Maya writing and OT?
Maya Hieroglyph Dictionary by Peter Mathews and Péter Bíró includes not only Mayan words and syllables, the older Thompson’s Catalogue of Maya Signs, but also a number of brief intro to the language(s) and orthography.
MAYA HIEROGLYPH DICTIONARY
© Peter Mathews and Péter Bíró
Drawings by John Montgomery
I was lead there by David Mora-Marin’s (unpublished?) manuscript:
Affixation Conventionalization Hypothesis: An Explanation of Regularly Disharmonic and Synharmonic Spellings in Mayan Writing. PDF. (Alternative explanation of Mayan orthographic practices to that by Houston et al. 1998, 2004.) **WORK IN PROGRESS: PLEASE CONTACT AUTHOR BEFORE CITING IN A PAPER**
where he explicated a theory of synharmonic and disharmonic spelling of word-final consonents (this is as far as I can understand and describe without too much jargonese) in Mayan writing. My understanding of the ACH is that the problem is not syn- or dis-, but these are examples of under-spelling, the convention to often drop the last phoneme/syllable of a well-known (perhaps by context) word, particularly its suffix(es). I admit my "feeling-of-knowing" is less than 50% in this case. My apology for any misinformation.
The Powerpoint version of his following talk is helpful:
Affixation Conventionalization: Explanation of Conventionalized Spellings in Mayan Writing. PDF. Paper presented at the 2004-2005 SSILA Conference in Oakland, California. For accompanying PowerPoint slideshow click here.
Thinking how this particular Mayan orthographic convention may be expressed within an OT, we can assume something like:
- a bunch of Correspondence between morphological constituents to phonological values of logographic and/or logosyllabic symbols; including one for LastSuffix; A morpheme-level correspondence system seems quite intuitive and commensensial. Pure phonetic writing was inconsistent with Mayan beliefs about writing and its societal functions (yeah, yeah. I made this up).
Suffixes may tend to be written with syllabic symbols where root morphemes logographic. This can be enforced with a two-tier constraint system (below)
- a lazyness Markedness constraint: LeastEffort (?? may not be a good one).
Where
- Faithfulness to Root, written primarily with logographic symbols (I assume, without knowing a single sign of Mayan)
- Faithfulness (general) — with logosyllabary — except for the LastSuffix. When F(root) dominants, this means syllabic spelling for suffixes only.
- Lazyness: LeaseEffort
- LastSuffix
There will, of course, be more complications, but to the extent Mayan writing became systematized and highly routinized, OT principles should apply.
Interestingly, the coexistense of logographic and syllabic writing would be an counterexample of Sproat’s Consistency principle. If an orthography has two tiers, one requiring logographs and the other syllabic or even alphabetic, it seems one (likely the phonetic) system should eventually take over the other, unless prohibitted strongly by other considerations. I know that the single most frequent writing error in Chinese is homophone substitution, where the logo-syllabic princple gives way to pure syllabic writing. I was constanted corrected (should we say Capital Correction?) as a kid, being drilled to keep the bar high to avoid "sloppy" homophonic writing. So far some 1 billion people are successful in keeping Chinese writing from slipping into a syllabary. I wonder if the struggle ever happened in Mayan.
From an OT perspective, the last learned, absolute "rule" *should be* at the top of the constraint hierarchy, but it’s often misplaced, dominated by existing "habits." Thus, if the #1 constraint listed above gives away, then everything can be "logo-syllabically" spelt.
Maybe sloppiness nevery happened among Mayan scribes, for they’d have been subject to Captial Correction.