tures), and some signs in the figures, they understood their matters, and could explain them and teach them. We found great numbers of books in these letters, but as they contained nothing that did not savor of superstition and lies of the devil we burnt them all, at which the natives grieved most keenly and were greatly pained.
"I will give here an a, b, c, as their clumsiness does not allow more, because they use one character for all the aspirations of the letters, and for marking the parts another, and thus it could go on in infinitum, as may be seen in the following example. Le means a noose and to hunt with one; to write it in their characters, after we had made them understand that there are two letters, they wrote it with three, giving to the aspiration of the l the vowel é, which it carries before it; and in this they are not wrong so to use it, if they wish to, in their curious manner. After this they add to the end the compound part."[1]
I need not pursue the quotation. The above words show clearly that the natives did not in their method of writing analyze a word to its primitive phonetic elements. "This," said the bishop, "we had to do for them." Therefore they did not have an alphabet in the sense of the word as we use it.
On the other hand, it is equally clear, from his words and examples, that they had figures which represented sounds, and that they combined these and added a determinative or an ideogram to represent words or phrases.
The alphabet he gives is, of course, not one which can be used as the Latin a, b, c. It is surprising that any scholar should ever have thought so. It would be an exception, even a contradiction, to the history of the evolution of human intelligence to find such an alphabet among nations of the stage of cultivation of the Mayas or Aztecs.
The severest criticism which Landa's figures have met has been from the pen of the able antiquary. Dr. Phillip J. J. Valentini. He discovered that many of the sounds of the Spanish alphabet were represented by signs or pictures of objects whose names in the Maya begin with that sound. Thus he supposes that Landa asked an Indian to write in the native character the Spanish letter a, and the Indian drew an obsidian knife, which,
- ↑ Diego de Landa, Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan, pp. 316, 318, seq.
