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K'uk' B'ahlam has also been called Quetzal and Kuk. He was previously referred to as Bahlum-Kuk because b'ahlum means jaguar in modern Ch'ol, the Mayan language which is spoken in Palenque. The two parts of the name Bahlum-Kuk were "reversed" by Linda Schele and Peter Mathews (1993) based on a spelling employed by a later ruler of Palenque, K'uk' B'ahlam II, who took the founder's name. As it appears above in the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs, we see the phonetic complement ma appearing as three dots beneath the main sign of the name of K'uk' B'ahlam II. A phonetic complement at the end of a word signals the pronunciation of the final consonant - in this case the m sound at the end of b'ahlam. That's why Schele and Mathews suggested that B'ahlam and not K'uk' is the final part of the hieroglyphic symbol that combines them.

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Note: It turns out that phonetic complementation can't always be relied on to signal which of two words combined in a single glyph block is to be pronounced first. But confidence in the present instance is encouraged by the fact that a stela at Naranjo names a K'uk' B'ahlam - with the reading order explicit - within a generation of Palenque's K'uk' B'ahlam II (Stanley Guenter, personal communication, 2000).