A while back, @Charlie_Plett asked in OSM World Discord whether we had a way to record place names in the Maya (Mayan) script. I’m dropping some notes here from a brief investigation into the topic, for anyone who comes across Classical Maya names in their research and needs a way to record it.
Unlike many historical writing systems, Maya script is not yet encoded in Unicode. There’s a proposal underway for Unicode by the Script Encoding Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. Classical Maya is full of meaningful layout variations that can’t be adequately encoded in Unicode. It’s sort of like how Unicode encodes musical and mathematical symbols, yet you need to use a higher abstraction such as MusicXML and MathML to typeset sheet music and math proofs based on Unicode fonts. The current state of the art appears to be an XML representation similar to the Character Description Language for Chinese. The paper describing this XML representation even proposes to stand up a SPARQL endpoint (think QLever) for querying characters used in a particular run of text!
If you come across a Classical Maya name, you can record its Latin transliteration for now as name:emy=* and name:emy-Latn=* (and name=* if that was the local language at the time). Additionally, you could try to look up the glyphs in this 2023 draft, making provisional use of it in name:emy-Maya=*. Once the Maya script is formally released as part of the Unicode standard, we can review existing use of name:emy-Maya=* and copy it to name:emy=*. These plain text tags won’t capture any complex layout or graphical variations. If your source includes this information, for completeness, you could also add a name:wikidata=L… tag that points to a Wikidata lexeme for more information about the name.