Variant: hand

·    Features:

o A hand with fingers slightly or very much curled towards the palm.

o Typically, it’s the left hand, with the viewer looking at the back of the hand (i.e., not at the palm), but the K&H example shows a right hand, with the viewer looking at the palm.

o One of the most striking features of this glyph is that whichever hand it might be, the angles and spatial relationship between the fingers, thumb, and the rest of the hand are such as to be almost impossible to achieve in reality (when and from which angle the fingernails are visible is only one of the very surprising aspects). Considering the accuracy with which scribes (carvers and painters) were able to capture human expressions (calm, quizzicalness, surprise, etc), this extreme distortion of reality in terms of the position of the fingers seems to require an explicit explanation.

Variant: tooth

·    Features:

o The main part of the glyph is a “duckbill” shape – representing a “tooth” – with reinforced or bolded left wall and ceiling (optionally the right wall as well (MC, JM, K&H)).

o There’s a circle in middle of the main part.

o On the left, “outside” the tooth, there’s a cascade of (touching or non-touching) dots:

§ The dots often decrease in size as they go downwards.

§ There can be 1 (K&H), 2 (MC, JM, TOK.p16.r5.c4), or even 3 cascades (MHD.ZY8.2).

·    Subvariants (2):

o A. With “dot cascade(s)” on the left.

o B. Without “dot cascade(s)” on the left.

·    Iconographic origin:

o Tokovinine (get reference) says that, historically, the iconographic origin of the dot in the centre is an inlayed precious stone, and the “dot cascade(s)” are droplets of saliva.

·    Do not confuse this variant of ye with a whole set of glyphs with the “tooth” as the main outline of the glyph, but with various distinctive elements on the left:

o chu has an “axe”.

o ha has a “bone property marker”.

o k’e has one end of a “bone”.

o t’a? has a “torch” (this reading is still only a proposal).

o ye has two or more “cascades of dots”.

Variant: head

·    In all the examples except 25EMC, the eye is covered by a vertically bipartite element where there’s a washer above and a trifoliate element below (leaves pointing downwards).

·    The three TIK Marcador examples appear to be HUL.ye, an inflected form of hul = “to arrive”.

·    Do not confuse this with the visually (slightly) similar logogram K’EK’EN:

o K’EK’EN is a mammal head while (the head variant of) ye is an anthropomorphic head.

o The interesting point is that it seems in both cases of K’EK’EN and (the head variant of) ye, it is exactly the same unusual element covering the eye: a “washer with a trilobate element below it, leaves pointing downwards”. Is this a downward pointing SAK?