Acknowledgements

Author: Sim Lee

Last updated: 2025-07-02

 

[This document is part of the Learner’s Maya Glyph Guide.]

 

Dorota Bojkowska has been my tutor (now also a good friend) since mid-2020. In weekly Zoom lessons, she has explained to me many subtle aspects of Maya epigraphy. Without Dorota’s help, I think it would have taken me many times longer to get to the level I’ve now got to. Her knowledge of and visual memory for glyph-forms is phenomenal, as is her sensitivity to tiny differences in elements comprising a glyph (differences which can make an enormous difference to reading a glyph one way or another). On many occasions I’ve asked her about an unusual variant of a glyph, to have her reply: “Yes, it does look strange, but you can also find it explained in this article by [say] David Stuart.” Such replies also show the breadth of Dorota’s knowledge, in terms of how many papers and dissertations she’s read and digested. Dorota’s talent is not only in remembering the information, but also remembering where the information is to be found.

 

Matthew Looper – and the simple fact of the existence of MHD – have contributed immeasurably to my learning of Maya. Prior to the going-live of MHD, if I wanted to find out something specific about an inscription, my only strategy was to google the name or description of the inscription. That search would then produce pages and pages of hits, 90% of which would not be directly relevant to understanding the inscription. The remaining 10% had to be sifted through, hit by hit, downloading the respective papers, with many hits still only relevant to one small aspect of the inscription in question – one or two glyphs or one or two phrases, or some snippet of information about the iconography. With the advent of MHD, all I need to do is type in the code for an inscription as the value of the “objabbr” and I get a complete transliteration, transcription, and translation of the whole inscription. And the coverage of MHD is so wide that it’s very rare that I seek information about an inscription and it’s not available in MHD. Furthermore, MHD gives a wealth of bibliographic information so that I’m immediately alerted to the existence of papers and dissertations discussing the inscription in question. The attribution information for all the images is also of immense value.

 

I consider the MHD to be one of the biggest single leaps forward in supporting and advancing the study of Maya epigraphy. I feel that it’s easily equal in significance to Eric Thompson’s creation of his T-numbers and to Justin Kerr’s mayavase.com database. To this day, it remains a source of surprise to me that the going-live of MHD was announced with such modesty that it was restricted to the set of reports (#71 to #75), published on the Glyph Dwellers website. From my perspective, it could have been announced on every website related to Maya epigraphy, with exclamation marks to say what an amazing tool it is for further research.

 

My thanks to Matt also for 3 years of very informative correspondence, with my questions always being answered very promptly.

 

John Pedersen is a close friend from my undergraduate days. His interest in Maya epigraphy was initially triggered by my own interest, but once he “got the bug”, he really ran with it.

 

As explained elsewhere, the original incarnation of the CMGG was just as my own private “syllabogram list” and “vocabulary list”, where I recorded what I had learned and which I used to refresh my knowledge of the glyphs. It was John who was so impressed at what I had gathered “in one spot” that he very strongly urged me to make it public. He felt in particular that this would be of benefit to other beginners and intermediate students of Maya epigraphy. That’s indeed the only reason why my syllabogram list and vocabulary list became re-conceived as the Classic Maya Glyph Guide (CMGG). It was originally meant only for my own personal use, perhaps to be shared with a few friends who are fellow fans of Maya epigraphy. I was hence very hesitant to make it available to a much wider audience. I was and remain very aware of the limitations of my work – this is just the sum total of what I have come across, in the few years that I’ve been involved with learning Maya. Nevertheless, John’s persuasive powers prevailed, and I eventually saw the value of trying to share the CMGG with a wider audience.

 

Furthermore, it was John who first saw the value of meshing MHD data (readings and meanings) and Bonn data (readings) with the information in the CMGG and presenting it as a website. He is also the person who conceived of, designed, and actually built what now is called the LMGG website. Along the way, he came up with multiple suggestions to improve the functionality, for the benefit of putative future users.

 

John deserves the same degree of thanks for the adding of the TTT functionality to the website. In much the same way as with the initial version, John encouraged me to share my TTT’s with other learners via the website and designed a very user-friendly format for presenting them. In our collaboration on the online presentation of the TTT’s, his creativity and meticulous attention to detail were major factors in achieving the result you now see.

 

Lastly, John brought the same amount of care to the proofreading of the TTT’s (something he had also been doing continuously for the CMGG entries on this site). From the spotting of typos to suggestions for improvement of style to questioning the accuracy of assertions I made (and the checking of a certain measure of consistency across TTT’s), his efforts in this area have contributed significantly to improving the quality of both the CMGG entries and the TTT’s.

 

In summary, the LMGG website would not exist, if it hadn’t been for the help of Dorota, Matt, and John.

 

As a final point, I’m grateful to Bonn University’s TWKM Project (TWKM = Textdatenbank und Wörterbuch des Klassischen Maya = Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Maya) that they didn’t wait until the very end of the project but instead released their classification system and the accompanying glyph images slightly more than halfway into their 14-year project. I feel that the LMGG website has benefitted enormously from being able to incorporate the MHD and Bonn images and readings. The Bonn project is also largely responsible for several of the 3D models displayed in connection with the TTT’s on this website. These enable us all to examine Maya inscriptions in ways which were not possible before (e.g., rotating the model in any direction, and changing the angle of incidence of the light source). This provides new information and insight which are simply not available from photographs and drawings. I’m sure the users of this website will also appreciate these products of the Bonn project.