Yuri Knorosov

Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov (Russian: ???? ???????????? ????????; b. November 191922 ? d. March 31 1999) was a Russian linguist, epigrapher and ethnographer, who is renowned for the pivotal role his research played in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics.

Key research

In 1952 Knorosov published a paper which was later to prove to be a seminal work in the field (Drevnyaya pis?mennost? Tsentral?noy Ameriki, or "Ancient Writing of Central America".) The general thesis of this paper put forward the observation that early scripts such as Mayan, ancient Egyptian, Cuneiform and others which were generally or formerly thought to be predominantly logographic or even purely ideographic in nature, in fact contained a significant phonetic component. That is to say, rather than the symbols representing only or mainly whole words or concepts, many symbols in fact represented the sound elements of the language in which they were written, and had alphabetic or syllabic elements as well, which if understood could further their decipherment. By this time, this was largely known and accepted for several of these, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs (the decipherment of which was famously commenced by Jean-François Champollion in 1822 using the tri-lingual Rosetta Stone artefact); however the prevailing view was that Mayan did not have such features. Knorosov's studies in comparative linguistics drew him to the conclusion that the Mayan script should be no different from the others, and that purely logographic or ideographic scripts were not actually so.

Related Topics:
1952 - Scripts - Ancient Egyptian - Cuneiform - Logographic - Ideographic - Phonetic - Symbols - Alphabet - Syllabic - Decipherment - Jean-François Champollion - 1822 - Rosetta Stone

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Knorosov's key insight was to treat the Mayan glyphs represented in de Landa's alphabet not as an alphabet, but rather as a syllabary. He was perhaps not the first to propose a syllabic basis for the script, but his arguments and evidence were the most compelling to date. He maintained that when de Landa had commanded of his informant to write the equivalent of the Spanish letter "b" (for example), the Mayan scribe actually produced the glyph which corresponded to the syllable, /bay/, as spoken by de Landa. Knorosov did not actually put forward many new transcriptions based on his analysis, nevertheless he maintained that this approach was the key to understanding the script. In effect, the de Landa "alphabet" was to become almost the "Rosetta stone" of Mayan decipherment.

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A further critical principle put forward by Knorosov was that of synharmony. According to this, Mayan words or syllables which had the form consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) were often to be represented by two glyphs, each representing a CV-syllable (i.e., CV-CV). In the reading, the vowel of the second was meant to be ignored, leaving the reading (CVC) as intended. The principle also stated that when choosing the second CV glyph, it would be one where the vowel sound matched that of the first glyph syllable. Later analysis has proved this to be largely correct.

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