. E., 76, 77, 80, 89, 317, 323
Gardiner, A. H., 76, 89, 239, 240, 250 Hock, H. H., 100, 114
Gassmann, R. H., 283, 312 Hoffmann, F., 322, 323, 325
Gauthier, H., 318, 323 Hofmann, I., 233, 234
Geeraerts, D., 269, 278 Hoogshagen, H., see Halloran de
Gelb, I. J., 1, 4, 5 Hoogshagen
Gestermann, L., 251 Hoogshagen, S., 151, 174
Getachew Haile, 179, 181, 183, 188, 195 Hopkins, N. A., 136, 172, 174
Glassner, J.-J., 24 Hospers, J. H., 287, 312
Goedicke, H., 236, 250 Houston, S. D., 1, 5, 46, 52, 57, 68,
Goldenberg, G., 250 129131, 136, 137, 147, 150, 154, 155,
Goldwasser, O., 239, 250 173, 174, 177, 253, 256, 260, 263, 265,
Golnischeff, W., 319, 323 268, 275, 278
Gong, Y., 24 Hsiao Pai-ling, 298, 313
Goodman, N., 380 Hsieh, Feng-fan, 104, 114
Goody, J., 1, 5 Hsieh, S. Ching-yu, 96, 114
Graham, I., 63, 68, 136, 154, 162, 174, 276 Hsu, see Hui-li
Green, M. W., 24 Hu Xiaoxin, 294, 312
Greene Robertson, M., 174 Huang, Shuanfan, 95, 114
Griffith, F. Ll., 223, 234, 320, 323 Hudson, G., 179, 195
Grove, D. C., 167, 176 Hui-li Hsu, 96, 114
Grube, N., 43, 55, 56, 59, 61, 68, 69, 129, Hunger, H., 16, 24
130, 155, 158, 160, 168, 174, 175, 255,
256, 272, 278 Illius, B., 174, 278
Gu Dong Ming, 285, 312 Imbelloni, J., 329, 341
Guest, A. Hutchinson, 357361, Inagaki, S., 31, 42
363367, 369, 373, 374, 379, 380 Inomata, T., 173, 174
Guinan, A. K., 21, 24 Izreel, Sh., 78, 89, 322
Gutirrez Solana, N., 162, 177
James, G., 114
Haft, Ll., 114 Janert, K. L., 213, 215, 217
Hgg, T., 224, 234 Jansen, M., 165, 172
Haider, P. W., 78, 89, 91, 318, 323 Janssen, J. J., 82, 89
Haile-Gabriel Dagne, 189, 195 Jensen, H., 179181, 183, 195
Hall, D. L., 285, 312 Jespersen, B., 291, 312
Halloran de Hoogshagen, H., 151, 174 Jiang Xuewang, 303, 312
Hanks, W. F., 68, 69 Jin Lixin, 294, 312
Hannig, R., 323 Johnson, S., 100, 114
Hansell, M. D., 93, 102, 113 Jones, G. D., 130, 174
Hansen, R. D., 167, 174 Jones, L., 177
Harlow, G. E., 167, 176 Joseph, B. D., 100, 114
Haspelmath, M., 167, 174 Justeson, J. S., 51, 52, 68, 131, 133, 138,
Haugen, E., 93, 97, 100, 103, 113, 148, 153, 157, 175, 253, 278
152, 174
Hawass, Z., 323 Kahl, J., 237, 250
Head, S. W., 183, 195 Kammerzell F., 1, 5
Helck, W., 7981, 89, 90, 251 Kampen, M. E., 162, 175
Hellmuth, N. M., 144, 174 Kaneshiro, S., 327, 329337, 340, 341
Helmke, C. G. B., 48, 68 Kaper, O., xi, 66, 68
Hernndez, C., 272, 279 Kaplony-Heckel, U., 249, 250
Heyler, A., 224, 234 Karttunen, F., 152, 156, 175
Hintze, F., 225, 234 Kaufman, T. S., 43, 50, 52, 53, 5759,
Hinber, O., 208, 213, 217 68, 129133, 135147, 150153, 155,
384 author index
156, 166, 167, 169, 173, 175, 177, 253, Looper, M. G., 47, 48, 59, 60, 69, 131,
256, 257, 265, 266, 268, 269, 272, 278 133, 146148, 153, 155, 156, 169, 175
Kelly-Buccellati, M., 117, 127 Loprieno, A., 227, 228, 234, 304, 312
Kerr, J., 53, 136, 143, 144, 147, 156, 157, Louden, B., 304, 312
162, 175 Lounsbury, F., 44, 48, 55, 56, 69, 141,
Kettunen, H. J., 48, 68 175, 260, 279
Kilgarriff, A., 269, 278 Love, B., 174
Kittler, F., 251
Klein, D. E., 287, 312 Macadam, M. F. L., 229, 234
Klein, J. S., 304, 312 Macri, M. J., 47, 48, 69, 131, 133,
Klengel, H., 118, 127 146148, 153, 155, 156, 169, 175, 176
Klepousnioutou, E., 287, 312 Mair, V. H., 114
Kloeter, see Klter Marcus, H., 195
Klompmakers, I., 38, 42 Marestaing, P., 236, 250
Klter, H., 93115 Marslen-Wilson, W., 305, 314
Knigge, C., 87, 89 Martin, S., 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 69, 143,
Knorozov, Y., 45, 46, 51, 267, 268 168, 175, 176, 270, 279
Koenig, Y., 75, 88, 89 Masayoshi Shibatana, 98, 114
Kolff, J., ix, 357380 Masayoshi Shigeta, 114, 195, 196
Kottsieper, I., 8385, 89, 319 Masini, F., 114
Krebernik, M., 24 Mathews, P., 50, 51, 69
Krecher, J., 12, 24 Matthews, R. J., 24
Kristan-Graham, C., 164, 175 Mattingly, I. G., 298, 312, 313
Kuiper, K., 102, 114 Mattos, G. L., 101, 114
Kurth, D., 241, 250 Maul, S. M., 20, 24
Mayrhofer, M., 213, 217
Labat, R., 12, 13, 24 McAuley, Th. E., 113
Lacadena Garca-Gallo, A., 48, 57, 59, McCulloh, Jr., J. H., 46, 69
68, 69, 129132, 134, 135, 143, 144, McGee, R. J., 137, 175
147, 157, 167, 172, 175, 253, 256, 265, McNab, C., 191, 195
278, 279 Meng Guangdao, 313
Lambert, W. G., 24 Meeks, D., 236, 250
Lambscher, M., 174, 278 Meheretu Adnew, 188, 195
Landa, fr. D. de, 4547, 51, 67, 69, Melndez, L., 131, 133, 141, 144, 146,
266268, 279 153, 172, 175
Landes, Chr., 217 Menchetti, A., 88, 90, 236, 250
Lange, E., 318, 323 Mendel, D., 324
Laporte, J. P., 157, 168, 175 Michaud, E., 207, 217
Larson, J. A., 323, 324 Milbrath, S., 53, 69
Leacock, C., 255, 269, 279 Miller, M., 143, 176, 270, 279
Leclant, J., 224, 234 Miqier, 109, 115
Ledderose, L., 298, 312 Mitchiner, M., 208, 217
Lehiste, I., 100, 114, 152, 175 Mller, G., 86, 90, 236, 250
Leitz, Chr., 241, 250, 318, 323 Montgomery, J., 48, 49, 69, 161, 277, 279
Lesko, L. H., 319, 323 Mora-Marn, D. F., 43, 69, 172
Li Wen-Chao, 282, 312 Moran, W. L., 127
Li, Chin-an, 93, 114 Morenz, L., 74, 90, 237, 250
Li, P. Jen-kuei, 94, 114 Morris, A. A., 163, 176
Li Yun, 293, 312 Morris, E. H., 163, 176
Lieberman, S. J., 24 Most, G. W., 24
Lipinski, E., 250 Murphy, G. L., 287, 312
Lippert, S. L., 85, 88
Li Haixia, 312 Nakamura Hajime, 285, 313
Loewe, M., 311 Naseema Mohamed, 197, 205
author index 385
Nelson, Z., 154, 155, 174 Ridruejo, E., 114

