K&L.p16.#2 TOK.p26.r5.c4 BMM9.p19.r4.c2 JM.p155.#5
K’UK’ K’UK’ K’UK’ K’UK’
MHD (Schele)
CPN Stela 19 F9
YAX.<k’u:<K’UK’+MO’>>
· No glyphs given in K&H.
· Features – a bird-head with:
o Feathery crest.
o Large beak – slightly smaller than for MO’ (“macaw”), with nostril.
o Large eye, divided in half by a horizontal line:
§ Optionally eyeball = small dot hangs from the bottom of the middle of the horizontal line.
§ Optionally eyelashes = grass blades growing upwards from the horizontal line.
o Bird spiral in the middle of the bottom: anticlockwise spiral starting immediately to the right of the mouth/beak.
· CPN Stela 19 F9 has an initial phonetic complement of k’u for K’UK’, with the K’UK’ then conflated with the MO’.
MHD (Mathews) MHD (Montgomery)
CAY Altar 4 F “Hellmuth Panel” B5
<i.ta.ji>:<2k’u.“UHMAN”> 2k’u.<lu:mi>
· On CAY Altar 4, we have k’u-k’u-“UHMAN” è K’uk’ “Uhman” = part of the extended name/title of one of the two carvers of the monument.
· On the Hellmuth Panel, we have 2k’u.<lu:mi> è K’uk’ Luum = part of the extended name/title of a historical person.
o This panel is in the LA Country Museum of Art, Catalog #: M.2010.115.1064
o The MHD objabbr is “COLK7520”, which, despite the format of the objabbr, isn’t a ceramic vessel from Kerr’s Mayavase.com database.
· MHD statistics (2025-07-25) – the syllabogram-only spelling for k’uk’ = “quetzal” is quite rare. A search in MHD yields:
o For “blmaya2 contains k’uk’” and “bllogosyll contains k’u k’u”: 17 hits.
o For “blmaya2 contains k’uk’” and “bllogosyll contains k’uk’”: 94 hits.
This shows that the logogram spelling is about 5 times more common than the syllabogram-only spelling (94/17 ~= 5.53). Somehow, this seems about what I would expect: if a logogram exists for a commonly occurring word and concept (k’uk’ = “quetzal”, in the names of rulers) then scribes would much more often write it by using the logogram than by using a pure syllabogram spelling for it. The fact, however, that there are 17 instances of the pure syllabogram-only spelling illustrates the often-stated assertion that “The Maya script was a fully developed writing system in the sense that scribes could write down anything that could be said in Classic Maya”. Any word in Classic Maya could be written down, as it could always be spelled with syllabograms.