Hello AskHistorians. I was wondering if you can help me with something.
I am writing a story starring a character who's an archaeologist whose area of expertise is the anchient Mayans. In my story there is a fictional island called "The Island of the Entombed" only in Mayan. The internet has a lot of Mayan words but nothing on how they propperly spoke Mayan, which is why I need your help.
Also if anyone were to direct me to some reputable online material about the Mayans I would be most appreciative.
Thank you.
If you're interested in some early Mayan script, I would check out http://www.famsi.org/. It's a site with free resources from Mesoamerican scholars, especially concerning writing. If you're willing to dig into it a little bit, under the "Writing" tab, and under Mayan, you should find a "Glyph Guide" or two, as well as some translations of poetry. It's not perfect, but you're a writer - with a bit of research I bet you could put together a pretty accurate and interesting Mayan script!
What time period does your archaeologist focus on? Mayan is a language group, not a singular language. There's significant differences between the Yucatec speakers in the Postclassic Yucatan, the K'iche speakers in the Postclassic Highlands, and the Chol* speakers of the Classic era. Qhapaqocha's correct in recommending it, since FAMSI has more on this, but here's a chart to inspire helpful confusion. This is less important if you're focusing on the script, but vital if you're focusing on the languages as spoken. Again, FAMSI is great if you poke around (the site is not the most intuitive).
You may want to check out the European Mayanist site, Wayeb, which has their excellent Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs. For written source material, the 1885 translation of the Annals of the Cakchiquels is in the public domain, and a more recent translation was published just a few years ago. That's a 15th C. Highland text though, so it may not fit what your time frame.
There's plenty of general material on the Maya in our book list as well. There's also the Mayan-English/Spanish online dictionary run by U Oregon. Not as extensive as their superb Nahuatl dictionary, but it's based on solid source material.
Finally, make sure your archaeologist says "Mayan" when talking about the language and "Maya" when talking about everything else. It's kind of a shibboleth that says "I know what I'm talking about."
Finally-finally, you can use "peten" for "island" in a general way. See Nojpetén and Ah Cuzamil Peten. It more literally means "land/area/province" though.
