Variant: animal head

·    Subvariants (2):

o A. Full:

§ Left: a boulder with scroll.

§ Right: a boulder-outline snake/lizard/turtle or bird head, with:

·      “reptile”- / “bass-clef”-spiral (inwards anticlockwise) in the bottom middle or right.

o B. Reduced: left part only.

·    (Tokovinine lecture, lost reference) In the early stages of the Classic Maya script, bu and mu were not distinguished, probably because they were borrowed from a language which didn’t distinguish between /b/ and /m/. But as this distinction is important in Classic Maya, they gradually developed two different forms:

o bu with dots on the scroll.

o mu without dots on the scroll.