Neu, E., 118, 127, 347 Riese, B., 155, 156, 176
Newland, A. R., 42 Riesenberg, S. H., 327, 329337, 340, 341
Nims, Ch. F., 8385, 90, 91, 319, 324 Rilly, C., 221234
Nissen, H. J., 24, 25 Ritner, R. K., 321, 324
Nock, A. D., 321, 323 Robertson, J., 52, 57, 68, 129, 131, 174,
Noegel, S. B., 304, 312, 313 177, 253, 256, 265, 268, 278
Norman, J., 101, 114 Robertson, see Greene Robertson
Norman, W. M., 131, 143, 144, 175 Roeder, H., 324
Novotn, Z., 102, 103, 114 Roetz, H., 311, 312
Nunberg, G., 287, 313 Rollinger, R., 91
Rosemont Jr., H., 285, 313
ONeill, P. G., 27, 42 Rubenson, S., 195
Odendahl, W., 284, 305, 308, 313 Ruiz, A. C., 68
Oelsner, J., 25 Ruiz, see Ciudad Ruiz
Olivelle, P., 217 Ryholt, K. S. B., 76, 90, 323
Osing, J., 74, 88
Otto, S., 89 Sachs, Chr., 217
Sagart, L., 283, 285, 289, 293, 294, 300,
Pallan, C., 131, 133, 141, 144, 146, 153, 313
172, 175 Salvini, M., 117, 127
Pan Wuyun, 300, 313 Sampson, G., 183, 195
Panman, O., 287, 313 Sander-Hansen, C. E., 304, 313
Parpola, A., 207, 217 Sanders, Seth L., 1, 5
Paul, H., 93, 114 Sarfert, E., 327, 340
Pearce, L. E., 16, 25 Sass, B., 76, 90
Pernigotti, S., 88 Saturno, W. A., 129, 145, 146, 153, 157,
Pestman, P. W., 239, 251 167, 176, 253, 279
Peust, C., 74, 87, 90, 228, 234, 242, 251, Sauneron, S., 86, 90
317, 324 Scharfe de Stairs, E. F., 151, 176
Peyraube, A., 111, 114 Scharfe, H., 215, 217
Pierce, R. H., 224, 234 Schele, L., 149, 154, 157, 159, 162, 176,
Pollock, H. E. D., 136, 176 257, 259, 260, 262, 279
Porten, B., 322, 324 Schenkel, W., 80, 90, 236, 237, 239, 251
Posener, G., 75, 90 Schmidt, P. J., 164, 176
Priese, K.-H., 224, 228, 234 Schneider, Th., 73, 7578, 80, 81, 89, 90,
Proskouriakoff, T., 160, 176 92, 251, 318, 323, 324
Pulcini, V., 100, 115 Schoors, A., 251
Pulleyblank, E. G., 283, 313 Schweitzer, S. D., 77, 91, 237, 238, 240,
251
Qui Xigui, 101, 114, 303, 313 Scribner, S., 201, 204, 205
Quack, J., 7392, 235251, 317325 Sear, D. R., 208, 217
Quizar, R., 131, 170, 173 Seeley, C., 27, 30, 42, 98, 114
Seitz, R., 167, 176
Rafinesque, C. S., 44, 46, 69 Sen, S., 213, 217
Ravin, Y., 255, 269, 279 Sessions, S., 177
Reents-Budet, D., 139, 174, 176 Sethe, K., 75, 91
Reilly, K. F., 167, 176 Seymour, Ph. H. K., 290, 311
Reintges, C., 291, 312 Sharer, R. J., 167, 176
Restall, M., 45, 69 Shaugnessy, E., 311
Ricci, L., 179, 195 Shi Feng, 313
Rice, D. S., 68, 69 Shibatani, Masayoshi, see Masayoshi
Richter, R., 180, 184, 195 Shirane, Haruo, 36, 42
Ricoeur, P., 310, 313 Shisha-Halevy, A., 250, 317, 324
386 author index
Sigrist, M., 92 Trk, L., 224, 234

