Uooh : Computational Semiotics and Hermeneumatics in ancient writing systems

Hermeneumatics in Mesoamerican Writing Systems

The field of Mesoamerican writing systems studies has been the scenario of groundbreaking events during the last decades. The success of the methods initially applied by Knorozov around 1952 to Maya script led to a rapid, dramatic advance in several adjacent fields of knowledge, powered by generations of brilliant scholars. One of the key aspects of such a success has been the formal, full–fledged methodological approach employed in the most relevant works of related disciplines. Particularly in Maya studies, writing system nature, paleography, linguistics, dialectology, and literature fields, among others, have greatly benefited from the use of logic and procedures developed and tested in other scripts of the world.

Similar procedures and techniques have been used in the proposal of decipherment of Epi-Olmec writing system, and in the recent publication on the code breaking of the Náhuatl writing system, the latest logo–syllabic script deciphered up to this moment.

Current research in Ancient Near Eastern writing systems shows cutting–edge perspectives that make possible to build new procedures of approaching texts. As other techniques mentioned before, these have been developed and tested in several scripts of the world. This state-of-the-art strategy is called hermeneumatics, and intends to formalize and automate the process of critical analysis of texts.

About

Hermeneumatics was born after the initial work by Jesús-Luis Cunchillos in late 80's, becoming a mature field after the intensive research during the following three decades by Cunchillos himself and colleagues at the Laboratorio de Hermeneumática. Beyond the initial use of this methodology in North-western Semitic languages it was applied to Classic Maya by Alfonso Lacadena during post–doctoral research at the Laboratorio de Hermeneumática, between 1999 and 2001. Knowing its importance and potential, Lacadena got successful results during this research, transferring knowledge to his fellows colleagues and students. Notably, in 2007 a long term project using hermeneumatics was begun, in a group together with Søren Wichmann (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Denmark), and Ignacio Cases (PhD applicant at SUNY, New York), under the umbrella name of Hermeneumatikon.

The aim of Hermeneumatikon is, in a first stage, the compilation of a Classic Mayan dictionary, by using the expected output from Cases dissertation. His PhD project is centered on studying the application of the hermeneumatical methodology to Mesoamerican writing systems, by defining the central issues –corpora, collations, data analysis, concordances, etcetera–, designing a hermeneutical application, and implementing the solution as a piece of real, usable software.