Death; epidemic. Ch'orti': Chamer; Quiche: Kame; Yucatec: Kimi; Aztec: Miquitzli. Chamer comes from the root cham which is death or dying. The second syllable er could derive from ehir which means teeth and could explain why teeth figure prominently in both the Maya and the Aztec glyphs of this sign.
With a slightly different inflection, cham means prank or deceit. Chamsan means poison and chamse is to kill. One other word that comes from the same root is chamar which means to smoke tobacco. It should be no surprise that the Ch'orti' used the same root for death and for smoking. The Quiche and Yucatec versions probably come from permutating chamer.
The Aztec or Nahuatl name appears to have a Maya root, either from the Huasteca or the Quiche who were each exiled to Mexico due to pellagra, a disease that resulted from over-reliance of untreated corn in the diet. Pellagra causes skin scrapiness and oozing lesions, later dimentia and death. At the time of their exile both the Huasteca and the Quiche would have spoken a version of Ch'orti', so it is appropriate to examine Miquitzli using Ch'orti', which gives: mich - scraping; ich - secreting; and ahl (or ahr) - time of. So michichal would be "time of scraping and secreting" a good description of the pellagra epidemic.
Chamer seems to be one of the earlier named days among the 20 day signs of the tzolk'in. Chamer was used to describe Xibalba in the Popol Vuh, with the phrase 1 Death, 7 Death used to name the leaders of Xibalba. The double name convention of the Popol Vuh consistently utilizes the second name as a date mechanism, based on the Mars retrograde long-count calendar. Seven Chamer corresponds to the range of dates 8688 to 8641 BCE in the Mars calendar.
This most likely refers to the first contact of the Maya ancestors with Xibalba, i.e. very shortly after the Maya ancestors arrived in El Salvador from South America. In fact one of the two beaches near where the Maya ancestors first landed on their rafts is called Amatal - "arrival to the bad one". There are many reasons why it is unlikely that they were using the Mars retrograde calendar when they first arrived. Rather, it seems more likely that they estimated the date of their first encounter with Xibalba several hundred years later, after they had devised the Mars calendar in about 8400 BCE. This would mean that Chamer was named after the first named sign, Tojmar, but at about the same time as the next three signs to be named: Tz'ikin, B'ajram, and B'ajk'.
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