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But the turtle sign substitutes with the logogram for AJ, the male agentive "he of", in the other known spelling of this ruler's name (from the East Panel of the Temple of the Inscriptions). So the turtle must be phonetic a. As such, it is an underspelling of aj (or ah in the earlier orthography). This led to reading the ruler's name as Ah K'an and Ah Lawal Mat. "K'an" entered into it for reasons that we discussed with Lady Yohl Ik'nal. The logogram OHL appears in the month sign known in Yukatekan as K'an, and it was originally thought to have that value here. Then for a brief time it was read as wa (hence Ah Lawal Mat) before the epigraphers settled on OHL, which means "heart" in the sense of "center". Yohl is the possessed form.

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Note: It was always likely from a grammatical point of view that the OHL in this name was possessed. As David Stuart comments,

I think YOHL or OHL are perfectly good transcriptions of the sign, since in the modern languages it often seems to operate like an inherently possessed nominal or relational noun (that is, a "center" or "heart" can usually only exist in relation to a larger space or body). The same thing seems to be true for OOK, "foot," where we find the yo- prefix dropping in and out of spellings (email, 24 October 2003).

Stuart (in prep.) reads one of the name captions from Temple XIX (that of the leftmost figure on the south face of the platform) as Yohl Mat Ich Baak and translates the first part of this as "center (or heart) of the mat bird."

Together with the fact that the possessive indicator y- in front of the OHL in the name of Lady Yohl Ik'nal of Palenque is spelled but a single time in all the inscriptions referring to this queen, this instance of "Yohl Mat" in a name seemed to provide strong support for a reading of Aj Ne' Yohl Mat.

Then Nikolai Grube's discovery of this ruler's name on Santa Elena Monument 1 in the museum in Balancan, Tabasco, clenched the Yohl reading. According to Simon Martin (personal communication, 2003) the superfix over the OHL even has traces of the central vein of the yo leaf (photographs of *yo-OHL-la ma-ta: 1, 2; more photographs to appear in the upcoming Mesoweb PARI Photo Database).