The key was cut from common signs

Claim (verbatim)

The burner made the key. Landa's Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan — itself surviving only as an abridged copy in the Real Academia de la Historia, recovered by Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1862 — records the so-called Landa alphabet: some twenty-seven signs elicited from a Maya literatus, most plausibly Gaspar Antonio Chi, by asking him to write the names of Spanish letters. Knorozov's 1952 reading of these signs as consonant-vowel syllables opened the decipherment. But an elicitation session samples a scribe's reflexes, not the syllabary's grid: under dictation a working scribe reaches for his most-practiced equipment. The Landa alphabet should therefore be a frequency-weighted sample of the script — which is why so few signs could unlock so much, and a measure of how much the decipherment of a burned literature still owes to one afternoon of one informant's habits. Prediction: matching Landa's securely identified syllabic signs to the standard grid as tabulated in Kettunen and Helmke's open workbook, at least three quarters will fall in the top half of syllable-sign token frequency in the four codices as recorded in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database, with the median Landa sign in the top quartile (primary clause: the three-quarters-in-top-half share; the verdict follows it). Kill: the Maya Hieroglyphic Database codical records for sign-token frequencies, joined to the Landa sign identifications in the syllabary chart of Kettunen and Helmke, Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs (freely downloadable workbook); the computation is a rank join and two percentile counts.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: matching Landa's securely identified syllabic signs to the standard grid as tabulated in Kettunen and Helmke's open workbook, at least three quarters will fall in the top half of syllable-sign token frequency in the four codices as recorded in the Maya Hieroglyphic Database, with the median Landa sign in the top quartile (primary clause: the three-quarters-in-top-half share; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Maya Hieroglyphic Database codical records for sign-token frequencies, joined to the Landa sign identifications in the syllabary chart of Kettunen and Helmke, Introduction to Maya Hieroglyphs (freely downloadable workbook); the computation is a rank join and two percentile counts.

Novelty / leakage triage

no prior formulation located (search dated 2026-07-17)

Knorozov's decipherment coupled Landa's signs with frequency-based positional statistics over the codices, and the Landa alphabet's internal structure and elicitation context have been studied, but a dated search located no prior test of whether Landa's elicited signs are a frequency-weighted sample of the codical syllabary (the rank-join against sign-token frequencies). Citations are the closest context works, not priors.

• Y.V. Knorozov, 'Drevnyaya pis'mennost' Tsentral'noy Ameriki', Sovetskaya Etnografiya 3 (1952)
• G. Stuart, 'Glyph Drawings from Landa's Relacion: A Caveat to the Epigrapher' (1988)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.