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Maya Epigraphy and Mayan Historical Linguistics, two distinct disciplines in this atlas, carry the identical four open questions, because the questions sit exactly at the seam between what the two disciplines each do: reading the Classic inscriptions themselves, and reconstructing what the language actually sounded like from its living daughter tongues.

Four Consecutive Months, Four Directional Colours

The Haab, the Maya 365-day calendar of eighteen twenty-day months, names four consecutive months, the ninth through twelfth, Chen, Yax, Sak and Keh, after the four Maya directional colours in sequence: black, the green-or-blue Maya languages do not split the way European ones do, white, and red. That four consecutive months should carry the four directional colours in order is a real, documented feature of the calendar; no source explains why they fall where they do in the year, but the colour element of each name is secure.

What Is Actually Unknown Is Not the Colour

In the Classic-period inscriptions each of these four months is written as its colour term joined to a second element read "sihoom", giving Iksihoom, Yaxsihoom, Saksihoom and Chaksihoom. The colour term in each case is secure. The second element is not: it is left untranslated in the inscriptions themselves, so the literal sense of each month name cannot be recovered from them, and the "storm" gloss that circulates for it in popular accounts comes from the later, post-conquest Yucatec name rather than from the Classic sign itself. What would resolve it is the same for all four, a collation of every spelling of the sign group across the Classic corpus, checked against Colonial-period Yucatec and Cholan dictionaries, to test whether sihoom has a surviving lexical match, which is exactly the kind of work that needs both disciplines at once: Maya Epigraphy to read the sign, Mayan Historical Linguistics to say what the sound it once carried actually meant.

Where To Read More

• Maya EpigraphyHumanitiesOne of two disciplines this cluster is filed under, sharing all four questions with the other
• Mayan Historical LinguisticsHumanitiesThe other discipline, carrying the identical four question edges as Maya Epigraphy
• ChenHaab MonthsChen, first of the four colour months, black; question-of target for Iksihoom
• What does the element sihoom mean in Chaksihoom, the Classic name for this month?The open question itself, confirmed public
• YaxHaab MonthsYax, second of the four colour months, green-or-blue; question-of target for Yaxsihoom
• What does the element sihoom mean in Yaxsihoom, the Classic name for this month?The open question itself, confirmed public
• SakHaab MonthsSak, third of the four colour months, white; question-of target for Saksihoom
• What does the element sihoom mean in Saksihoom, the Classic name for this month?The open question itself, confirmed public
• KehHaab MonthsKeh, fourth of the four colour months, red; question-of target for Chaksihoom
• What does the element sihoom mean in Iksihoom, the Classic name for this month?The open question itself, confirmed public