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But long before the Maya used the Roman alphabet, they had created their own rich and elegant script, featuring more than 800 hieroglyphs.

It may have been a very nice script -- even a wonderful one -- but why "elegant"? I suspect learning all those glyphs would have been difficult.

The script certainly wouldn't have been "elegant" in the scientific sense -- "gracefully concise and simple; admirably succinct."

That's the thing about political correctness. We want to be fair to all manner of groups, but some people really make fools of themselves in bending over backwards to be accomodating.

But long before the Maya used the Roman alphabet, they had created their own rich and elegant script, featuring more than 800 hieroglyphs.

If there were only about 800 hieroglyphs, it was not a rich script. Compare this to a 4 year old child who has a vocabulary of about 2000 words. Chinese has over 80,000 characters. If you know about 3000 of the most common characters, you can read most of anything that appears in common usage; double that for literature or technical writing (for most of science and medicine, they use standard English texts that they pirate). And since many "words" are combinations of two or more characters, the language can represent many subtle concepts. Of course, Chinese has about 2000 years on the Mayan hieroglyphic language. I'm betting that most of the language is dedicated to describing how cool any particular leader was or keeping inventory of tribute or how to calculate the number of victims necessary for sacrifices to get the cosmos back into adjustment after any of the standard causes of perturbation.

At least with alphabetic writing you could have slaves in mines writing their thoughts on the walls.

Sort of silly to say the Spainards “conquered” the Mayan “Empire” since the great Mayan cities like Tikal have been abandoned for several centuries before the Spanish arrived not whithstanding Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. What was left of the Mayans the Spanish “conquered” were scattered communities in the highlands.
In terms of 700 glyphs. From that I understand the glyphs represented both a symbol, like Chinese, and a phoenetic sound. The Mayans would form words by putting glyphs together. That was probably one of the reasons it was so difficult to decipher.
I went to Tikal in Guatemala. An amazing place. I even climbed the top of the pyramid used in Star Wars. LOL!!!

Paul J.J. Payak of the Global Language Monitor states:

This all being said, I now unequivocally state that as of 1:16 pm (Pacific) on the 22nd day of September (the autumnanal equinox) in the year 2007 AD (or CE, whatever your preference), there were approximately 995,112 words in the English Language, plus or minus a handful.

While brevity and simplicity might be an attribute of elegance in physical sciences, I’d say a 800 word written language would be severely limited in its ability to express complex thoughts and the richness of human experience.

It would be something on the order of: Me Tarzan, You Jane.

This doesn’t denigrate the achievements of the Maya in mathematics and astronomy.