Background to the CMGG and LMGG
Author: Sim Lee
Last updated: 2025-08-27
[This document is part of the Learner's Maya Glyph Guide.]
Contents
3. A “centralized document” for information on glyphs
6. The Spanish version of the LMGG..
7.1 General limitations of the LMGG website
The LMGG website (https://www.mayaglyphs.org) is a result of four independent threads coming together:
· The consolidation of my compilation of glyph variants – something which I had been doing since I started learning Classic Maya in November of 2019.
· The consolidation of my approach to doing Transcriptions, Translations, and Transcriptions (TTT’s) of inscriptions.
· The going live of the MHD (Maya Hieroglyphic Database) in early 2022 (https://www.mayadatabase.org).
· The release of the Bonn Maya Dictionary project standardized glyphs in late 2022 (https://classicmayan.org/zeichenkatalog).
As I assume that most readers will be familiar with the third and fourth of these threads, this document will concentrate on the first two: how they started and how they eventually became the Classic Maya Glyph Guide (CMGG) and part of the Learner's Maya Glyph Guide (LMGG) website.
When I started learning Maya, I found a number of excellent resources, both printed and in electronic form. These were introductory textbooks, workshop manuals, dictionaries, word lists, etc. Each resource had its strong points, but those strong points differed from resource to resource.
For example the strong point of Erik Boot’s The Updated Preliminary Classic Maya ‐ English, English ‐ Classic Maya Vocabulary of Hieroglyphic Readings is the fact that there are references to the actual monuments and vases where each listed word can be found, but it has very little information on what the glyphs writing those words actually look like (the reader has to find a drawing or photograph of the inscription to find out). Conversely, other resources were very strong on showing what the glyphs look like, but don’t indicate which inscriptions they are taken from. Some resources show just one “typical” example – very good in not overwhelming the beginning student, but not helpful when that student is confronted with the reality of the variation in the entire corpus. A resource like Tokovinine’s Beginner's Visual Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs is wonderful in that it distils the essential features of each glyph into a single “abstract”, “idealized” example (something which couldn’t be achieved when only one real-world example is provided), but in the real world, many examples would not have some of those features.
Thus, each resource had its strong points, but no resource had all the strong points of each resource. Not only that, but the glyph inventory varied from resource to resource. That is to say (in general) each work would provide a syllabogram list and a logogram list, but exactly which glyphs would be given in the various syllabogram or logogram lists would differ (to say nothing of which glyph variants would be given per resource). For example, every resource lists the syllabogram u, but each gives slightly different variants of u; every resource lists the logograms BAHLAM and WITZ, but each gives slightly different variants of them (or just one example and no variants at all). For less commonly occurring glyphs, some resources include them while others don’t.
This caused a bit of difficulty for anything outside of the most basic glyphs and the most basic variants of the most basic glyphs. If I vaguely recalled seeing a more “obscure” glyph (or a more “obscure” variant of a common glyph) in one of the resources but couldn’t quite remember what it looked like or how it was read, then I’d have to look through several different documents before I found what I was thinking of. Sometimes I never succeeded in finding the example that I had in mind.
Furthermore, the different resources use slightly different spelling conventions – some indicate vowel length and aspirated internal vowels, and glottalization, and others don't (as a matter of principle); some write plain b while others write b’; some write initial glottal stops, others don’t; some write the glottal stop as an apostrophe, other write it with the official symbol (somewhat resembling a question mark without the dot); etc.
I felt a need for a single, “centralized” document which I could go to, where every syllabogram or logogram in every appendix of every major teaching resource was listed – all in one standardized orthography and format. Ideally, under every lemma/listing of a particular syllabogram or logogram, I would find – at one glance – all the variants which that teaching resource had deemed worthy of including in their specific resource.
As I started compiling such a “centralized document”, I found it handy to record written notes on each particular syllabogram or logogram. I would write a short section on the number of variants I knew of (briefly describing the distinguishing characteristics of each variant). I also started adding a note to remind myself not to confuse one glyph with another which looked quite similar. Or a note to remind myself not to confuse two Maya words which sounded similar, even if their glyphs looked totally different and they meant totally different things. This grew into explicitly recording which characteristics made the two similar glyphs (or similar-sounding words) different. As time passed, more and more things got added to these notes: the history of various proposed pronunciations of a logogram; conflicting proposals and the pros and cons of each proposal; notes on papers where important additional information could be found concerning a particular glyph. Each entry hence grew quite organically, to become a sort of “brain dump” of everything I knew (or should know or had come across) concerning a glyph.
