Reddit reviews Breaking the Maya Code

Wow, this is such a selective piece of the story chosen for sensationalist reasons.

Diego de Landa did try to have all Mayan writing burned, though thankfully he missed a few books, and there are still all of the stone carvings. Later in life, however, he had a change of heart, and tried to preserve the writing system by having someone write down a Mayan alphabet.

Of course, he didn't understand that the Mayan writing system was logographic, along with syllabic characters, rather than alphabetic, so when he asked for a letter like "t", he would have for the syllable "te", since that's how he pronounced the letter in Spanish. Anyhow, this Mayan alphabet of his, along with the realization that the Mayan languages spoken today are actually closely related to classical Mayan, proved to be the key to deciphering the writing system eventually. So yes, the burning of the Mayan texts was atrocious, but he later did the best he could to try and preserve the writing system later. See Michael D. Coe's "Breaking the Mayan Code" for more information.

Also, besides Diego de Landa, religious missionaries have actually been some of the greatest proponents of minority languages and their preservation. James Evans, a British missionary in Canada, developed the a writing system for the Swampy Cree that was so successful, it ended up being adopted by most Aboriginal Canadian tribes, from the Athabaskans to the Inuit. The whole family of writing systems is now known as Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.

More recently, the organization doing the most work on preserving minority languages is SIL International, a missionary organization dedicated to documenting and preserving minority and endangered languages.

Now, I'm not usually an ardent defender of religion, being an atheist myself, but I do respect the contributions that missionaries have made to preserving minority languages, and I feel that Bishop Diego de Landa is more the exception than the rule in this respect.

Como mencioné, es algo poco conocido, menos documentado.

En el libro "Breaking the Maya code" el Dr. Coe (un eminente Arqueólogo) menciona que durante sus viajes a Yucatán (en los años 60's) en Mérida, entre los "rojillos" podías encontrar bastantes libros de origen Ruso, y el compró varios de ellos precisamente por que en estados unidos era casi ilegal poseer algo así debido a la guerra fría. Esto me lo confirmó una persona que fue líder estudiantil

En mi caso, en el DF pude comprar (en la calle de Donceles) algunos libritos de cuentos rusos y chinos (como de los 50's) Si los lees con un poco de suspicacia, es fácil notar su intención evangelizadora.