| It seems, then, that what we have above might be an "underspelling", where to is written in the place of tok and a literate Maya would have known to supply the implicit consonant -k. This would be transcribed to-(ko). Such underspellings are common in the Maya texts, and this very word is frequently underspelled in the name of the Tikal ruler Chaak Tok Ich'aak (Grube and Martin 1998). Another possibility is that the sign which elsewhere stands for the syllable to is logographic TOK in this context. Whether transcribed to-(ko)-TAN or TOK-TAN, the word formed is Toktan. |
| Marc Zender notes: The logographic alternative must be the correct one, since elision of "hard" consonants like /k/ are practically unknown in the world's syllabic scripts, and because this case would be unique in the known corpus of Maya elision (which otherwise impacts only l, m, n, w, and y). |