Simon, R., 148, 152, 155, 156, 176 Tremlett, P., 114
Simon, M., 31, 42 Trigger, B. G., 233, 234
Simpson, J. M. Y., 195, 234 Truschnegg, B., 91
Sims-Williams, N., 212, 217 Tsao, Feng-fu, 95, 104, 115
Singer, I., 123, 127
Sisson, V. B., 167, 176 Uhlig, S., 184, 195
Sivan, D., 80, 91 Ulmer, G., 313
Smith, A. G., 334336, 341, 343 Unger, U., 291, 313
Smith, J. S., 98, 115 Upward, C., 100, 115
Smith, M., 82, 91, 321, 324
Smith, R. E, 160, 176 Vail, G., 272, 279
Soden, see Von Soden van der Veken, see Veken
Sohn, Ho-Min, 327, 334, 335, 336, 337, van Soldt, see Soldt
338, 339, 340, 341, 343 Van Stone, M., 48, 54, 62, 67, 69, 258,
Solana, N., see Gutirrez Solana 261, 266, 267
Soldt, W. F. van, xi, 117127, 345355 Vargas de la Pea, L., 48, 69
Spiegelberg, W., 86, 91 Veken, G. van der, 85, 89
Spriggs, M., 177 Verhoeven, U., 86, 91, 236, 251
Sproat, R., 207, 217 Vernus, P., 237, 251, 319, 325
Stadler, M. A., 322, 324 Vitharana, V., 197, 205
Stairs, E. F., see Scharfe de Stairs Vittmann, G., 85, 91, 245, 251, 319, 322,
Stairs, G. A., 151, 176 324, 325
Steiner, R. C., 78, 8385, 90, 91, 318, Vleeming, S. P., 83, 89, 92, 236, 251,
319, 324 319, 321, 325
Steinkeller, P., 117, 127 Vomberg, P., 323
Steinthal, H., 300, 313 Von Euw, E., 63, 68, 136, 174
Sternberg-el Hotabi, H., 251 Von Soden, W., 352, 355
Stuart, D., 43, 46, 5255, 57, 58, 64, 68, Von Winning, H., 148, 162, 177
69, 129, 131, 135137, 141, 145147, Voogt, A. J. de, 15, 67, 172, 179,
150, 153, 154, 168, 174, 176, 177, 253, 197205, 281, 327343
258, 261, 266, 268, 272, 273, 275,
277279 Wang Jian, 304, 313
Stuart, G., 44, 48, 69 Wachmann, A., 357, 374, 379
Su Jinzhi, 283, 313 Wfler, M., 24
Wald, R. F., 260, 279
Tacke, N., 82, 91 Walker, C. B. F., 25
Taddese Beyene, 183, 195 Wang, W. S. Y., 101, 115
Takcs, G., 73, 91 Ward, W., 82, 92
Tani, M., 269, 279 Weijini, 109, 115
Taube, K. A., 53, 69, 145, 155, 158, 167, Webster, D., 53, 69
171, 176, 177 Wegner, I., 117, 118, 127
Tawerilmang, A. F., 339341 Weippert, M., 25
Taylor, J. R., 255, 269, 279, 287, 313 Weninger S., 1, 5
Teeter, E., 323, 324 Werness, M. D., 160, 162, 177
Thiel, H. J., 120, 127 Wesselius J. W., 83, 92, 319, 325
Thilenius, G., 340 Westendorf, W., 90, 243, 251
Thissen, H.-J., 91, 250, 321, 324, 325 Whittaker, G., 155, 156, 177
Thomasson, S. G., 177 Wichmann, S., 48, 57, 68, 70, 129131,
Thompson, D. J., 212, 217 133135, 137, 138, 140, 142146, 151,
Thompson, H., 320, 321, 323 152, 166, 169, 173175, 177, 256, 266,
Thompson, J. E. S., 46, 47, 58, 69, 129, 269, 278, 279
160, 177, 256, 266, 268, 279 Widmer, G., 321, 325
Thompson, S., 114 Wiedenhof, J., 27, 93, 291, 314
Timm, S., 25 Wilhelm, G., 117, 118, 127
author index 387
Willems, H., 251 Zauzich, K. Th., 91, 92, 246, 248251,

Wilson, P., 87, 90, 92 319, 325
Winkel, M., xi, 2742 Zeidler, J., 80, 81, 92, 251
Winter, M., 291, 314 Zender, M. U., 50, 51, 59, 69, 137, 150,
Witthuhn, O., 323 177
Witzel, M., 207, 208, 213, 217 Zhao Yuanren, 283, 284, 313, 314
Woodard, R. D., 48, 67, 70, 173, 278 Zhang Guangyu, 96, 115
Wossene Yifru, 179, 195 Zhang Hao, 293, 314
Wright, D., 293, 314 Zhang Taiyan, 300, 314
Wu Zhenwu, 297, 314 Zheng Xianzhang, 303, 314
Wyllie, C. E., 162, 177 Zhou Wei, 306, 308, 314
Zhou Xiaolin, 312, 314
Xiamen University, 104, 115 Zhou Yuanlong, 306, 308, 314
Zhu Liqun, 99, 115
Yao Rongsong, 93, 115 Zibelius-Chen, K., 319, 325
Yalew Ingidayehu, 189, 196 Zimmermann, G., 47, 70
Yanada, S., 27, 42 Zivie, A-P., 76, 92
Yardeni, A., 322, 324 Zwartjes, O., 114
Yon, M., 122, 127, 354, 355 Zwicky, A., 304, 314
Yoyotte, J., 86, 90, 319, 325 Zwicky, E. D., 304, 314
Yu Min, 291, 314
LANGUAGE (GROUP) AND SCRIPT INDEX
Abyssinian, see Fidl Cretan, 78, 318

