From Newsgroup: sci.lang
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-mysterious-teotihuacan-murals-reveal-early.html October 6, 2025
More than two millennia ago, Teotihuacan was
a thriving metropolis in central Mexico with
up to 125,000 inhabitants. The city had
gigantic pyramids and was a cultural center
in Mesoamerica at the time.
But the city, which today consists of ruins
and is a popular destination for both
archaeologists and tourists, holds a great
mystery. Who were its inhabitants?
Researchers Magnus Pharao Hansen and
Christopher Helmke from the University of
Copenhagen have presented a possible solution
to the mystery in an article published in
Current Anthropology.
By analyzing the signs on Teotihuacan's
colorful murals and many other artifacts, they
have concluded that the signs constitute an
actual writing system, and they believe that
this writing records an early form of the
Uto-Aztecan language, which a thousand years
later developed into the languages Cora,
Huichol, and Nahuatl, the language of the
Aztecs.
...
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/737863
The Language of Teotihuacan Writing
Abstract
The culture that thrived at Teotihuacan in the
Classic period has a unique place in
Mesoamerican history. Today, it is held as an
emblem of the Mexican national past and is one
of the most visited archaeological sites in the
Americas. Nevertheless, curious visitors are
told that the ethnic and linguistic affiliation
of the Teotihuacanos remains unknown. Whereas
the decipherment of other Mesoamerican writing
systems has provided a wealth of information
about dynasties and historical events,
scholars have not been able to access
information about Teotihuacan society from their
own written sources. Indeed, the topic of writing
at Teotihuacan prompts several contentious
questions. Do signs in Teotihuacan imagery
constitute writing? If it is writing, how did it
work? Was it meant to be read independently of
language? If it did represent a specific language,
then what language was it? We propose that
Teotihuacan writing shared basic principles with
other Mesoamerican scribal traditions, including
the use of logograms according to the rebus
principle, as well as a principle we term rCLdouble
spelling.rCY Arguing that it did encode a specific
and identifiable language, namely, a Uto-Aztecan
language immediately ancestral to Nahuatl, Cora,
and Huichol, we offer new readings of several
Teotihuacan glyphs.
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