498 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1941 



a type of Maya two-stem compound, probably the same type as 

 already explained, though the idea of "by means of" here need not 

 be injected into the translation. We now have attained to transla- 

 tion of the whole predicate: "(he) causes by drilling his ignition of 

 fire; and it is evident that this expression ha esah u-to'Tc-Wah is but 

 a more elaborate form of the hc&ah Tc'ak'' cited by the Motul diction- 

 ary as the way of saying that one starts fire with a fire drill; it 

 follows the same basic pattern. 



I might here digress briefly, anticipating a misconceived objection 

 that might be raised, to say that the sign cluster to-kah sometimes 

 occurs in the codices where there is no pictured reference to fire, and 

 seems in these cases to refer to an animal in a hunting scene. An 

 instance of this is seen in figure 3, top section, over the second pic- 

 ture, where occurs the cluster to-Jcah-a^ with -a of No. 1, figure 1, and 

 without preceding w-, forming part of a sentence roughly analyzeable 

 as loman u-NORTH tohaka X "speared (in) his north (is) (gram- 

 mat, object) -X." I shall suggest first, but not in seriousness, a type 

 of explanation that overstresses the mentalistic approach. I shall 

 suggest that the reason why this glyph accompanies both pictures 

 of fire and pictures of a hunted animal is that it is a glyph which 

 denotes sacrifice or a sacrifice, hence either a sacrificial fire or a 

 sacrificial animal. Now apparently just this sort of explanation, 

 with its thin veneer of ethnological allusion, sounds plausible to 

 some minds that have engaged themselves with Maya hieroglyphs, 

 and it is necessary to warn against it. This is why no people but 

 linguists should touch the hieroglyphs. In the present case of 

 course, the explanation is an out-and-out concoction of my own, 

 cooked up in a few seconds merely to illustrate a point. A trained 

 linguist would, I believe, be inclined to ask, "Have you searched for 

 an explanation in the configurations of utterances and in the data 

 of the vocabulary, before adopting this quite speculative hypothesis?" 

 The real reason is no doubt that besides the stem to'h "burn" Maya 

 has the similar sounding stem tok (with nonlong o) "take away, take 

 by force, capture, carry off," etc. The Motul has Hoc^ ah, oh (i. e., 

 tok) : quitar, tomar por fuerza, privar, arrebatar, robar y usurpar 

 casas, y cosas muebles." The sign cluster to-kak in this case is not 

 being used to write the compound word to 'k-Wak'' but to write some 

 similarly-sounding derivative or inflection of the stem tok, and the 

 word probably means prey, animal taken or carried off, catch, game. 

 Possibly the word contains tok and the repetitive plural suflix 

 -ak, hence "(successive) catches of game." The context is enough 

 to distinguish this word from the similarly-written word pertain- 

 ing to fire. 