Acateco, Acateca, 137, 139, 140, 141, Cuneiform, 1, 2, 4, 925, 78, 80, 81,
143 89, 117127, 207, 209, 237, 242, 322,
Afar, 193 345355
Afro-Asiatic, 73, 90, 229, 324, 325 Cushitic, 179, 180, 193, 194
Agnwa, 193
Akkadian, 913, 1923, 78, 117120, Dawro, 193
123127, 207, 322, 347355 Demotic, 8292, 225, 226, 229, 235251,
American English, see English 319325
American Indian, see also Indian, North Devanagari, 80, 81
American, 75 Dhivehi, 197205
Amharic, see also Fidl, 179, 180, Dhivehi Akuru, Dives Akuru, 197
183188, 191, 195 DIRI, 1416, 24
Anyua, 194 Dives Akuru, see Dhivehi Akuru
Arabian, see Arabic, Old South Arabian Dravidian, 213
(OSA) Dutch, 100, 114, 352
Arabic, 49, 188, 191, 193, 197, 204, 211,
222, 232, 350 Easter Island, 329, 330
Aramaic, 83, 85, 9092, 207209, 217, Egyptian, 4, 66, 68, 7392, 221234,
319, 320, 322, 324, 325 235251, 291, 304, 312, 317325
Assyrian, 10, 21, 347, 348 Elamite, 23, 24, 207
Athabascan, 288 English, 21, 36, 38, 48, 53, 75, 96, 100,
Austroasiatic, 300 101, 105, 107, 109, 111, 112, 115, 129,
Austronesian, 94, 99, 114, 327 143, 172, 173, 191, 192, 197, 198,
Awacateca, 139 200203, 222, 223, 241, 256, 274, 277,
Awateco, 141, 144, 150 279, 282, 304, 311, 324, 337, 338, 341,
Awngi, 193 364
epi-Olmec, see also Isthmian, 157, 253,
Babylonian, 10, 19, 21, 24, 122, 126, 347, 278
348, 352 Eshkol-Wachmann, 357, 373379
Benesh, 357, 371, 373, 379 Ethio-Semitic, 179, 180, 193
Brahmi, 181, 215, 216 Ethiopian, Ethiopic, see Fidl
Burmese, 301 Eveyla Akuru, 197
Canaanite, 80, 318, 349 Faraulep writing, 332, 333

Caroline Islands, 4, 327343 Feuillet, 360362, 364
Caucasian, 347 Fidl, 4, 179198
Chol, Cholan (Eastern), see also Formosan, see also Taiwanese, 9496,
proto-Cholan, 135, 175, 265, 267, 268 114
Cholt, 57, 135, 138, 140, 144, 147, 150, French, 4, 24, 100, 176, 191, 222, 223,
253, 265 241, 342, 359, 364
Chort, 57, 58, 135137, 139141, 147, Fuamulaku, 198, 199
253, 265
Chinese, 1, 4, 27, 2931, 34, 3842, Ge-ez, see Fidl
93115, 281314 Gedeo, 193
Chontal, 138, 147, 279 German, 4, 75, 100, 114, 223, 248
Chuj, 136, 139141, 143, 144, 150 gibberish, 85, 319
Coptic, 81, 82, 84, 88, 188, 230, 246, 322 Greater Kichean, see also Kiche, 135, 141
language (group) and script index 389
Greater Mamean, see also Mam, 141, 144 Kharosthi, 181, 209, 216, 217
Greek, 78, 8590, 180, 181, 188, 208212, Kinetography Laban, see also
214, 217, 222, 226, 229, 230, 236, 304, Labanotation, 367, 379
320322 Koorete, 193
Kunama, 191
Hanyu Pinyin, 113
Hanzi, see also Chinese, 98, 101 Labanotation, 357, 366370, 373,
Hadiyya, 193 378380
Hakka, 95, 96, 99, 114 Lacandon, 135, 137, 140, 141, 150, 173,
Harappan, 207, 217 175
Harari, 191, 193, 194 Latin, see also Roman, 180, 192194,
Hebrew, 79, 188, 313, 320, 324, 352 211, 22, 223, 224
Hieratic, 86, 229, 235239, 244, 245, Linear A, 318
247, 249, 250, 317, 323 Luwian, 76
Hindu-Arabic, 188
Hirakana, see Kana Majangir, 193
Hittite, 78, 118, 122, 123, 127, 345, 347, Malayo-Polynesian, 335
348 Maldivian language, see Dhivehi
Huasteco, Huastecan, 131, 139, 141, 150 Maldivian script, see Taana
Huave, 151, 152, 176 Mam, Mamean, see also Greater
Hurrian, 76, 117121, 126, 127, 347, 350 Mamean, 139, 141, 144, 150
Mandarin, 95101, 104, 108115, 282,
Indian, see also American Indian, 80, 284, 301, 307, 313
181, 212, 216, 225, 226, 230232 Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (MPS), 98,
Indic, 197, 209 99, 107
Indo-Arian, 117 Mareko, 194
Indo-European, 197, 213, 224, 286 Mayan, 4370, 129177, 253279
Iranian, 23, 92, 208, 212214 Medieval Central Asian, 302
