In the courts of the sun [antikvár]

A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATIONost Mayan words in tliis book are spelled according to the current orthography adopted by the Academia de Len-guas Mayas in Guatemala. However, I've retained older spellings for a few wordsfor instance, the text uses uay instead of the now-preferred way m order to distinguish the word from the English way. Specialists may also notice that some words are spelled to be pronounced in Ch'olan, which usually means a ch takes the place of a k. I've itahcized Mayan and most Spanish words on the first use and dropped the italics after that.Vowels in Mayan languages are pronounced roughly like those in Spanish. Ay in Maya, uay etc., is pronounced like the I in "I am."/is pronounced like the Spanish j, that is, a guttural h with the tongue farther back than in English. X is hke the Eng-hsh sh. Tz is like the Enghsh ts in "pots." Otherwise, consonants are pronounced as in English. An apostrophe indicates a glottal stop, which is hke the tt in the Scottish or Brooklynese pronunciation of "bottle." All Mayan words are stressed on the last syllable, but Mayan languages are less stressed than English. Mayan is somewhat tonal, and its prosody tends to emphasize short couplets. There's a certain lilt to it which in some places I've tried to convey with dactyls, although readers may differ on whether this is successful.Words in the language of Teotihuacan are stressed, like the name of the city, on the penultimate syllable.