Io Globe
Launching Mayan
1. The publication of Johnson's useful textbook on the subject;
2 My experience with using Anki flash-card software in the past few years. Anki's ability to handle images is crucial for this project.
3. Accumulating insights into cognitive strategy;
--I recently took up the study of Mayan glyphs. This is something I have planned on doing for years. In the future I'll travel to Central America to check them out in the field.
I want to make a few remarks on my study system for Mayan. What I will not do in this post is to discourse on the Mayan glyphs themselves, beyond pointing out a few interesting points.
One such being that almost all of the world's scripts trace their origin to pictures (Korean script seems like at least one exception), but most have evolved to the point where it is difficult or impossible to recognize the original depiction. Mayan glyphs hew closely to their pictorial origins, as the sample above demonstrates.
Or look, for example, at a glyph for the syllable "A", taken from a picture of a turtle:
Compare, for example, to the Chinese ideogram for "turtle":
And by the way, who draws a picture of a "turtle" and stops with the head? It goes to show how culture affects the way we see things in unexpected ways. The Mayans really seem to like pictures of heads; how many can you count in the sample above?
Although Mayan is not a dead language (plenty of folks speaking Mayan as you read this), the glyphs essentially qualify as a dead language—the ability to read them having been lost and only recovered fairly recently by dint of enormous effort. I am therefore applying my "dead language" policy to this project, meaning that I am concerned essentially with reading, not at all with writing or listening, nor speaking, beyond the bare rudiments of pronunciation. It actually make sense to pay some attention to pronunciation with any language, dead or living, as every script I have come across so far relies at least somewhat on phonetic relationships—and Mayan glyphs certainly do; a single word can be written in multiple ways, linked only by its pronunciation. Some of the speaking and listening activities I would normally rely on in language study are therefore irrelevant.
Anki software is quite adept at handling a variety of scripts, but I'm not sure whether fonts for Mayan glyphs exist (Unicode does not appear to include a relevant coding standard), but the very idea of a font is rather foreign to the script. Any given glyph appears in at least a a few variants, with great allowance given to the artistic inclinations of the individual scribe. I'm not sure whether any given glyph ever appears twice in exactly the same form.
I therefore rely on importing images into Anki. I can scan or clip source images (such as the turtle-head above) and paste these into Anki flashcards.
A feature of Anki is the ability to associate several cards with a single "fact", which is a set of associated data fields. In this case each "fact" consists of seven data fields:
(1) The image of the glyph.
(2) The pronunciation. Some glyphs may have more than one such, in which case I list them.
(3) The meaning. Some glyphs represent sounds only, in which case this field is void. Others may require a listing of several possible meanings.
(4) The object depicted. This is distinct from the "meaning", in that a glyph which does not mean anything as such may still be designed to resemble a real-world object (this is the case of the turtle-head glyph above, which does not have an associated meaning but merely represents the 'a' sound).
(5) A mnemonic phrase. I found this extremely useful in learning the Thai alphabet, For example Mr. Turtle Head up there gets the somewhat arbitrary name "Angry Turtle." The "Angry" is to remind me that the sound is "a". Or, again, the glyph
So I could use the following cards for each Anki "fact":
1. Stimulus: picture of the glyph. Response: the glyph's reading, with the mnemonic provided as an after-the-fact hint.
2. Stimulus: picture of the glyph, and the reading. Response: the glyph's meaning.
3. Stimulus: picture of the glyph and the reading. Response: the glyph's mnemonic.
This is in line with the principle that the response for any card should be short and sweet as possible. If a card's response consists of two or more pieces of information, it's better to use multiple cards, with one piece of information each. Not every glyph gets every card. If the glyph has no inherent meaning, I skip Card 2. If I don't assign a mnemonic, I skip Card 3.
If previous experience (with, for example, Egyptian hieroglyphs) serves, the more pictorial the script, the more easily is sticks in the mind. In fact for the first 21 cards, Anki reports my success rate is 100% (whereas typical is more like 85%).
Hone Your Visual Sensuality and Eloquence with the Game of Kakiemon
[This game takes its name from the 17th-century Japanese potter who, inspired one evening by persimmons hanging from the tree and bathed in the glow of the setting sun, spent years obsessed with reproducing that exact shade of orange in porcelain. When he finally succeeded, he changed his name to Kakiemon (loosely translated as "Persimmon-guy").]
Assembling the game apparatus: At the hardware or paint store, pick up a collection of paint chips. How many and in what colors is up to you. The more shades you choose and the more subtle the distinctions between them, the more challenging the game. Get two identical copies of each.
