Question

Passage:
The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs was a protracted and contentious process, characterized by paradigm shifts and fierce academic rivalries spanning over a century. For decades, the undisputed authority in Maya studies was J. Eric S. Thompson, who firmly maintained that Maya writing was predominantly ideographic—representing concepts rather than sounds—and focused almost entirely on calendrical, astrological, and religious matters. Thompson argued that the Maya were peaceful astronomer-priests whose inscriptions eschewed earthly history in favor of cosmic timekeeping. His profound influence and often polemical dismissal of dissenting views effectively stifled alternative methodological approaches until the mid-twentieth century.

The crucial breakthrough in phoneticism came from an unlikely source: the Russian linguist Yuri Knorozov, who in 1952 published a seminal paper proposing that the script was actually a logosyllabic system. Drawing upon sixteenth-century colonial manuscripts, Knorozov demonstrated that glyphs could represent either whole words (logograms) or phonetic syllables. Crucially, he identified the principle of synharmony, revealing how the Maya spelled consonant-vowel-consonant words by combining two consonant-vowel syllables and suppressing the final vowel. Despite intense, deeply political pushback from Thompson during the Cold War era, Knorozov's phonetic approach gradually proved indispensable for translating the glyphs.

Parallel to Knorozov's phonetic breakthrough, Tatiana Proskouriakoff revolutionized the semantic and historical understanding of the inscriptions in 1960. By meticulously analyzing the structural patterns of monumental inscriptions at the site of Piedras Negras, Proskouriakoff observed that specific glyphic clauses were consistently associated with the lifespans of human beings. She conclusively proved that the texts recorded the dynastic history of specific human rulers—detailing actual births, accessions to power, alliances, and conquests—rather than solely marking the passage of abstract time or serving as mystical chronologies, as Thompson had insisted. This historicist paradigm completely reoriented the discipline, grounding the monuments in tangible political reality.

Building on the foundation of Knorozov's phonetic decipherment and Proskouriakoff's historicism, subsequent scholars accelerated the pace of translation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the linguist Floyd Lounsbury made critical contributions to the understanding of the grammar and syntax of the underlying Mayan languages, particularly elucidating the role of verbal inflection, tense, and aspect within the chronological structure of the dynastic sequences. Subsequently, David Stuart made a staggering leap forward as a prodigy by identifying the pervasive principle of polyvalence in Maya writing. Stuart recognized that a single phonetic syllable could be represented by multiple different, visually distinct signs (homophones) and that single signs could sometimes possess multiple distinct readings (polyphony). Stuart's realization that the scribes highly valued artistic variation and playful substitution explained the bewildering sheer number of unique signs, unlocking the phonetic reading of a vast corpus of previously opaque texts.

The convergence of these distinct methodological breakthroughs—Knorozov's phonetic structuralism, Proskouriakoff's historical contextualization, Lounsbury's grammatical analysis, and Stuart's elucidation of polyvalence—ultimately transformed the mute monuments of the ancient Maya into a rich, decipherable historical record, fundamentally supplanting the earlier ideographic assumptions that had long arrested the field's progress.

Question:
Based on the explicit information in the passage, match each of the following scholars with the specific methodological breakthrough or theoretical position attributed to them.