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Note for more advanced students: SAK-chi-ku is transliterated as Sak Chiik. The double-"i" in Chiik is an epigraphic convention intended to indicate that the vowel is "complex". In ancient Mayan it might, for instance, have been long, meaning that the normal short-i sound was extended or prolonged. The hieroglyphics experts realized that the Maya scribes were signaling vowel complexity because the phonetic complement - ku has a different vowel than the syllable which it complements, chi. As noted previously, the consonant of a phonetic complement is intended primarily to indicate how the end of the word that it complements is to be pronounced, in this case signaling the k sound at the end of Chiik. But secondarily, if the vowel of a phonetic complement is different from the vowel of the preceding syllable, this indicates vowel complexity in the preceding syllable. This is the principle of disharmony, a term originally coined by the great Russian epigrapher Knorosov, who made the essential breakthrough in cracking the Maya hieroglyphic code. David Stuart, Stephen Houston and John Robertson discovered the principle by which disharmony indicates vowel complexity. The exact nature of this complexity in any given case is still a matter of debate. There are four possibilities: long vowel, internal velar (raspy glottal h sound), reduplicated vowel (where the vowel is repeated with a glottal stop in between), or preconsonantal glottal. In the current instance these would be illustrated orthographically as Chiik, Chihk, Chi'ik and Chi'k. While the exact nature of the complexity is being debated, many epigraphers are using a doubled letter - technically the convention for a long vowel - to stand for a complex vowel in general.
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