In that gradual learning process, I had also gathered more than 2,000 academic papers, and more than 70 PhD theses. These were initially from the FAMSI and Mesoweb websites, later, from www.academia.edu. This too was a valuable resource, but I’ve (obviously) had the time to read only a tiny fraction of these papers. Nevertheless, information gleaned from these papers and Master’s and PhD theses also ended up in my “centralized document”. Specifically, what got added were not only references to the specific articles from which I’d got important information for any particular glyph but also examples of glyphs which were shown in these papers. I also began writing short notes summarizing the important conclusions of that article, when they pertained to a specific glyph.
At the same time, as I studied more and more inscriptions, I came across more and more interesting variants of glyphs – variants which were not shown in the teaching resources or which I hadn’t seen in the academic works I’d read. My original intention had been to centralize just the examples from the teaching resources, but as I was adding glyph examples from academic works, I also started adding examples directly from the (drawings of) inscriptions themselves. This process was of course very random – dependent on which inscriptions I had come across and decided to study, and the academic papers which I had happened to read along the way, in an attempt to throw light on these inscriptions.
Also, while it started out as being a list of syllabograms and logograms, this also got extended to include fixed phrases and the names/titles of the nobility and of deities, and even included components of glyphs, like the “orthographic doubler” and “property markers”.
That then is the story of the genesis of the “central document” which I developed for myself. As I mentioned above, it grew to become my central repository of everything I wanted to record about anything related to Maya epigraphy.
Very slightly later than the start of compiling and classifying the variants of glyphs, I started doing a “transliteration, transcription, and translation” (TTT) of selected inscriptions. Like many people, my first one was probably CPN Altar Q and I very soon moved on to the more well-known YAX lintels and PNG panels. But I was encouraged very early to try less well-known ones such as CAY Altar 4.
There was a long period of experimentation before I finally settled on a format which suited my purposes. Even after the basic format had long been established, more and more aspects were added to the “standard format”. It was probably only in 2022 – a full two years after I started learning Maya – that the final details of what I desired to record for each TTT were fully worked out.
The background to this – the history and the subtle considerations – are of sufficient complexity that they’ve been hived off to a separate document. See Background to the TTT’s in the CMGG (also available on the “About” page) for more information.
Despite its modest origins, I was persuaded by friends that all the information I had compiled might be of considerable interest and use to other students of Maya epigraphy. I was also persuaded that it was already in a good enough state to start sharing with others, rather than waiting until it had been further improved. That’s the reason that it got given the more formal name of Classic Maya Glyph Guide (CMGG). And in the 21st century, one very obvious way to share information is via a website. That website was, in turn, given the name Learner’s Maya Glyph Guide (LMGG), because it weaves together the information compiled in the CMGG with information from three other major sources:
· Eric Thompson’s compilation of glyphs, with the examples he provided (mostly without readings or meanings).
· MHD’s classification of glyphs, with its examples, readings, and meanings.
· The Bonn Dictionary Project’s refinement and extension of Thompson, with its examples and readings (currently without meanings).
The LMGG homepage has as its main emphasis the content of the CMGG relating to glyphs, with some correlation to the three pre-existing resources while the main emphasis of the LMGG Concordance is a detailed correlation of all four (i.e., including the CMGG) with a complete listing of the glyphs in them – in particular, including those not covered by the CMGG.
As TTT’s reach the stage that they are publishable, they will be made available on the Inscriptions page. Rather than have them appear in dribs and drabs, we envisage adding small sets of TTT’s from time to time (perhaps with a unifying theme, as happened with the initial group of eight Quirigua stelae).
Warning: in the period 2024 - 2025, MHD underwent significant upgrade and revision. The matches between the MHD codes (and their readings), T-numbers, and CMGG entries may not reflect the latest state of MHD. A similar warning is appropriate for the matches between Bonn codes (and their readings) and the CMGG entries. All the more so, now that Bonn have added meanings for the glyphs in their Catalog with known meanings and confidence levels (as of 2025-08-01). Every effort has been (and will continue to be) made to have these matches as current as possible, but this problem is inherent (also going forward) when cross-referencing to something as dynamic as data in a database. It is, however, particularly acute at the moment, in the case of the matches between MHD and CMGG entries in the LMGG Concordance, matches between the Bonn and CMGG entries in the LMGG Concordance (a small but significant number of Bonn glyphs are missing), and the absence of any Bonn meanings in the logograms grid of the LMGG home page. The actual MHD and Bonn codes associated with particular entries in the logogram or syllabogram grids of the home page could similarly be out of sync with the live MHD and Bonn databases.
As explained earlier, the CMGG is still very much a “work in progress”. It’s constantly being improved and extended. These improvements will find their way into the LMGG via regular releases.