Isthmian, see also epi-Olmec, 157, 253, Medieval Chinese (MC), 101, 113, 283,
278, 279 292, 294299
Italian, 100, 115, 191, 359 Meroitic, see also proto-Meroitic, 1, 4,
Itza, 44, 130, 138, 140, 141, 144, 150, 86, 221234, 321, 322
164 Mesoamerican, 131, 152
Ixil, 139, 141, 145, 172 Mikir, 301
Min, see Taiwanese Southern Min
Jacateco, 137 Mittani, 118, 122, 126, 347
Japanese, see Kana Mixe-Zoquean, 135, 137, 138, 140, 142,
143, 145, 151154, 157, 166, 167, 171,
Kiche, Kichean, see also Great 177, 253, 279
Kichean, 135, 138, 139, 141, 145, Mixe, 138, 151, 174
147, 150, 151 Mocho, 139, 140, 143, 144, 147, 150,
Kachin, 301 151
Kambata, 193 Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM),
Kana, Hiragana, Katakana, 2742, 98, see also Mandarin, 284, 285, 291299,
107, 108 301, 302
Kanbun, see also Chinese, 30, 3840 Moji-e, 3134, 42
Kanji, 27, 3133, 97, 98, 110 Mopan, 135, 138, 139, 141, 144, 150
Kanjikana-majiribun, 27
Kaqchikel, 139, 142, 145, 147, 150 Nhuatl, 142, 143, 147, 148, 152157,
Karkamis, 118, 122 159, 168171, 175, 176
Katakana, see Kana Napatan, see also Meroitic, 225231, 234
Kebena, 193, 194 New Persian, see Persian
Keficho, 193 Nilo-Saharan, 179, 193, 194, 224, 229
Keftiu, 318 Nilotic, 180, 194
390 language (group) and script index
North American, see also American 190, 193195, 197, 241, 242, 250,
Indian, 93 317320, 323325, 348, 355
North-West Semitic, see Semitic Sidama, 193
Northern East Sudanic, 224, 232 sign language, 357
Nubian, see also Old Nubian, 74, 76, Silte, 193
223, 224, 319, 321, 323 Singhalese, 197
Nuer, 193 Sinitic, 95, 96, 99, 313
Sino-Japanese, 33
Old Nubian, see also Nubian, 223, 232 Sino-Sui, 301
Old South Arabian (OSA), 181 Sino-Tibetan, 301, 313
Old Yi, see Yi Sino-Vietnamese, 301
Olmec, 166, 167, 176, 177 Sipacapense, 139, 141, 145, 149
Omotic, 179, 193, 194 Somali, 191, 193
Oromiffa, 193 Sorobun, 30
Oromo, 191 South Semitic, see Semitic
Otomanguean, 153 Southern Min, see Taiwanese Southern
Min
Persian, 85, 213, 226 Stnochorgraphie, 362
Perso-Arabic, 197 Stepanov, 362, 364366, 379
Pinyin, see Hanyu Pinyin Sumerian, 911, 13, 14, 1924, 118, 123,
Popoluca de Otula, 151 208, 347351, 353, 354
Popoluca de Sayula, 151 Sumero-Akkadian, 207
Popti, 137, 139141, 143, 144, 150, 151 Suri, 193
Poqomam, 142, 145, 150
Poqomchi, 142, 145, 147, 150 Tzeltal, 136, 139, 140, 143, 144, 147,
Portuguese, 100, 184 150, 268
Prakrit, 209 Tzotzil, 139141, 147, 148, 150, 268
proto-Cholan, 151 Taana, 197205
proto-Elamite, see also Elamite, 23, 24, 207 Tai-Kadaiic, 288
proto-Mayan, see also Mayan, 57, 130, Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM), 95, 99,
136, 138145, 147, 150152, 156, 166, 104, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115
173, 256, 257, 265, 268, 278 Tangut, 301
proto-Meroitic, 319 Teco, 139, 141, 144, 150
proto-Mixe-Zoquean, see also Teotihuacan, 142, 148, 157160,
Mixe-Zoquean, 137, 138, 140, 142, 168171, 173, 177
143, 145, 151, 152 Thaana, see Taana
proto-Sinaitic, 233 Tibetan, 231, 301
proto-Zoquean, pre-proto-Zoquean, 135, Tigre, 191
137, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146 Tigrigna, 180, 188, 191, 193
Ptolemaic, 87, 90, 92, 226, 236, 242, 247 Tojolabal, 136, 139, 140, 143, 144, 150,
268
Qeqchi, 135, 139, 140, 143, 145, 150, 268 Totonac, 153, 169
Qanjobal, 137, 139141, 143, 144, 150, Trukese, 327, 331
268 Tuzanteco, 139141, 143, 144, 147, 151
Tzeltal, 136, 139141, 143, 144, 147,
Roman, 3, 49, 98, 99, 107, 109, 112, 115, 150, 268
191, 194, 197, 201, 202, 204 Tzutujil, 139, 142, 145, 150
Sabaean, 179181, 194 Ugarit, Ugaritic, 118, 121127, 345355

