Tag Archives: Linguistics

Chipotle’s Mayan Glyphs and the Temple of Burritos

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A while back, I bought Andrea Stone & Marc Zender’s Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture, and checked out a number of similar books from the library. I skimmed and enjoyed them, and then returned them.

I went to a Chipotle in Philadelphia, looked at the wall, and realized their design was more than just decoration. There, looking back at me, was K’awiil, also known as God K.

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Next to K’awiil was a glyph representing a lord, possibily Juun Ajaw, one of the Hero Twins. All over the wall was seeing bits and pieces of legible, decipherable Classic era Mayan art. Here, the glyph for mountain. There, a shark.

[T]he wood and metal sculptures at many (or maybe all) Chipotle locations were provided by a company named Mayatek Inc.

The short story is, there are deviations, but the art is surprisingly accurate (for a restaurant) on a number of the glyphs (albeit, most are picked at random rather than for their original significance or lexical meaning). Or at least spitting distance. Though that seems kind of rude to do at a burrito place.

So…what does the above section of Mayan glyphs actually say? Dr. Zender translated the glyph blocks from Chipotle:

u-K’AM-ma-K’AJAN?-ch’o-ko
uk’amk’ajan ch’ok
“the youth’s rope-taking” (a ceremony)

u-TZ’AK-AJ
utz’akaj
“its count” (calendric information)

WAX-YAX-SIHOOM-ma
“6 Yax” (part of a date)

chu-lu-ku-?
Chuluk … (pre-accession name of the king)

i-K’A’-yi
i k’a’ayi
“his … stopped” (a death verb, here referring to the king’s father)

TIWOL?-4-ma-ta
Tiwohl Chan Mat (the father of the king)

mu-ka-ja
muhkaj “he was buried” (again referring to the father)

u?-na-ta-la
u naahtal “the first”? (ordinal title?)

MO’-na-bi
… Mo’ Nahb (part of the name of the king)

Brings back memories of my college study of Classical Aztec (Nahuatl) in Chicago…

By Language Jones via Slate for the full awesome story and more photos of the art.

Slang Terms Through History for the Vagina

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History and linguistics cooperate in odd ways, sometimes. Check out this timeline of the evolution in the English language of slang terms for the vagina, labia, clitoris, and pubic hair.

Some of the better ones:

  • Etcaetera (1570s)
  • Venus’ Anvil (1650s)
  • Cupid’s Warehouse (1680s)
  • Bookbinder’s Wife (1770s)
  • Eve’s Custom-House (1780s)
  • Miss Laycock (1790s)
  • Jack Straw’s Castle (1830s)
  • Central Office (1890s)
  • Rest and be Thankful (1900s)
  • Ringerangeroo (1920s)
  • Sir Berkeley (1930s)
  • Dry-Mouthed Widow (1940s)
  • Sausage Grinder (1960s)
  • Golden Doughnut (1970s)
  • Black Cat with Its Throat Cut (1980s)

Green’s Dictionary of Slang by Jonathon Green via Timeglider.

George Bernard Shaw’s New Shavian Alphabet

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The Shavian alphabet is an alphabet conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling.

It was posthumously funded by and named after Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.

Shaw set three main criteria for the new alphabet: it should be (1) at least 40 letters; (2) as “phonetic” as possible (that is, letters should have a 1:1 correspondence to phonemes); and (3) distinct from the Latin alphabet to avoid the impression that the new spellings were simply “misspellings”.

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Shaw had served from 1926 to 1939 on the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English, which included several exponents of phonetic writing.

All of his interest in spelling and alphabet reform was made clear in Shaw’s will of June 1950, in which provision was made for Isaac Pitman, with a grant in aid from the Public Trustee, to establish a Shaw Alphabet.

The Shavian Alphabet is interesting for another aspect; the letters are categorized as being tall, deep, or short, with short letters being vowels, liquids, and nasals, and tall letters being voiceless consonants – flipping the tall letter makes it a “deep” letter representing the voiced version of that letter.

In other words, the shape of the letter isn’t arbitrary, but is actually tied to the phonetics.

Other interesting features; there are no upper and lowercase letters (thank god), but it still preserves the concept of proper naming by utilizing a “naming dot” before a proper name.

It’s a pity that the strength of cultural convention has hobbled us to the Latin alphabet. While it was, to be sure, an improvement over previous systems, especially in English it has a lot of problems that something like this could solve.

Via Wikipedia.