Variant: rectangular

·    Subvariants (3):

o A. Abstract – a rotatable / rectangular glyph consisting of:

§ Two crescents, touching end-to-end, one pointing “inwards” (towards the main sign) and one pointing “outwards” (away from the main sign).

·      The crescent pointing inwards has a reinforcement on the inner side (the bay side), often with two struts from the reinforcement to the outer side.

o    The area bounded by the two struts is optionally darkened, or

o    The two struts themselves are optionally darkened.

·      The crescent pointing outwards has a reinforcement on the outer side (also the bay side), but without struts of any sort.

o    The “bay” of this crescent can be optionally darkened, i.e., the “bay” of the crescent is closed in and cross hatched. resulting in an element which resembles a “death eye”,

§ Perhaps a further sub-subvariant is where one end of the inwards pointing crescent (the end which is further away from the other crescent) “lifts off” from the main sign, making more of an L-shape (see other MC example above).

o B. Representational (centipede-related) – a horizontally rectangular glyph (longer than high) consisting of:

§ The two fangs of a centipede.

§ A rest of the head?: a circle with a smaller circle in it, close to or on one edge.

o C. Representational (maize-related) – a horizontally rectangular glyph (longer than high) consisting of:

§ Resembles the reduced variant of NAL: two leaves, one tightly curled, the other “unfurled”.

·    TOK.p10.pdfp10.r1.c4 is given as wa, but this is a known misprint for wo (or an aberrant reading not accepted by other epigraphers). Confirmed by Sergei Vepretskii on 2022-07-13.

·    Iconographic origin:

o Sim: Probably the two fangs and head of a centipede. The fangs developed, first, into the L-shape, and then later, into a crescent – while the head became, first, a “death eyeball” (a logical progression, as centipedes were associated with death), and then later, the other crescent.

o For the Classic forms, the MHD Catalog has (in the “picture” field of the MHD Catalog) “centipede nose and snout”.

o For the Codical forms, MHD has (in the “picture” field of the MHD Catalog) that they derive from maize foliage. [Sim:

§ Indeed, some of them resemble NAL = “corn”.

§ Perhaps these NAL-like ones shouldn’t be grouped with the representational and abstract centipede, but I’ll leave them here for the moment, as a matter of convenience.]

Variant: boulder

·    Dorota Bojkowska:

o OHL and WAAJ are identical, in some contexts used to write wa.

o The use of this glyph to write wa is clearly based on its function as WAAJ, with the application of the acrophonic principle, where a “weak” final consonant falls away, leaving the syllabogram.

·    Overall MHD statistics (2025-08-18) – seen from a search in MHD on “blcodes contains”:

o 2S2 (“rectangular” variant): 3,035 hits.

o XH5s (“boulder” variant): 9 hits (vs. 473 hits for XH5 but not XH5s, i.e., the logogram usage).

·    Unfortunately, MHD doesn’t distinguish the abstract subvariant from the representational one (nor even from the maize-related codical one), so we’re not able to easily get information on the relative frequency of those (with 3,000+ hits, it’s difficult to gather subvariant information by visual inspection).

o What we can see is that – for use as the syllabogram wa – the rotatable rectangular variant far exceeds the non-rotatable boulder variant.

o The expectation is that – with respect to all occurrences of the rectangular variant – the occurrences of the abstract subvariant will massively outnumber those of the representational subvariant.

o I.e., the pattern of usage is:

§ Rotatable / rectangular variant, abstract (“two crescents” and related sub-subvariants like “L and crescent”) subvariant: overwhelming (most of the 3,000+).

§ Rotatable / rectangular variant, representational (“centipede”) subvariant: very small (no more than 5%(?) of the 3,000+).

§ Boulder variant: insignificant (9 only).

·    All 5 of the pedagogical sources give the abstract, rectangular / rotatable wa and the “centipede” wa, but none of them gives the boulder / non-rotatable wa. However, both MHD and Bonn recognize the use of the OHL/WAJ logogram as the syllabogram wa. This is because of the extreme rarity of occurrence of the last. A pedagogical source doesn’t want to burden the learner with such an obscure usage of the glyph, but a “research” resource like MHD or Bonn obviously strives for completeness.