More written languages in the New World

Could Mesoamerica-inspired writing systems spread further than they did before the arrival of Columbus? Could scripts develop among the Pueblo societies of the Southwestern United States, the Taino in the Caribbean, or perhaps as far south as the Andes?
 
I'm not sure that many other groups will have a use for it, especially the Taino. That's the primary problem. That, and the Andean peoples are really far away. Maya traders went as far as Panama, but further is probably rather unnecessary, and difficult. And I'm not sure if the Andeans could or would go that far north, and they have to have more contact than two trade missions meeting eachother fleetingly to transmit something like writing. And Maya writing might be a bit problematic to adopt. For one, it's not pictographic like Aztec writing. As long as you understood certainly cultural aspects and meanings, anyone can understand Aztec writing. But Maya writing was logo-syllabic, and pretty much made for Mayan languages. It'd be like adapting Hieroglyphs or Chinese characters to use for English.
 
Sailing wouldn't get them to Chaco Canyon. Still, besides the general spread of agriculture, there are a lot of Mesoamerican influences in the ancient Pueblo cultures... The elites of the major centers imported luxury items like macaws and cacao beans from the south in exchange for turquoise and other local resources, which were likely transported directly by merchants between the two regions. There's even a theory that the Kokopelli image originated from the memory of a Mesoamerican trader.

Unfortunately, the only confirmed contacts were contemporary with the Toltecs, who didn't have a writing system. It shouldn't be too hard to give them one, or to put someone else in their place during that time period who had knowledge of writing.

As for the Caribbean, there's less evidence for any extensive Pre-Columbian contact here, but there are some cultural similarities - For example, the ball courts in both regions. The Yucatan really isn't that far away from the tip of Cuba.
 
And Maya writing might be a bit problematic to adopt. For one, it's not pictographic like Aztec writing. As long as you understood certainly cultural aspects and meanings, anyone can understand Aztec writing. But Maya writing was logo-syllabic, and pretty much made for Mayan languages. It'd be like adapting Hieroglyphs or Chinese characters to use for English.
But Aztec "writing" was not true writing in that it could not represent any meaningful utterance in a language, like the Maya Script can; it was pictogrammic with limited use of the rebus principle. It was also cumbersome to use and was not nearly as expressive as the Classical Nahuatl language which the Mexica spoke.

BTW, Chinese characters were adopted to Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean, all unrelated to each other, and English has many more grammatical similarities with Classical Chinese than Korean (I have studied the former a bit and I was shocked when I could almost translate Classical Chinese phrases word for word to make an awkward and ungrammatical yet rather understandable English sentence.) And another logosyllabary, Sumerian Cuneiform, was adopted to the unrelated Hittite, Akkadian and Elamite languages; the Maya script is certainly capable of writing Aymara, Quechua, Taíno or Taos...one can create new syllabograms as necessary for new phonemes and use the harmonic and disharmonic spelling methods, which the OTL Maya applied ubiquitously in their script to write Classic Maya, to represent consonant clusters, long vowels, diphthongs, &c. You may be interested in parts of this PDF and this one.

BTW, I also wrote this section of this Wikipedia page and added all the references on the page.
 
Sailing wouldn't get them to Chaco Canyon. Still, besides the general spread of agriculture, there are a lot of Mesoamerican influences in the ancient Pueblo cultures... The elites of the major centers imported luxury items like macaws and cacao beans from the south in exchange for turquoise and other local resources, which were likely transported directly by merchants between the two regions. There's even a theory that the Kokopelli image originated from the memory of a Mesoamerican trader.

Unfortunately, the only confirmed contacts were contemporary with the Toltecs, who didn't have a writing system. It shouldn't be too hard to give them one, or to put someone else in their place during that time period who had knowledge of writing.

As for the Caribbean, there's less evidence for any extensive Pre-Columbian contact here, but there are some cultural similarities - For example, the ball courts in both regions. The Yucatan really isn't that far away from the tip of Cuba.

I mean MesoAmerica was boxed in by the desert to their north, jungle to the south and oceans east and west. They needed sailing to reach other population centers. The Pueblo Indians were on the far side of the desert, for languages to transmit, steady trade would be desirable.
 
Hmm, my bad I guess. Linguistics is far from a strongpoint of mine, I don't understand a few of the words your using. :p Nevertheless, there's still the problem of actually being able to have enough regular contacts (and enough time) that Maya writing passes on south.
 
Hmm, my bad I guess. Linguistics is far from a strongpoint of mine, I don't understand a few of the words your using. :p Nevertheless, there's still the problem of actually being able to have enough regular contacts (and enough time) that Maya writing passes on south.

If they had sailing vessels during the classical collapse, It's likely Mayan migration would spread throughout the Caribbean. Contact with Andeans would also be possible.
 
Just found this paper, which suggests they very well may have had large sailing canoes. This might also be interesting.
Uh, that paper seems to be about how they did not have sails. They even say it was Thompson who said they did, and Thompson was incredibly wrong on pretty much every level of Maya studies as we know today. He was the man responsible for the idea that they were a completely pacifistic society whose cities were ritual centers inhabited only by priests and that all their writings were only of esoteric matters considering the gods and the stars, stuff which was disproven four centuries earlier by Spanish accounts made by witnesses to Maya civilization.
 
Uh, that paper seems to be about how they did not have sails. They even say it was Thompson who said they did, and Thompson was incredibly wrong on pretty much every level of Maya studies as we know today. He was the man responsible for the idea that they were a completely pacifistic society whose cities were ritual centers inhabited only by priests and that all their writings were only of esoteric matters considering the gods and the stars, stuff which was disproven four centuries earlier by Spanish accounts made by witnesses to Maya civilization.
My mistake in thinking I had found something that was actually something else :eek:; long ago I found a paper that described that the Maya may have built plank boats along with dugouts.

One could use Polynesian contact, the Polynesians settled Hawaii during the Classic Period, to give the Mesoamericans sailing technology, but that might be too little too late.

I think the Andean sailing vessels hold the better potential: As they knew of the technology in OTL, one just needs to make the Tiwanaku of the Early Intermediate Period more maritime trade based.

Of course, there is also the, probably easiest alternative, of having writing develop instead of the khipu in the Andes (that is, if the khipu does not count as true writing...Inka Khipu have yet to be made any sense of.) As khipu go back to the Norte Chico Civilization, this would give one millennia to have an ATL's Andean writing spread.
 
The Manta culture of coastal Ecuador, which thrived between 500 AD and the Spanish arrival, was a civilization based on maritime trade which ranged as far north as Mexico and as far south as Chile.
 
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