Variant: moon

·    Subvariants (2):

o A. Full:

§ Crescent moon with the tips of the crescent curve around to almost touch, forming a “bay”.

§ Sometimes tips touch and merge so that the bay becomes a totally enclosed internal circle (JM, TOK.p14.r5.c1, MHD.ZU1s.1).

§ Within the bay (or circle) a diagonal row of three non-touching dots, the middle dot often slightly larger than the outer ones.

§ A darkened (cross hatched) area within the body of the crescent, “hugging” the bay, starting at about the middle of the glyph (the lowest point of the bay), and going around the bay to the right.

§ Within the darkened area, 2 to 4 touching dots, also “hugging” the bay, about halfway along from where the darkened area starts (in the middle of the bay) to the end of the darkened area.

§ Optional bolding of the entire perimeter of the bay, optional bolding of the non-bay side of the darkened area.

o B. Reduced: either the left or right half of the full form.

·    This glyph is also a logogram UH = “moon”.

·    The iconographic origin of this glyph is the crescent moon, with the two points meeting at the top being the endpoints of the crescent. It’s used as the syllabogram ja but also to write the word “moon” as the logogram UH. There are no distinguishing characteristics between these two usages – it’s the “same” glyph, distinguished only by context. MHD distinguishes them with a lowercase suffix to the 3-letter MHD character code – ZU1a and ZU1s respectively.

·    MHD statistics (2025-08-23) – a search in MHD on “blcodes contains <XXX>” where <XXX> is:

o ZU1s (ja): 2,772 hits.

o ZU1a (UH): 53 hits.

The statistical analysis shows that the crescent moon glyph is used far more as ja than as UH.

Variant: head variant

·    Features (all of which are the obvious ones for the head variant of this glyph):

o A generic human head with infixed 1/2 to 3/4 of the full form (the right 1/2 to 3/4 of the full crescent).

o The inner edge of the crescent begins in the middle of the glyph, at the level of the nose.

o The three dots in a diagonal line are at the level of the eye.

o The right tip of the crescent ends in the middle of the top of the head.

o Because this is also the Moon Goddess, the bold “IL” (a sign of beauty) may be present on the cheek. It was initially thought that this “IL” element marked beauty in women, but it’s now known to be present in glyphs representing men as well (perhaps it represents “gracefulness” or some other similar positive quality which can apply to men as well as women).

·    Overall MHD statistics (2025-08-23) – seen from a search in MHD on “blcodes contains <XXX>”, where <XXX> is:

o “moon” variant (ZU1s): 2,772 hits.

o “head” variant (PL4s): 32 hits.

2772 + 32 = 2,804. 32/2,804 = 1.15%, so only slightly over 1 in every 100 instances of ja involve the head variant. I.e., not very many in both relative terms and absolute terms, but not totally obscure either.