Ancient Maya cities found in jungle | Hacker News Reader

Ancient Maya cities found in jungle

news.discovery.com

83 pointsjdmitch19 comments

The title and article are a little sensationalized. I grew up in Guatemala, and the entire Yucatan peninsula, along with Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, are covered in "undiscovered" cities. I'd regularly dig up pottery and carved stones in fields and garden beds.

The Calakmul area is especially dense in ruins. Most xateros (rubber tappers) know them all and can guide you to them for a couple bucks. Very few of them are surveyed or even mentioned in literature.

This hit front page on reddit today, much more interesting comments. Mostly noting that there are lots and lots of "undiscovered" cities because it's extremely expensive to unearth and preserve them. The yucatan largely is flat, not unlike Florida. Most hills in the jungle are sites. "Undiscovered" sites.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2e2il8/maya_citie...

That's got to suck finding an undiscovered Mayan city, and then it turns out to actually be a discovered-but-lost Mayan city.

Sure makes you appreciate GPS though.

I grew up reading stories of lost cities of gold and all that, so when satellite maps became more common in the 2000s I thought for sure we would find tons of lost cities. Unfortunately you can't get much off of even infrared scans of these areas as the buildings are rock and wouldn't have heat signatures any different from their surroundings.

One day I bet we will see more emerge from faster scanning tech.

Back when I was remote sensing, I remember some talk of people using SAR images (Synthetic Aperture Radar??) to search for Maya roads. I imagine something was found since then but I didn't kept up with the literature on the subject.

This is great and very historical, I am very interesting with this article. I love historic place.

True, exactly this article are very interesting.

Exactly joseph, for me this the most interesting one from this article, a monster mouth doorway, ruined pyramid temples

If you check this one, kinda interesting to read which is one of the cities featured an extraordinary facade with an entrance representing the open jaws of an earth monster.

This bring memories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq5Y_ogiyi0

When I saw the title, the first thing to come in to my mind was: Dun da duh daaaa, dun da daaaaaaa....

By the way, the “Maya” in the article’s original title is correct. There’s no reason to change it to the incorrect “Mayan”.

Thanks. We missed that one.

(If anyone is wondering, as I was, the convention is to use "Mayan" for the language and "Maya" for the people.)

Yes - but note that there are about 30 Mayan languages, not just one.

How is this measured? For calibration, how many English languages are there now?

Well there isn't a nice and easy test, but in linguistics it tends to come down to some measure of mutual intelligibility. How much meaning can a speaker of Variety A garner from a speaker of Variety B? And vice versa. For tricky distinctions, throw in some historical and social analysis to taste.

I don't know much about Mesoamerica but I believe the "30 languages" claim refers to the count of current languages descended from a single ancestor, not the languages of Classic Maya. (EDITED to avoid implying "Proto" and "Classic" Maya were one in the same--they were separated by millenia!)

English is a particularly tricky issue because there are so many "standard" Englishes understood by many but natively spoken by none, and because lingua francas tend to become such a smooth continuum between their different lects. However for the purposes of the mutual intelligibility tests, the vast majority of world Englishes would still fall under one "language". Many that don't are already labelled distinctly, either as creoles/pidgins, or from historical divergence (e.g Scots, Frisian). English' divergence is little compared to that of, say, Arabic, and I suspect any two random English speakers in the world would understand each other much much more easily than any two Mayan speakers.

I believe you are correct about the 30 (not 100% sure on the number) Mayan languages being ancestor of Proto-Maya. Classical Maya belongs to the Ch'ol branch and is mostly likely a written form of the parent language of Ch'olti' (extinct) and Ch'orti'.

Here are some random facts about the Mayan languages and Maya people:

Yucatec is the most spoken of the Mayan languages, located in the Yucatan peninsula. Interesting story about Korean immigration to Mexico (Spanish only, some early immigrants ended up in Yucatan and one lady mentions that many learned Yucateco before Spanish because the worked with they Mayas): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmDTrvddD_8

Popul Wuj is written in K'iche'. Trippy videos about the Popul Wuj: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTeOYNsBHvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDt9rQrGp1I

Lacondon people managed to escape Spanish control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nSb36zgGzo

Sorry - that was my fault putting in the "n" in the posting - here is a particularly elucidating article on the linguistic/ethnic/geographical differences of the use of the word Maya/Mayan: http://www.osea-cite.org/program/maya_or_mayans.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb4n8Cl3leg

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