AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Maya glyphs interpretation8/23/2023 ![]() Coe 2003:199–200 Zender 2004)-many such signs show objects being held, scattered, indexed or supported in some way. But, apart from glyphs like K’AB, “hand” (or syllabic k’a-ba)-and a few characters derived from hand measurements (e.g., a valuable study by Boot 2003:6 see also M. Ch’orti’, its descendant language, identifies the thumb as the “mother” of the other fingers ( u tu’ uk’ab, Houston et al. In Ch’olti’, for example, a Mayan language of the Colonial period, the pinky is the “child of the hand” ( v-y-al ca cab ). The ancient Maya certainly associated the human hand with action and broader sets of meaning (e.g., Houston et al 2006:30 Palka 2002 Stuart 2002). By various theories, the hand became associated, as humanity evolved, with effective tool use, meaningful gestures, hierarchy, and “goal-directed action” (Cochet and Byrne 2013:531). The time depth of these notions goes far back, perhaps to a distant past. In English, there are words like “command,” “mandate,” “manipulate,” all taken in part from Latin manus, “hand” a person can be “handy” (dexterous) and, in Germanic languages, a sense of emotion merges with a tactile sense of “feeling” (e.g., Alpenfels 1955:15–16). The hand also inflects terms for making and doing. Dancers showed it, scribes too, perhaps to keep ink from smudging or to balance a brush over a page ( ). Among the Maya, as David Stuart observes, an extended pinky stands for elegance and skill. Held a certain way, fingers placed just so, it can reassure, offend, accentuate, direct. The human hand is, aside from the face, the most expressive of body parts.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |