...How Arabic influenced Highland Mayan writing
This presentation will address the emergence of the colonial alphabet used to write Kaqchikel Mayan in the 16th century. Developed by the Franciscan Friar Francisco de la Parra, it was partly inspired by the Arabic script. I discuss Parra’s engagement with Arabic, the influence of Antonio de Nebrija’s protolinguistics in the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes in colonial alphabets in the Maya Highlands. As an example, I examine the adaptation of Parra’s alphabet to Ixil, a Mamean language for which it was not originally designed. I consider also the appropriation of Parra’s alphabet by the Maya, and the Kaqchikel texts used by Parra’s Kaqchikel elite collaborators to teach the alphabet to Maya scribes. The circulation of alphabetic writing was mediated by divergent Maya and Spanish metalinguistic representations of sound and text, which I will also address in my conclusion.