He especially interpreted the symbols of the Mayans in a completely different way and managed to make a name for himself even years after his death. Another thing that attracted attention was that Yuri did all this with his cat Asya.
So what kind of discovery did Yuri Knorozov make and where exactly was his cat Asya in this?
First, let’s look at Yuri’s life story.
Unable to adapt to school and disrupting the peace in the classroom, Yuri’s education life began with his suspension from school. When he was 5 years old, he suffered a serious injury that almost blinded him. Also, by his high school years, he turned out to be an accomplished violinist. He was very skilled at drawing and was adept at writing romantic poems.
In 1940, at the age of 17, he left his hometown Kharkiv and began his undergraduate studies at Moscow State University, Department of Ethnology, specializing in Egyptian linguistics. In fact, it was clear at that time that he would achieve successful work.
Yuri’s work plans, World War II. It was interrupted, albeit briefly, with the outbreak of World War II.
Although he was not initially drafted into the military because his health was deemed unfit, he was later forced to join the German army support units. But Yuri Knorozov traveled from village to village teaching and managed to get rid of this duty.
Shortly thereafter, he went to Moscow with his family and continued his studies in Egyptian linguistics there. During his studies, he came across a book by chance and through this book, he became interested in the Mayan alphabet.
Devoting himself entirely to science, Yuri continued his research and studies on hieroglyphs as well as ancient languages and writing systems.
At the age of 30, he wrote a paper that would later prove to be a seminal work in the field. The basis of this article was that ancient writings, such as Egyptian and cuneiform, actually had a significant phonetic component.
In other words, many symbols, rather than just representing words and concepts, also expressed the sound elements of the language in which they were written. In addition, the symbols also had alphabetic or syllabic elements.
In fact, these inferences existed for Egyptian hieroglyphs, but the Mayan alphabet was not thought to have such features. In short, Yuri’s studies in comparative linguistics led him to the conclusion that Mayan writing should not be different from any other.
Yuri’s basic insight was to treat the Mayan symbols not as an alphabet but as a syllable.
He was perhaps not the only person to propose a syllabic perspective, but his arguments and evidence were the most compelling to date. In 1963, Yuri Knorozov further developed the decryption technique in his monograph “Writing of the Maya Indians” and published translations of Mayan manuscripts in his work titled “Mayan Hieroglyph Manuscripts”.
Let’s talk about Yuri’s cat Asya.
Yuri Knorozov, the linguist who deciphered the Mayan alphabet, stated that his namesake cat Asya was a great source of inspiration for him during all his work, and not only that, he also saw his cat as the co-author of his work.
When all the publishing houses that wanted to publish his work asked Yuri for a representative photograph, the linguist sent a picture of himself with his cat Asya. The publishers said that he only wanted his photo, otherwise he would have to crop the cat, and Yuri was quite resentful of this.
So how could a cat help a linguist?
According to a Russian source; While Asya is teaching her kitten to hunt, Knorozov sees Asya talking to the kitten and making various sounds to communicate, and he gains a moment of insight. Again, the sounds that Asya makes increase the linguist’s level of focus.
On the other hand, although publishing houses want to exclude Asya, Yuri Knorozov and his cat Asya; It appears together on Mexican silver coins, on two monuments in two different parts of Mexico, and on Yuri’s tomb.
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