Hola! Hope it's ok to ask how did you learn classic Maya?
That's super cool.
Gracias! The short answer is I read a lot of academic articles and books.
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The long answer starts with me designing OC kids for the X-Men and wanting them to use their parents' native languages when saying "mom", "dad", "aunt", etc. At the time, my interest in history was mostly reserved for architecture, though I was also getting into historical world fashion. I was in university at the time, still going full time but dealing with weekly panic attacks that kept getting worse.
I ended up switching to auditing university history courses and spending all my free time in the library, where I realized that I could take out piles of yellow, crackling grammars to help me improve my X-Men cheat-sheets - some languages made distinctions between talking TO someone, and talking about them! Or talking about your family member VS someone else's! Or change terms based on your gender!
I started reading about languages unrelated to comic books. I always need a project, so I made a little world where a bunch of people from different cultures in the 8th century ended up, and had them desperately trying to share enough knowledge to survive Canadian-like winters. I'd go to the semi-hidden section of the library devoted to onomastics (the study of given names, which was big in the 1800s but really isn't now), and try to find books that gave historical versions, so I could accurately name my characters. I discovered The Academy of St. Gabriel, an SCA site devoted to helping historical reenactors name their personas. I started reading translations of copperplates and papyri from the period for languages that didn't have handy lists, skimming for names.
I got REALLY into scripts (alphabets)! And since the Anishinaabe are understandably reticent to share wiigwaasabakoon with researchers, and quipu remain mostly untranslated, my options for New World scripts were limited. But Maya would have grabbed me even if it wasn't the main option. It's BEAUTIFUL!
It was also the first logosyllabic writing system I studied (what I did with Japanese doesn't count), and required a bit more of a commitment than learning the Angkorian Khmer or Arabic scripts had. I ended up making an academia dot edu account and bookmarking several blogs Maya linguists had, so I could find articles about specific glyphs. It's also a field that is growing rapidly, so I had to keep updating my knowledge as ideas about interpreting the glyphs evolved. That extra commitment led to a deeper connection to the language over some of the others I had studied. Classical Maya, Angkorian Khmer, and Mochica ended up becoming special interests, and my harddrive is full of downloaded articles on grammar and writing (and fashion! I still enjoy that).
I'm a stay-at-home parent of special needs kids. I've had a lot of spare time over the years that I couldn't do anything structured with: I was always on call to pick up my kids when they became to much for the school or whoever had agreed to give me a break. So I read about languages, and poured over VERY BAD QUALITY scans of rubbings¹ to figure out what Angkorian 'ḷ' actually looked like. I read articles by complete cranks, trying to "revolutionalize" the reading of Maya glyphs, each telling me that they've FINALLY translated the glyphs for ejective t and p syllables!
I learned classical Maya by having fun with the process.
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I talk a bit HERE about some of the resources I use. I'm not longer using academia dot edu due to ... the usual online stuff. (Sigh.)
Mostly, I just keep deciding to do something and then do enough research to be able to accomplish it badly. Usually, something interesting enough to inspire more research is discovered through this process. (Also, I hopefully learn enough to do it better the next time.)
I'd say something self-deprecating here about how I don't actually know anything and am just playing around, but I have read SO MANY ARTICLES BY CRANKS! I know more than they do.
You, too, can get to the point where you know more than the cranks if you find something that excites you enough!
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¹ A lot of the languages I study are mostly found carved into various materials. They are very worn and may not be readable to the naked eye. So people put big pieces of paper over them and then rub that paper with charcoal, leaving white spaces where areas were carved out. This can work very well. Or, if done poorly, it can be an almost unreadable recording of every scratch on the stone/copper. Then, when digitizing those rubbings, you can skillfully set the contrast to the setting that most allows the letters to pop, or you can create a black and white pixelated mess that obscures what's there and then save it at a resolution so low that each character is 4 pixels.
As SEAclassics, THE source for images of Angkorian Khmer inscriptions, says, "These images are scanned from a variety of sources [...] They are, by and large, atrocious." (Look at K3 and K6. That's what we're working with!)