Naturally, many people with an interest in Maya glyphs will have a Spanish-speaking background. Some might not have much English at all, and even those who have some might be more comfortable with information provided in Spanish. That’s the reason that we’ve felt – for a while now – that a Spanish version of LMGG would be highly desirable. This has been reinforced by input from some friends who give workshops about Classic Maya, including its glyphs, or know of those who do. These workshops involve younger students who speak modern Maya languages and, typically, more Spanish than English.
However, the fact that there’s so much information in the database – and the fact that any of it can, at any time, be either tweaked in minor ways or drastically updated and expanded – means that it wouldn’t be practical to have it manually translated. Version management of the revisions alone would be an administrative nightmare, to say nothing of the costs associated with the one-time initial translation, as well as the costs of ongoing translation of the revisions. (If you make changes to 10 sentences in a two-page document, you can’t just pay to have those 10 sentences retranslated – you have to pay for translation of the whole document.)
For this reason, we’ve gone for using the Google Translate widget (GTW) to render the pages of the website into Spanish. It’s done dynamically – on-the-fly, as it were – as each page is shown to the user. This means that version management is a non-existent problem: the current version of any page is translated into Spanish at the moment that the user looks at it. The disadvantage of this approach, however, is that the resulting Spanish is unlikely to be as good as if it had been manually translated (with the proofreading and correction of detected errors which is inherent in that process). In contrast, with the on-the-fly approach, the Spanish translation is not checked for errors and might even change from time to time, without the English original having been changed, because of changes to the Google Translate algorithm. But the GTW does provide mechanisms (a) to indicate pieces of text, such as Maya words, which should not be translated, and (b) for us to correct known mistranslations. Therefore, we request users to report mistranslations so that we can improve our LMGG-specialized translation incrementally over time.
All things considered, it seems to us that the benefits of using GTW (far) outweigh the disadvantages. The quality of English-to-Spanish translation by Google Translate has increased enormously in the last ten years. Enough (we feel) for it to produce perfectly adequate and useable translations (given a bit of “empathetic understanding” from our Spanish-speaking users, for when the process doesn’t go so well).
We are now hence offering a Spanish version of the LMGG website to the Spanish-speaking community. We hope, in so doing, that many Spanish speakers will find the website to be a useful resource in their attempt to master Maya glyphs.
I’m only too well aware that the work in the MHD and Bonn websites, as well as in the thousands of papers (and hundreds of master’s and PhD theses), has been done by professionals and academics, many with decades of experience in Maya epigraphy (some of the authors and researchers dating back to the time of Linda Schele and Peter Mathews). In contrast, I am a layperson, and I’ve been involved with Maya glyphs for a far shorter period of time. Furthermore, I don’t speak a modern Mayan language, and I don’t speak even basic Spanish.
I can absolutely guarantee that there are incorrect statements and ideas (and a frustrating residue of typos, despite constant revision and proofreading) in the CMGG. The information it contains is offered – in a spirit of utmost humility – to beginners and intermediate students of Maya epigraphy.
I feel that the information it holds, “all in one spot”, would have been of help to me, when I myself first started being a student of Maya glyphs. I hope it will be that, for users of this website. I’m happy to answer any questions about the material, including any detected inaccuracies and typos (please email me at maya.glyphs@yahoo.com).
In the past year (2025), it has come increasingly to my attention that my analyses and ideas are appearing in the “Google AI summary”, for difficult questions in Maya epigraphy. I see these “citations” myself, when trying to find out more information on a particular problem, to improve my own knowledge and the CMGG/LMGG”. I appear to be “cited”, and I’m given the same air of authority as any of the renowned epigraphers: “Sim Lee finds that …”.
This is something of considerable concern to me.
The topic of “AI slop” and its pollution of science and human knowledge has been gaining increasing prominence. It worries me that I’m now contributing to it. I’m very happy (indeed, keen) to share my ideas with the world – via the LMGG website – as an amateur. That’s because I think that, in particular, the way the information is presented could be very beneficial to beginners and intermediate students of Maya epigraphy. The introductory and background material of the website tries to make the nature and limitations of the information it provides very clear. But this warning is lost in these so-called “AI summaries”. Because these “AI summaries” are a relatively recent phenomenon, this didn’t happen in the first year of the existence of the LMGG (~2024). But it’s happening now, and I fear it will happen with increasing frequency in the future.
All I can do, for the moment, is re-emphasize the nature of the website. Fortunately, the Google AI summary does link its summary to the website, when it’s cited. So, users who “click through” will hopefully see the background material we provide. Nevertheless, it remains a source of concern to me, for the users of Google who don’t click through to the website, or who do click through but don’t read the background information. But I suppose this is a problem for all information one finds on the internet nowadays.