Sacapulteco, 145 Ulithian, 327
Saint-Lon, 362, 363, 371 Uspanteco, 141, 145, 147, 150
Sanskrit, 207217, 302, 303 Uto-Aztecan, 142, 143, 153, 154, 171, 173
Semitic, 11, 12, 7382, 85, 86, 8991,
117, 121, 123, 179181, 183, 184, 188, Vedic, 213
language (group) and script index 391
Wolaitta, 191, 193 Yucatec, Yucateco, 43, 44, 58, 64, 130,
Woleai, see Caroline Islands 134, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143,
Woleaian, 327, 331, 334341 144, 147, 150, 152, 161, 265268, 272
Xamtanga, 193 Zapotec, 164166, 169

Zoque de Chiapas, 151
Yeniseian, 288 Zoquean, see also Mixe-Zoquean,
Yi, 301 proto-Zoquean, 135, 143
SUBJECT INDEX
abbreviation, 27, 59, 60, 113, 140, 141, bird, 14, 15, 47, 55, 69, 138, 156, 226,
147, 154, 156, 157, 242, 256, 265, 272, 291, 378
274, 354, 358, 359, 374 birth, birth day, birth name, 156, 165,
abugida, see also alphasyllabary, 183, 166
185, 190 board game, see game
adaptation, adapt, adaptable, 1, 9, 27, 75, book pedlar, see pedlar
86, 88, 117119, 126, 135, 180, 214, borrowed, borrowing, 3, 23, 27, 73, 75,
221, 230, 233, 253, 260, 331, 335, 339, 85, 88, 93115, 119, 140, 142, 151,
349, 358, 378 153, 167, 170, 173, 174, 185, 188, 347
adoption, 27, 133, 142, 143, 145, 148, borrowed form/meaning/graph
170, 171, 257, 361 definition, 104
administration, administrative, 9, 17, boundary
25, 110, 179, 191, 200, 207, 209, 227, between script and picture, 31
235, 244, 249, 305, 327, 334, 345, 347, word boundary, 186, 228, 338
349, 350 bronze, 210, 291, 298
aesthetic, 41, 42, 304 Bronze Age, 123, 345
allophone, allophonetic, 119, 121, 302, bureaucracy, bureaucratic, 123, 239, 345,
349 347, 349
alpha-syllabary, alphasyllabic, see also boustrophedon, 183
abugida, 183, 197, 198, 224, 225,
230232, 301 calendar, calendrical, 34, 35, 39, 44, 52,
ambiguity, ambiguous, see also 62, 68, 69, 157, 160, 161, 165, 260,
disambiguate, 3, 9, 10, 50, 66, 73, 221, 266, 278
222, 226, 228, 229, 231233, 243, 244, calligraphy, calligraphic, 30, 162
249, 285, 312, 335, 336 canoe, 330, 333
ambiphonetic, 297 card game, see game
anacyclical text, 308 cartouche, 41, 161, 162, 169, 224, 225,
animal, animated, 34, 47, 50, 52, 53, 56, 266, 268
57, 62, 66, 136, 137, 151, 164, 165, cephalomorphic, see also head-shaped,
171, 239, 245, 318, 378 47, 50, 51, 5759, 62, 65, 67
anthropomorphic, 47, 53, 56, 57, 59, 62, character
65, 66 ambiphonetic, 297
anthroponym, anthroponymic, 232, 234 homosomatic associative, 296, 312
appropriation, appropriated, 30, 40, 42, intrasyntactic, 301, 302
244, 287, 337, 340 mutually commenting, 293
archaeology, archaeological 58, 68, 69, phonosemantic, associative, 107, 293,
127, 131, 138142, 157, 160, 164, 297, 298, 300, 308, 309, 312
174177, 226, 250, 253, 255, 345 circle, see also square and triangle, 36,
archaic, 24, 25, 111, 195, 311, 313 183, 185, 198, 241, 298, 362, 374
assimilation, assimilated, 100, 104, 113, classifier, 239, 250
244 clay, 9, 123, 210, 322
auxiliary script, 99, 106, 107 cnws, v, xi, 173, 278
code switching, 201, 202, 349
bamboo, 294, 298 coexistence, coexist, 80, 94, 204
bilingual, see also multilingual, 89, 90, colophon, 14, 17, 350, 354
93, 118, 173, 201, 202, 204, 323, 341 comma, see also punctuation, 32, 33, 186
bi-script, biscriptual, see also communication, communicative, 1, 30,
multilingual, 97, 160 97, 241, 333336
subject index 393
compound, compounding, 1416, 46, epigraphy, epigrapher, epigraphic, 45,

100, 109, 111, 162, 285, 290, 303 46, 4850, 52, 55, 62, 129, 131, 133,
computer, 100, 112, 114, 200, 241, 278, 134, 137139, 150, 155, 173, 176,
378 217, 222, 241, 242, 256, 257, 265,
conundrum, 19, 304306 266, 277
cryptography, 9, 14, 17, 21, 25 epithet, 134, 146, 156, 161, 170, 319
cultic text, 118, 350 exclamation, 98, 186
cursive, 27, 28, 30, 33, 41, 223226, 228, execration texts, 74, 87, 90
235237, 243, 244, 247, 322
fish, 52, 53, 333
damage, damaged, 61, 62 full-body, 47, 52, 5762, 65, 66
decipherment, 4446, 50, 5558, 68, 69,
136, 158, 175, 177, 217, 223, 241, 244, game, 3
248, 249, 263, 267, 271, 272, 278 ball game, 157
undeciphered, 145, 229 board game, xi, 31, 308
deer, 153, 161, 165, 166, 296 card game, 198
default, 77, 110 geminatae, geminated, gemination, 119,
determinative, 10, 12, 15, 19, 22, 74, 120, 192, 198, 215, 216, 226, 338
75, 78, 85, 87, 109, 226229, 233, gesture, 64, 66, 361, 362, 364, 366, 368,
239248, 268, 348 373
determiner, 294, 309 glottal stop, 45, 48, 124, 125, 175, 279,
diacritic, diactrical, 177, 181, 198, 200, 285, 349
223, 242, 247, 248, 297, 335 God, 12, 15, 17, 2123, 44, 53, 5862,
digit, see also numeral, 188 68, 69, 83, 84, 88, 136, 146, 150, 155,
digraph, 113, 223, 230, 231 156, 167, 170, 174, 177, 223, 227, 232,
direction of writing, 88, 133, 181, 183, 236, 258, 260, 270, 274, 278, 318320
283, 306 grammatology, 1, 4, 287, 313
direction of contact, influence, graphosection, 306, 308
development, 3, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, groan-inducing, 19
113, 157
direction symbols (dance), 358, 366, hahaphony, 304
368, 371, 374, 376 handedness, 64, 67
disambiguate, see also ambiguity, 3, 269, hierarchy, 96, 97, 202, 203, 262, 263,
285, 295 274, 277, 288, 289, 304, 305
divider homographic, 223, 226
sentence-divider, 186 homology, 286288
word-divider, 78, 85, 186, 224, 228 homonym, 52, 53, 57, 66, 221, 253, 255,
word-list divider, 186 256, 263, 265, 266, 274, 277, 286, 287,
donor language, 78, 96, 100, 104111, 304, 312, 313
133, 143, 148, 171 quasi-homonym, 39
dot homophone, homophonic,
dot for determinative, 247 homophonous, homophony, 57, 66,
dot divider, 186 68, 101, 263, 277, 278, 283, 284, 286,
dot for doubling, 136 304, 306
dot in Labanotation, 368, 373 homophonophoric, 295
dot numeral, 44, 165, 257 homophonous, 101
dummy, 106, 231, 232, 250 homosomatic, 296, 311
horse, 35, 101
education, educated, educational, see humor, 31, 40, 100, 283
also school, 10, 11, 19, 42, 62, 66,
9396, 99, 104, 112, 115, 173, 180, iambic, 300
184, 189, 191193, 195, 196, 317, 341, iconography, 49, 61, 66, 143, 148, 167,
360, 367, 379 168, 171, 173, 176, 177
ejective, 180, 185 ideograms, 10, 21, 74, 102, 227, 239
394 subject index
ideographic writing, see also logographic metonymies, metonymic, metonymical,