Clip out the color part(s) of each chip. In particular, be sure to cut off and discard the name of each shade (although you may optionally make a note of it for later). To keep track of all these colored rectangles, you write codes on the back of each. Two copies of each shade: one copy gets an even code number on the back; the second copy gets a random unrelated odd code number. Each code number should be unique, so you can use them to identify the color. Make a list which shows the even code numbers in sequence and the corresponding odd code number for the same shade for each.
How to play:
You need three players. On each turn, one player is sender, one is receiver, and one is checker. Separate the cards into a pile with even code numbers and a pile with odd code numbers (thus each pile will have one copy of each color). The sender and receiver face opposite directions so they cannot see each other. The sender gets the pile with even code numbers, the receiver gets the pile with odd code numbers, and the checker gets the list of what matches with what.
Set a timer for a fixed interval, say 3 minutes. During this time, the sender draws cards at random from the even-numbered pile and shows it to the checker, who looks up the even code number on the list (and thus the corresponding odd number, but don't tell what it is). For each card, it is the sender's task to describe the color verbally so that the receiver can locate the same color. The sender can specify the color by name (if remembered, but there's no guarantee that the receiver will also remember), or use any kind of description (the color of persimmons in the glow of the setting sun; the watery green of a pane of glass seen edge-on, etc.). The receiver gets one guess as to which color is being described, but can ask for more information or even specific questions. The checker's only job is to verify using the code numbers whether the receiver has selected correctly. For each correct identification during the fixed time interval, both sender and receiver get one point.
At the end of the time interval, roles rotate: the sender becomes the receiver, the receiver becomes the checker, and the checker becomes the sender. After three turns, reverse the sender and receiver and continue by rotating for the next three turns. This way each sender gets to work with each receiver.
In other words if the first turn has Sender=A, Receiver=B, Checker=C:
Then the second turn has Sender=C, Receiver=A, Checker=B;
The third turn has Sender=B, Receiver=C, Checker=A;
The fourth turn has Sender=C, Receiver=B, Checker=A;
The fifth turn has Sender=A, Receiver=C, Checker=B;
The sixth turn has Sender=B, Receiver=A, Checker=C; This completes one round.
And then the seventh turn repeats with Sender=A, Receiver=B, Checker=C, etc.
Continue rounds until you can stand it no longer, and total up the points for each player.
So who will be good at this game? I expect that, like most things, skill will improve with practice. Some people just pay more attention to colors than others. The (Anglophone) world is divided into to groups: people who know what "taupe" is and people who don't. My hypothesis is that people in the worlds of fashion (or even those who work the cosmetics counter of a department store) would have an advantage at this game.
Difficulty can be adjusted easily. For very small children
This game is not unlike the face-matching game that I described earlier.
Warped Reflections in an Icy Mirror
Disney's animated Frozen has just hit the American theaters at this writing. The Japanese opening is still some three months away, but comparing the American and Japanese movie trailers shows some interesting cultural differences.
One is the overall thrust of the trailer. You can tell the difference even if you don't understand English or Japanese. The American trailer plays up the humorous angle, while the Japanese plays up the adventure and romance angles. Both of these are misleading in their own ways, but the Japanese trailer seems to come close to the true spirit of the movie. The difference in emphasis is consistent with what I have said earlier about the American penchant for irony versus Japanese earnestness.
Or then again, the difference may represent a difference in marketing strategy. Perhaps in America it is expected that kids will dictate the movies the family sees, whereas in Japan the parents choose (I merely speculate). This latter seems even more likely when you consider the printed text of the Japanese trailer:
ディズニーの映画の (Of Disney movies...)
歴史が変わる (...history is changing...)
Very dramatic, but this hardly seems calculated to appeal to the little tykes.
There is more to be seen than just a difference in marketing. The very titles of the movies are significantly different. In English it is simply Frozen, whereas in Japanese it becomes the more conventional アナと雪の女王 (Anna and the Ice Queen).
There is also a particular line of dialog that coincidentally appears in both trailers. The Japanese translation is slightly off. In English it comes around the 1:39 mark:
That's no blizzard, that's my sister!
The Japanese version comes around the 0:39 mark:
Tada no fubuki ja nai! Nē-san no mahō yo! Literally: That's no ordinary blizzard! That's my sister's magic! (Italics mine)
The Japanese version inserts a couple of extra words. To me the effect is to make the Japanese seem serviceable, but dumbed down and unimaginative. I'm not sure why it was done this way. Perhaps Japanese people just don't get metonymy?
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