This isn't really relevant to Oasisamerica, but it's something that came to mind when I was writing the examples of stylized Hopi script in the most recent entry. This was said before a long, long time ago in
Entry 10, but I felt it was worth reiterating in stronger terms.
One of the key ways Oasisamerica is
unlike Mesoamerica is that the former's elite prefers a
writing system. By "writing system," I mean that they have a system that can encode language exactly. Hopi, for example, is written in a 127-character, 20-diacritic syllabary (TTL's "Standard Hopi" has twenty consonants and six vowels, and final consonants are written with diacritics).
The origin of the Oasisamerican syllabary is Mesoamerica's "merchants' script," whose characters derive from a simplification of the syllabic values of Maya hieroglyphs. The merchants' script is also a syllabary, and it has a few different variants. The most widely used one is the one for Nahuatl (Isatian), which has 60 different characters corresponding to the sixty combinations you can make from the fourteen possible initial consonants (plus no initial consonant) and four vowels of Nahuatl. With a diacritic to mark long vowels and special diacritic forms of the fourteen final consonants, you can write all of the 1,680 syllables that Nahuatl phonology permits.
(I've invented two sets of glyphs for TTL's Nahuatl syllabary. The first is more primitive. It uses a lot of ugly boxes that are simplified forms of Maya face glyphs, long vowels are marked by doubling vowel characters instead of using a diacritic, and there aren't special characters for final consonants; a word like
calli is written
ca-
li-
li. You can see how it looks like in Page 10.)
(The second is a lot more elegant and easier to write with the brush pen used by Mesoamerican scripts, mainly because I was inspired by China, the other brush-using civilization, and got rid of all the boxes and replaced them with "hats" resembling the Chinese radical 人. Doubled vowels and syllabic characters representing final consonants also went the way of the dodo as diacritics were introduced.)
But
the merchant's script is low-prestige. It's easy and quick to write, so merchants use it for commercial purposes ("bring me twenty turkeys tonight"), generals use it to give orders, and so forth. But
because it's perceived as almost blasphemously easy to write, it's not used for literature.
In fact, TTL's Mesoamerican literature doesn't use a writing system at all. What it has is a
semasiographic system, which encodes
meaning, not a specific spoken language. Familiar examples include musical notation or OTL's Aztec pictographs. But it's not just any semasiographic system;
it's one that's more complete, as in "capable of expressing the full range of human ideas, not just classical music," than any semasiography used IOTL. I'm not sure to what degree it's plausible, but I really like the concept.
Say that a TTL Mesoamerican opens a codex and sees a painting of a peasant kneeling before a lord. There's a speech scroll covered with feathers issuing from the mouth of the peasant, and the scroll unfolds into a box above the peasant. Everything so far is written in black ink. Within the box, there's a sleeping peasant (drawn in
blue ink), and another box issuing from his chest. In this second box, there's the same peasant kneeling before the same lord, only drawn in
red ink.
In the same way that we can "read" non-written elements of a comic book (e.g. a speech bubble means that the person is speaking; a thought bubble means the person is thinking; a certain jagged yellow shape means an explosion), TTL's Mesoamerican can "read" this painting with no ambiguity.
- The speech scroll means the peasant is speaking, and the feathers means that his speech is courteous.
- The things within the box that the scroll opens into are the contents of the man's speech.
- The use of blue ink means that it's a past event.
- A box issuing from the chest of a sleeping person refers to a dream. The things within the box are the contents of the dream.
- Red ink means that it's a future event.
So the reader could translate the codex as:
The peasant knelt before the lord. He said: "Your honored lordship, I dreamed that I would meet you."
Of course, each reader would have a slightly different interpretation. Someone else might translate the painting as:
The peasant prostrated before the lord, saying: "Sir, I knew that I would meet you from my dreams."
But the basic elements of the translation would be the same for all readers. For example, nobody could translate this as the peasant "shouting," because shouting would require the speech scroll to have thicker lines than was actually used. Nor could anybody think that the peasant was saying "I
met you in my dreams," because the dream was in red ink, so the peasant dreamed it as a future event (hence "would").
More details drawn on the picture would further qualify the description and limit the range of possible interpretations, just as with spoken language.
This is what Mesoamerican elites use and what almost all the primary sources quoted in almost all prior entries are written in. Historians learn the conventions of the system if they want to major in the field.
(OTL Mesoamerica had something similar, but there was something missing—
grammatical elements. OTL Aztec codices don't explicitly spell out the relative position in time of specific events, as TTL's system does with color, nor does it mark recursion, as TTL's system does with dozens of different types of boxes and lines. The result is that the OTL system is a lot more context-dependent than TTL's. OTL Aztec pictographs is to TTL's semasiographic system almost as hand gestures is to sign language.)