writing, 102, 221, 228 293, 303, 305
implosive, 192 mind, 9, 36, 68, 88, 287, 297, 298, 308,
infix, infixed signs, 23, 46, 129, 256, 288 354, 371
inherent vowel, 75, 198, 231 mirror, mirrored, 49, 269, 293, 302, 308,
interjection, 75, 243 309, 314, 371
intrasyntactic, 301, 302 misleading, 101, 103, 216
inventory, 43, 4547, 62, 66, 79, 123, missionary, 94, 99, 114, 184, 191, 193, 331
126, 162, 167, 245, 253, 254, 327, 342 mixed, intermixed, 27, 129, 130, 190,
230, 235, 255, 317, 320
jeu dcriture, see also games, ludic, monkey, 52, 53, 164, 166
play, 2, 3, 42 monovalency, 221, 230, 231
jokingly, 283 moon, 15, 17, 21, 53, 150, 282, 293, 308
multilingual, multiscriptual, see also
king, 9, 17, 21, 49, 50, 55, 59, 61, 62, 66, bilingual, 93, 97, 114, 115, 205, 312
69, 74, 76, 86, 117, 118, 122, 123, 138, multiplicity, multiple, 255, 266, 268, 269,
140, 147, 149 150, 158, 160, 167, 168, 287, 290
174176, 214, 223, 224, 227, 228, 250,
258, 260, 263, 274, 275, 278, 303, 317, narrative, 43, 53, 59, 61, 64, 145,
347, 348, 352 162165, 169, 171, 278, 279, 305, 310
kingdom, 43, 49, 7377, 79, 8183, 85, neutral, neutrally, 55, 64, 77, 198, 211, 232
87, 89, 90, 127, 223225, 227, 230, niche, 245, 302, 324
240, 242, 244, 246, 317, 318, 323 numeral, numeric, numerical, see also
ordinal, 10, 23, 25, 39, 44, 49, 112,
leaf, 57, 58, 136, 212, 243 161, 162, 164, 165, 186, 188, 194, 197
leather, see also skin, 212214, 236, 322
left-handed, see handedness obscure, 5, 16, 19, 225, 226, 302
lexicon, see also vocabulary, 24, 90, 92, obsolete, 27, 42, 254, 256, 268
114, 238, 277, 287, 296, 312, 313 onomatopoeic, 27, 53, 55, 66
ligature, 84, 241, 303 oracle bone, 291, 310, 312
lingua franca, 96, 118 ordinal, see also numeral, 257259, 262,
literacy, 9, 9597, 99, 102, 112, 173, 192, 263, 274, 277
204, 205, 250, 279, 311, 347 origin, 16, 28, 40, 78, 83, 86, 90, 104,
loan graph, 101, 106, 107 110, 129, 135, 136, 140, 142, 143, 145,
loanshift, 100, 152 148, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160,
loan translation, 100, 111, 114, 168 162164, 166, 168171, 175, 179, 210,
loanwords, 7392, 93115, 117127, 228, 230, 238, 253, 255, 257, 263, 311,
129177, 179196, 197205, 207217 318, 329
logogram, 10, 20, 21, 48, 57, 102, 129, originate, xi, 13, 14, 27, 33, 43, 118, 179,
148, 227, 239, 240, 256, 264, 272, 273, 210, 228, 294, 296, 360
276, 279, 348, 351355 orthography, orthographic, 12, 13, 23,
logograph, logographic, 20, 25, 45, 46, 24, 69, 7375, 77, 7984, 8688, 92,
48, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 66, 98, 102, 99, 100, 103, 114, 118, 119, 125, 127,
105, 129, 137, 148, 158, 160, 207, 255, 129, 174, 194, 201, 204, 216, 222, 223,
256, 263, 265, 266, 268, 272, 274, 285, 229, 230, 232, 234, 236, 238, 247, 251,
291, 300, 301, 304, 306, 351 256, 278, 286, 304, 312, 314, 319, 321,
logosyllabic, 45, 46, 207, 255 322, 334341, 343
logosyllabographic, 305 ostracon, 8890, 236, 250, 317, 323, 324
ludic, see also play, games, 42, 281, 304,
306 paint, painter, painted, 43, 44, 49, 61,
64, 67, 135, 139, 142, 146, 162, 163,
mass communication, see 165, 173, 176, 266
communication paleography, 184, 195, 236, 250, 298,
metaphor, 58, 221, 303, 313 311, 312, 314
subject index 395
papyrus, 78, 84, 87, 8992, 217, 230, queen, 69, 175, 224, 225, 234
235, 236, 248251, 317321, 323325 question mark, question particle, 80, 186
parchment, 179, 184, 185
parody, 38 rebus, 17, 287, 292, 297
particle, 19, 23, 39, 80, 98, 294 reconstruction, reconstructed, 16, 53, 57,
pedlar, iv, 3234 129, 136, 137, 142144, 147, 150, 151,
pen, see also writing implement, 64, 210, 166, 224, 239, 256, 257, 260, 265, 268,
211, 213215 285, 303, 305, 313, 330, 332, 357, 371, 379
philology, philologist, 1, 2, 5, 101, 234, recursiveness, 298
311, 312, 323 redundancy, redundant, 188, 194, 238
phoneme inventory, see also inventory, rhyme, rhyming, 282, 283, 288, 290, 301,
118, 126, 327, 354 312
phonetic complements, 10, 14, 5052, riddle, 184, 304, 311, 312
5759, 75, 76, 137, 158, 160, 238, 243,
244, 246, 266, 268, 269, 348 sarcasm mark, 186
phonophoric, 294, 297, 298, 300, 301, school, schooltext, see also education,
307, 309, 310, 312314 11, 19, 36, 73, 78, 98, 99, 188191,
phonosemantic, 107, 293, 297, 298, 300, 195, 201, 202, 204, 211, 249, 274, 303,
308, 309, 312 349, 350, 355, 364, 379
pictograph, pictographic, 9, 16, 291, 297, scribal practice, convention, 11, 136,
298, 311 175, 279
play, playful, playing, wordplay, seal, 24, 117, 298, 312
interplay, xi, 13, 5, 30, 31, 36, 41, secret writing, see cryptography
42, 66, 68, 93, 102, 112, 157, 198, 283, sentence-divider, see divider
308, 312, 313 shorthand, 231
pluriconsonantal, 74, 77, 79, 238, 247 sign inventory, see inventory
poetry, poet, poetic, 2, 30, 34, 189, 191, skin, 50, 61, 212, 217
198, 281, 282, 284, 301, 306, 308, 309, slang, 96
312, 314 sociolinguistic, 94, 96
polygraphy, 221223, 228, 229, 231, 233, sound inventory, see inventory
242 spiral, 306
polysemy, polysemous, 221234, square, 133, 161, 162, 169, 281
235251, 253279, 281314 standard, standardized, 27, 30, 33, 40, 42,
polyvalency, polyvalence, 221234, 48, 62, 95, 99, 118, 185, 188, 211, 227,
253279 236, 254, 282, 284, 294, 337, 338, 352
popular, 30, 31, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 96, stress (linguistic), see also prosodic, 45,
197, 216, 236, 295, 339, 360 51, 81, 129, 130, 140, 246
practical, practicalities, 41, 77, 241, 289, stroke, 9, 74, 186, 188, 192, 229, 240,
318, 340, 361, 378 244, 246, 248, 306, 362, 368, 373
prediction, predictive, predictable, 77, substitution, 4370
80, 290, 308, 336, 349 syllable inventory, see inventory
priest, 44, 89, 174, 184, 223, 235, 308, 351 syllabogram, syllabographic, 48, 129,
printing, 30, 31, 41, 188, 200, 240, 241 306, 348, 354, 355
pronunciation, 17, 19, 23, 27, 39, 50, 75, synonym, synonymy, 255, 266, 274, 277,
77, 78, 8185, 87, 95, 98, 118, 120, 286, 287, 302, 310, 311
121, 155, 223, 232, 237, 246, 284, 285,
293, 294, 296, 302, 313, 339, 349 tablet, 1113, 16, 19, 21, 62, 89, 122,
prose, 283, 285 123, 210, 257, 318, 322, 354
prosodic, see also stress, tone, 289 tattoo, 330, 340
pun, punning, 9, 17, 19, 20, 22, 30, tone, see also prosodic, 112, 114, 222, 284
311314, 322 toponym, 67, 139, 155, 156, 353, 354
punctuation, see also comma, divider, triangle, 286, 303
question mark, 186 trigraph, see digraph
pyramid, 75, 225, 226 typewriter, 200
396 subject index
undeciphered, see decipherment wax, 210

