[Jedi Master Pikachu]

The Roman alphabet (which is used on FR) is descended from the Phoenician alphabet (phonics comes from "Phoenician"), and the Phoenician letters look similar to many Roman/English letters. Carthage was a colony of Phoenicia.

Mayan glyphs, on the other hand, are ideograms, not an alphabet, and are much more complex in appearance than Roman or Phoenician letters (pictures instead of lines and dots).

Phoenician alphabet

Mayan glyphs.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Under the Phoenician picture, and change to the "caption:"

Phoenician letters.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Under the Phoenician picture, a change to the "caption:"

Phoenician letters.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Mayan glyphs are apparently both logograms (rather than ideograms) and syllabic.

[Verginius Rufus]

Actually most of the letters we use on FR are the medieval manuscript version (Caroline minuscule) rather than forms the Romans would have used.

I wasn't saying I think the Mayan glyphs are from Carthaginian writing, but that one of the first Europeans to see them made the connection. The person in question was one Vinko Paletin, discussed in David Lupher's book Romans in a New World (University of Michigan Press, 2003), a Dalmatian who wound up serving in the Spanish army which invaded that area before eventually becoming a Dominican friar (Fray Vicente Palatino de Curzola).

The Greek alphabet derives from the Phoenician alphabet (the Greeks remembered this and referred to them as "Phoenician letters") but "phonics" comes from the Greek word phone meaning "sound" (especially the sound of the human voice) or "the faculty of speech."