As promised, here is my post on the Aztecs. I was about to be REALLY sad because I thought I had lost my notes, but I found them so you can all celebrate! As mentioned in my
last post, Humphreys used the Aztecs as an example of a culture who only developed their writing system to the use of simple pictures to represent objects.
For example, the Aztecs would use
symbols such as a foot print to represent travel, night by a black sky and closed eye, and speech as a scroll coming from the speaker's mouth (quite interesting as we learn about going from speech to writing). Some think that a similar system might have been used by the Native Americans around this time as well. The first step, according to Humphreys, of going from symbols to writing is simplification of pictorial forms. This had not yet happened in the two centuries that the Aztec culture developed before the Spaniards came to the land, destroying the culture of the native citizens.
They did, however, develop enough to begin combining symbols to express foreign words or to write the names of their cities, somewhat like Andrew showed us with the Japanese combining their phonetic written alphabet to express foreign names. An emperor whose name meant "handful of reeds" would be written by painting a hand grasping reeds, while the town of Cimatlan would be written by painting a picture of a root called cimatte next to another object which, when spoken, is pronounced tlan.
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| Imagine this with only pictures! |
The Aztec language was read much like the picture puzzles that help children read. I always loved finding these in the friend, reading the words, and having my little brother read the pictures.
Humphreys mentioned that the Aztecs painted on cotton cloths, prepared skins, or fabric made from agave leaves. Though their books sometimes resembled scrolls, they were usually simply folded accordion style with a solid board attached to each end. This allowed them to look at a full page at a time instead of scrolling. How annoying would it be to have to scroll through a document, anyways? (By the way, I never made the connection of the term "scrolling down" on electronic devices as coming from scrolling documents! Pretty crazy!)
Humphreys, Henry N.
The History of Writing. London: Day and Son, 1855. Print. Collection of Victorian books, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library.
Amazing connection, Jenna! I think the Aztecs were definitely efficient with their scrolls, even though they weren't scrolls, because they didn't have to do any scrolling. I read a book in Japanese over the summer (technically, I didn't really read it because I can't read Japanese), but I thought it was interesting that when you pulled out all the pages the book was about thirty feet long! That's because the Japanese, or at least the publishers, followed a pattern that modeled the Aztecs. The pages weren't scrolled up, by they were folded in such a way that you could unfold the entire book and read it all without having to turn a page (however, that would mean that you would have needed to walk from the beginning of the book all the way to its end so you could read it all that way, haha)
ReplyDeleteSo, we have had a lot of talk of languages that use pictures to represent words. Jenna, are the Aztec symbols, although undoubtedly different, related or similar to say that of the Egyptians. It seems that the Aztecs have more simple pictures than the Egyptians. Just curious.
ReplyDeleteThis is awesome. I've never understood how those symbols worked, since they all seem to be mixed up together from other things. I wonder how much it limited their naming of places - you could only use combinations of sounds that already had a symbol, or represent it by something that everyone would understand.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the names all had more obvious meaning. Sometimes I pass over the meanings in our place-names today.
To answer your question, Scott, the Aztec language was a lot simpler than Egyptian hieroglyphics. While the Aztecs simply had a language consisting of symbols that represented objects, the Egyptians had symbols that represented thoughts or ideas and also had a number of sound expressing characters. So, for early writing, they were quite advanced compared to the Aztecs. Of course, they were around for quite a bit longer as well.
ReplyDeleteMarc, I think I could have fun reading a book that way. It may include a series of ninja rolls, though. And Sam, I'm pretty sure it would limit their naming of towns. There are a few that I can think of that you could make a picture puzzle, though: my hometown of Muleshoe; Blackfoot, Idaho. It would be pretty interesting to be driving down the road and see the names of towns represented by a combination of pictures!
ReplyDeleteWow, very interesting post Jenna, I had know idea the Aztecs used such simplistic symbol based system to communicate knowledge. It does seem quite a bit simpler than the egyptian symbols, where their characters, like japanese, represented more intricate thoughts and ideas.
ReplyDeleteEven though pictograms are a simple form of communication, it seems like they're actually a pretty complex way to represent language...or maybe they aren't meant so much to represent the spoken language at all?
ReplyDelete