·    BMM9 does not give a boulder variant of PIK.

·    Variants (5):

o A. Abstract (“2-KAWAK”) – features:

§ Top: Two KAWAK’s next to one another.

§ Bottom: (Optionally) the reduced (“knot”) variant of hi) – when present it should perhaps be read as PIH rather than PIK, because the hi is acting as an end phonetic complement?

Do not confuse this variant of PIK (actually PIH) with the full / boulder-outline variant of hi.

§ PIK/PIH has two KAWAK’s, with the hi-knot underneath.

§ The full variant of hi has only one KAWAK, with the hi-knot on top.

o B. Bird-head – features:

§ It’s well established that PIK, WINIKHAAB, HAAB each have a bird-head variant. As a rule of thumb, the bird-head has:

·      In PIK: A hand-jaw.

·      In WINIKHAAB: Neither a hand-jaw nor a bone-jaw – an “ordinary jaw” (actually, no jaw at all, the word “ordinary” is just for the sake of the mnemonic – see below).

·      In HAAB: A bone-jaw.

Mnemonic: H.O.B = Hand-jaw, Ordinary-jaw, Bone-jaw – think of a bird unable to fly, hobbling along – for PIK, WINIKHAAB, and HAAB, respectively.

§ AT-E1168-lecture6.t0:34:55-36:55 discusses the head variants of PIK, WINIKHAAB, and HAAB. For PIK, Tokovinine explains that:

·      It’s a raptorial bird with a “darkness” property marker, making it a nocturnal bird.

·      It has a human hand instead of the lower part of the beak.

§ MHD.SB1a.4 is an interesting example, with an end phonetic complement (a “knot”, the reduced variant of hi) perhaps to indicate a reading of PIH instead of PIK. This is optional (but seems to be more common) in the abstract / 2-KAWAK variant.

§ Summary of distinguishing characteristics:

·      A bird-head with two o feathers:

o    The left one “outside” the main outline, like a “forehead ornament”.

o    The right one “inside” the main outline, in the top right corner.

·      A hand-jaw.

·      A scroll / left feeler in quite a large eye. Unlike WINIKHAAB and HAAB there seems to never be a “HIX-face”-like eye.

·      (Optionally) the “darkness” property marker in the top of the head (K&L.p62.#2.2, TOK.p27.r2.c3, 25EMC.pdfp45.#5.1?, MHD.SB1a. 4&5&6).

·      (Optionally) a scroll / upside-down right feeler in the middle of the top of the head (25EMC.pdfp45.#5.3, K&L.p62.#2.1, K&L.p62.#2.8).

·      (Optionally) non-touching dots in the middle of the top of the head, either:

o    In a line / slight arc (25EMC.pdfp45.#5.4, MHD.SB1a.2), or

o    More scattered, like jaguar spots (25EMC.pdfp45.#5.3, K&L.p62.#2.3, MHD.SB1a.5).

There’s not much overlap in the presence or absence of the last three optional features – i.e., it’s not the case that they can optionally appear independently of one another. In general, the presence of one of the three will have the absence of the other two (perhaps some overlap of the upside-down scroll co-occurring with the non-touching dots). It’s almost a “philosophical issue” whether the absence or presence of the three should be considered to be a sub-variant, or just random absence or presence of optional features.

o C. CHAN-like – features:

§ Top: CHAN = sky.

§ Bottom: wa-/wu-like.

That this is a separate glyph is supported by MHD, which does not consider it to be <CHAN:<wu/wa>>, but instead an independent variant of PIK: MHD.ZHA. It gives 7 hits for a search “blcodes contains ZHA”. Bonn does the same, with 0285bv. In addition, Bonn recognizes a “reduced form” of this variant, with just the “legs” at the bottom. The Bonn examples have three elements at the bottom not two (i.e., is more wu-like than wa-like). This is probably part of the well-known phenomenon of the bottom of a full variant of a glyph “sticking out” at the bottom from “behind” another main sign which has been put in front of it (relative to the reader), in the same way as reduced forms of NAL or AJAW “stick out” at the top.

o D. HAAB-based – features:

§ Top: Two KAWAK’s next to one another.

§ Bottom: HAAB.

o E. Full figure:

§ So far, I’ve only listed PAL PT and YAX Lintel 48 above – there are quite a few others .

·    MHD statistics (2024-09-29). These statistics are available only for the abstract/2-KAWAK, bird-head, and CHAN-like variants, as I’m not aware of MHD codes for the other two – if they even exist. And even if they did and I knew them, the number of hits for these two obscure variants would probably be extremely low anyway. The MHD search was “blcodes contains <3-character-MHD-code>”:

o Abstract/2-KAWAK (MHD.ZC3a): 304 hits.

o Bird-head (MHD.SB1a): 419 hits.

o CHAN-like (MHD.ZHA): 7 hits.

The very few occurrences of the CHAN-like variant is not at all surprising, but the considerably greater number of occurrences of the bird-head variant compared to the abstract/2-KAWAK variant is surprising. I would have expected the abstract variant to be much more common than the bird-head variant, as is the case for WINIKHAAB and HAAB.

·    Do not confuse the (bird-)head variant of PIK/PIH with the visually (slightly) similar head variant of MIH/mi. They are both head glyphs with a hand-jaw, but:

o MIH/mi is an anthropomorphic head while PIK/PIH is a bird-head.

o MIH/mi can have an optional %-sign (or three non-touching dots in a triangular formation, triangle pointing downwards) and (also optionally) some skull/bone/death-like characteristics, absent from PIK/PIH.

These two will generally only occur in different contexts (e.g., the former as a coefficient and the latter as a calendar unit), so there should be no confusion. But “in abstraction”, when thinking about “loose glyphs out of context”, it’s easy to confuse the two, owing to the shared characteristic of the hand-jaw.