(first of all, sorry group members that this is long. Feel free to only read as much as interests you)
Here is the writing that we received (image courtesy of group 6's blog):
It is written in ancient Mayan hieroglyphs. I volunteered to do the translation of the sentence for our group, so I got to learn a little bit about Mayan writing. Each of those symbols, as you can probably see, is made up of several different parts. Some of the parts are phonetic, while others of the parts contain meaning. This actually reminded me somewhat of the Chinese characters I have studied, which also are part phonetic and part meaning, although the two cultures put their meaning and phonetic parts together in a slightly different way. I think the term "Mayan characters" is probably more accurate than "hieroglyphs." Mayan characters are read left to right and top to bottom, but not in as simple of a way as English. The characters are organized in a grid, but you don't just go down the line. You first read the top left corner, then the one directly to the right of it, then the character below the first one, then the one directly to the right of that, then two below the first, and so on and so forth.
At first I just tried to look up the characters on my own, but quickly found that, while I could find the constituents of each character, I could not find what all of them meant when they were put together. I am used to looking up characters by parts, because I have done it a lot with Chinese/Japanese characters. However, there aren't really any great Ancient Mayan Character Dictionaries online like there are for Japanese and Chinese (and considering how accurate our original artifact was, I'm not sure how useful a dictionary would have been, even if there had been one). I finally managed to find a key on group 6's blog that told both where the group got the characters and what they each meant.
I looked them up from the place they originally came from so that I would understand their meaning. This inscription contains the name and title of a man named Chaki (It is unclear whether the last vowel of the names was pronounced or not, since all Mayan phonetic parts contain both a consonant and a vowel). After his name, the stone lists the names of his mother and father. This was interesting to translate into English, because the words they use are "son of (father)" and "son of (mother)," which are distinct in Mayan. The words "son of" in English, however, don't specify the gender of the parent, so I had to figure out a way to indicate this. If I just said "son of Yuluku son of Xoko," then it would sound like Xoko was Chaki's grandfather rather than his mother. I decided to simply write it "son of Yuluku and Xoko," which I feel carries the same meaning.
Next comes the title of Day Keeper. This means that Chaki was very knowledgeable about the Mayan calendar (the one that says the world will end next year). It was a very important position.
Last comes the name of a city "Red Lake City", which indicates where Chaki was from.
All of the names are written phonetically, which each part of the character being a different syllable.
Translation: English-Old Irish
Once I had the phrase in English, next I had to translate it into Old Irish. This is a different language than our original stone inscription, but I chose it because it is more authentic, and I also was able to find a really really wonderful website that gave me all the information I needed about it. First, I looked up each word that I would need individually:
attá--is
a--his
ainm--name
mac--son of
ocus--and
láa, lá--Day
con°oí--keeps, preserves
derg --red
linn--lake
baile--city
I looked up Old Irish word order, and found that the verb comes first in the sentence, followed by the subject, and then the object. I looked at several examples, and adjectives seemed to come after the noun that they described, so with all this in mind, I came up with this:
is a ainm Chaki mac Yuluku ocus Xako, conoi laa, baile derg linn
lit. "is his name Chaki son of Yuluku and Xaco, keeps day, city red lake"
Still, Old Irish isn't exactly the language that Ogham would have been written it. It is the later version, which was written in the Roman Alphabet. After I made this translation, I found on Wikipedia, the way that some of these same things were said in the actual Ogham language, which was known as Primitive Irish. I also fiddled with the spelling of the names so that they fit into the Ogham alphabet which, for example, does not contain the sound "ch." I did this by choosing the closest consonant phonetically to the foreign one. My revised sentence is as follows:
anm taci maqi iulucu ocus saco conoi la baile derg linn
And that is what ended up on our stone. It probably isn't exactly how they would have said it 1500 years ago, but it is close enough.
Carving the Stone:
We met as a group Saturday morning at 8:30 to actually carve our stone. We abandoned the idea of doing it authentically with chisel and hammer (because that would have been insane), and instead broke out the power tools!
We drew on the stone with pencil so we would know where to carve, and then used the dremel (provided by James's brother in-law) to carve it. We had to buy a new tip halfway through because ours became too dull. This was significantly easier than pounding it with a hammer, and we had to be much less worried about breaking the stone if we pushed too hard. However, there were a few things that were harder, such as getting the lines to be completely straight. The different parts of the stone had a big variety in how soft and easy to cut they were. The carving took a very long time--including planning, we worked on it for about 5 hours Saturday morning, each taking turns carving. I did all the Ogham inscriptions, Alicia (sorry if I spelled that wrong) and James did the English, and we each took a Mayan character. Mine is on the left column second from the bottom.
(there will eventually be a picture here, but I haven't gotten the pictures from my group members yet)
Course Outcomes:
Here comes the "what did I learn from this" part, that I find it amusing that I have to do at all (for reasons that I will not elaborate on here). I will just say now, that I'm going to be completely honest in this part. It is tempting to be overly gushy and positive when telling what you learned from a school project, since you are trying to get the teacher to like you and give you a good grade. (With that in mind, please, teachers, don't give me a bad grade just for being honest that I didn't enjoy it. I worked very hard and tried to do it as best as I could. I think our group definitely fully filled the requirements). This project was supposed to give us a deeper understanding of ancient cultures and written knowledge. In some ways it did this very well, and I did learn new things. I didn't, however, think that it was 10 hours worth of learning, which is about how long it ended up taking me. I thought that the research I did on the different languages was very interesting and enriching. I like languages, and I liked everything I learned about both Ogham and Mayan. The translation was fun for me to try, but I didn't quite see the point of making us translations into languages that we don't know. I doubt that almost anyone in the class has the skill to do that sort of thing accurately, and many people don't even know enough about languages to know how wrong they end up (through no fault of their own). Then there was the making of the project. Again, I thought it turned out cool, but still not 10 hours cool. I learned that dealing with rock is difficult. Guess what. I knew that already. I learned that writing was much more labor intensive in the past. Again, not too difficult to figure out. I learned that power tools help everything go better, but they catch on hard bits of rock. I learned that power tools are quieter than chisels and hammer. I learned, once again, that sometimes you cannot find information on the internet simply because it is not there. I learned that if I made a mistake on, or just completely made up, the Ogham in the final version, no one that looked at it would know, or even really suspect (I didn't do this, but when I was working on the translation at 2 in the morning, I thought about it). My understanding of ancient cultures includes one more stone block, but if I had spent 10 hours doing something else, I feel like my understanding could have included something much better.
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