·     It seems to mean “give” in the context of a ritual – offering something to the gods.

·     PAL TI ET+CT+WT have 19 instances of yak’aw, almost all of them written ya.<k’a:wa>. Only four examples from the PAL TI tablets are given here as they are all very similar to one another. One exception to writing it as ya-k’a-wa is an interesting one (PAL TI WT J9), where the ak’ seems to be written using AK’ = “dance”. It’s very easy to mistake this as something to do with “dancing” rather than “giving”, but AK’/AK’OT = “dance” is an intransitive verb and so would not take the ergative prefix – y-. This is the reason that I’m viewing it as functioning as a rebus in this context.

·     Similarly, PAL TI CT M6 has yak’aw written with a bird head, presumably ya:<AK’:wa> and there are two further possible cases (CRC Stela 6 C12, CRZ Stela 1 A11) – all given as examples above. I’m inclined to treat them also as a rebus, rather than recognizing a logogram AK’ = “give”, based on a bird-head. This is precisely what MHD does with MHD.BM4b (with MHD.BM4a being the logogram which really reads as AK’ACH = “turkey”). I prefer to think of it as just an “aberration”, similar to the use of AK’ = “dance” as a rebus in PAL TI WT J9. I feel that taking this viewpoint is justified as there are two further occurrences of the bird-head glyph being used to write ak’biiy/ahk’biiy = “last night”, “yesterday”, and even one occurrence of the bird-head glyph being used to write ak’taj = “to dance”. Rather than see a logogram variant with a bird-head (in this case, given the reading, probably a turkey-head) for any of these words, I prefer to view them all as using the bird-head glyph as a rebus.

·     The verb is ak’, not yak’ – the y- is simply the 3^rd person singular ergative suffix for the agent of the verb, here a y- instead of a u- because the verb begins with a vowel.

·     MatP2021-Zender.t0:21:10: yak’aw is a verb which means “to give by handing on or by sending along”, so “he [drank and then] passed along the pulque”….

·     EB.p21.pdfp26.#5 has “ak’- tv. to receive”. But this has been amended to “to give” in K&H.p88.#2, 25EMC.pdfp14.§2.#4.2, and CMC4.p34.#2. However, K&L.p85.#4 and BMM9.p98.#4 have dropped the verb totally, but have in its place ahk’(u)tu’, a noun meaning “gift”. This implies that the earlier “to receive” was incorrect, and that later discoveries support “to give”, which is what I have adopted.

·     Do not confuse this with the homonyms AK’/AK’OT = “dance” and AK’/AK’ACH = “turkey”.