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Note 1 for advanced students: The principle of disharmony is described most fully in a paper by Stephen Houston, David Stuart and John Robertson entitled "Disharmony in Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: Linguistic Change and Continuity in Classic Society" (Houston, Stuart and Robertson 1998). Disharmony affects the transcription of both 'a-ku-la and MO'-na-b'i. A turtle head sometimes substitutes for 'a-ku, and the Mayan word for "turtle" is ak or ahk (depending on dialect and historical reconstruction of the original, or proto-Mayan language, and its descendant, the language of the hieroglyphic texts). David Stuart realized that the phonetic complement ku in the syllabic spelling, in addition to supplying the k, might be indicating a disharmonic spelling. (A spelling is disharmonic when the vowel of the phonetic complement is different from the vowel of the word being produced. In this case, the u in -ku is different than the a in the word for turtle. Synharmony, by contrast, pertains when both vowels are the same, as would have been represented in this case by the spelling 'a-ka.) The ancient Maya scribes used disharmonic spellings to indicate a complex vowel in the word being formed. In this case, if indeed the -ku is intended to signal disharmony, the word for turtle would be 'aak, 'ahk, 'a'ak or 'a'k rather than 'ak. Judging by the development of modern Maya languages, we would pick 'ahk from these choices, and we are almost certain that the ancient Maya pronounced the word with an internal velar h sound. That is why David Stuart proposed the spelling Ahkal. Complicating the matter is the existence of a spelling of "turtle" as 'a-ka in the inscriptions of Tonina. Here the synharmony results in 'ak, not 'ahk. This suggests that, no matter how they actually pronounced the word for turtle, the scribes did not spell it with a complex vowel. This has led Søren Wichmann and Alfonso Lacadena to propose that the u in 'a-ku-la must have a value of its own, since it is not signaling disharmony. Thus the name would have been Akul rather than Ahkal. Or rather it would have been Akuul, since the a in the phonetic complement -la is disharmonic and would have produced the complex vowel represented by the double-u. Further, Wichmann and Lacadena believe that the ancient Maya never spelled velar h. Thus the disharmony of na-b'i would produce the complex vowel of naab', na'ab' or na'b', but never nahb'. And thus the Palenque rulers' name would be Akuul Mo' Naab'. Wichmann and Lacadena argue that consonant-a complemented by consonant-i always produces the long vowel represented by the double-a in Naab'. Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube are not as certain, but they also use the spelling Naab' to indicate that the vowel has a complexity of some yet-to-be-determined sort. David Stuart is considering the implications of the 'a-ka example from Tonina, but finds the evidence of both epigraphy and linguistics too equivocal to disprove velar-a. Note 2: To introduce yet another complicated concept into the discussion, astute readers will have noted that in David Stuart's model, the ku in 'a-ku-la works disharmonically with the 'a to make 'ahk, while the la must be somehow "reversed" to make the -al ending of Ahkal. To explain this phenomenon, Stuart and Stephen Houston have posited the principal of "morphosyllables". They suggest that, for instance, the upside-down ajaw heads that are customarily read as the syllable la were originally a logogram AL that became the syllable la while retaining its logographic function in certain contexts. By the principle of morphosyllables, Stuart and Houston would transcribe the left sign in the illustration above 'a-ku-AL. Note 3: The spelling Mo' results from the fact that no Mayan word starts or ends with a vowel (other than certain parts of speech which can appear in compound word formations and complicate the situation). The apostrophe represents the Mayan consonant known as a "glottal stop" - an explosive sound made in the back of the throat. Thus Mo' ends with a consonant, as expressed by the apostrophe, and 'Ahkal begins with one. When spoken properly you can hear the glottal stop at the end of Mo', but there is no comparable sound produced at the beginning of 'Ahkal. Epigraphers have decided not to use this initial apostrophe in spellings for the public, such as those of the rulers' names, because it only results from the technicality that the word should start with a consonant.