[Aztlan] EK & CHAY glyphs related?

[Aaron]

Hi Gary,

I'm by no means an expert, so bear with me. I think you are correct in seeing the same 'EK' or truncated Lamat/Venus glyph in both words. With this particular form, I doubt the inversion of the glyph can be very significant since I'm pretty sure the truncated Lamat glyph means Star regardless of it's orientation. The full (non truncated) Lamat day-sign displays a quadrilateral symmetry, therefore a change in meaning based on any (re)orientation is highly dubious. (If you take the "W" form and wed it to the "M" form, you create the full "X" form.)

My guess is that the dots you're wondering about represent water or blood, or more generally Ch'ul, sacred fluid. The Lamat glyph had associations with war events in the Classic period, as in "Venus Tlaloc warfare", so it's not suprising to see it, especially in conjunction with blood designs, used in the context of disaster. In this case, a literalistic reading might be more like 'blood star' or 'sacred star' than 'bad star'.

As for other inversions in Mayan, my understaning is that depending on the glyph, the significance is more likely to be in distinguishing between a phonetic and logographic reading, or otherwise subjective, perhaps simply aesthetic, criteria. Glyphs designs aside, phonetic linguistic inversion is possibly more likely to emphasise a reflective, rather than simply negative relationship. For example, the root 'Nik' means flower, while the root 'Kin' means sun, indicating that flowers are reflections of the sun, not the negation of the sun. Perhaps adding some support to this notion, the root for mirror, 'Nen' is phonetically its own mirror image.

-Aaron



On 1/22/10 3:19 PM, "Gary Daniels" <Gary at LostWorlds.org> wrote:

> Are the glyphs for EK and CHAY related or did they evolve separately? CHAY
> looks like an upside down version of EK. Is this the case or just a
> coincidence?