unreadable, 235251 wood, 19, 49, 210
unwritten, 101, 106, 107 woodblock printing, see printing
word-divider, see divider
versatility, 2, 5, 204, 283, 355 word boundary, see also divider, 228, 338
video, 357, 379 wordlist, see lexicon, vocabulary
vocabulary, see also lexicon, 49, 67, 68, writing implement, see also pen, 64, 239
73, 78, 87, 91, 143, 173176, 245, 277,
322, 373 zodiac, 34, 35
zoomorphic, 47, 60, 62, 65, 66, 138

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The Idea of Writing

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978 90 04 17446 7

Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by

printed in the netherlands

Introducing Writing on Writing ..................................................... 1

Strange Byways in Cuneiform Writing .......................................... 9

Scripts and Shapes: The Interplay of Chinese Characters and

Substitution, Substitution, Substitution: The Many Faces of

From Group-Writing to Word Association: Representation

What is Being Borrowed? Language and Script Contact in

The Adaptation of the Cuneiform Script to Foreign

Loanwords, Foreign Words, and Foreign Signs in

On Loans and Additions to the Fidl (Ethiopic)

Languages and Scripts in the Maldive Islands: Coding and

Foreign Terms in Sanskrit Pertaining to Writing ........................ 207

Reducing Polyvalency in Writing Systems: From Egyptian to

Difficult Hieroglyphs and Unreadable Demotic?

Maya Writing: Synonyms and Homonyms, Polyvalency and

In the Interstices of Representation: Ludic Writing and the

TOWARDS ANOTHER SCRIPT

Egyptian Writing for Non-Egyptian Languages and Vice Versa:

The Caroline Islands Script: A Linguistic Confrontation ........... 327

The Interaction of Syllabic and Alphabetic Cuneiform Writing

Writing Dance .................................................................................... 357

Author Index ...................................................................................... 381

The idea originated at a conference on board games, where the two

The Idea of Writing: Play and Complexity is an exploration of the

A broad perspective on the study of writing systems increases its pos-

Play in writing, also known as jeu dcriture, is the individuals explora-

ways to write sounds or sound sequences not immediately found in

Only a selection of the participants and writing systems presented at

four main writing systems for which a tradition of research on writing

The study of writing systems, also known as grammatology, is not a

Writing systems do not belong exclusively to grammatologists.

Borchers, D. F. Kammerzell & S. Weninger 2001. Hieroglyphen Alphabete, Schrift-

Meanwhile, parallel developments in usage meant the creation

1. Any given phonetic sign, such as BA or LU, also had a range of

A further point was that throughout its long history Mesopotamian

words were spelled. These assorted phenomena, magnified by perpetu-

Sign substitution: UD.GAL.NUN

The unappetizing term UD.GAL.NUN is applied by Assyriologists to

Basic conventional uses: an (above, heaven, sky, An), dingir

Basic conventional uses: ud (sun, day), bar6, babbar, dg, hd and

work is yet to be done. Some forty-five UD.GAL.NUN signs have been

Normal values: nun, zil/sl/sil

SHRINE (AB) later

or UNUG (complex AB) later

and such principles probably underpin many Diri compounds.

en-ku-um EN.PAP.SIG7.NUN.ME.EZENxKASKAL enkummu

200 <:> LUGAL : 27 : MAR : 10 : mu-tu : SI- UB : -ru-ur- GI6.GI6-ma

The natural employment of rebus writings that underlay cuneiform from

The Akkadian word for chariot is narkabtu, a feminine noun from

In a magical text (Kcher 1964), the word sissiktu, fringe, in the

A final medical example, for the connoisseur, is truly outrageous. There

This proves to be a deadly double-pun, and perhaps the only one

Fun with NAB and MUN

experimenting with a complex script of their own, usually called proto-

References and Further Reading

Biggs, R. D. 1974. Inscriptions from Tell Ab Salbkh. Oriental Institute Publications