Acatl (MH638r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Acatl (“Reed,” or "Cane," attested here as a man’s name) shows a vertical, segmented reed with one long leaf on both the right and left sides. Roots are also just visible at the base of the reed. Acatl is a day name in the 260-day divinatory calendar called the tonalpohualli.
Stephanie Wood
Typically, this calendrical name would have a companion number, 1 to 13. Because of colonial edicts to stop using the tonalpohualli as a source for names, one thing that happened is that the companion numbers were dropped, perhaps as a stopgap measure to reduce the sacred nature of the name. See Norma Angélica Castilla Palma, "Las huellas del oficio y lo sagrado en los nombres nahuas de familias y barrios de Cholula," Dimensión Antropológica v. 65 (sept.-dic. 2015), 186.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
reeds, canes, carrizos, cañas, plantas
aca(tl), reed, cane, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/acatl
la caña
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 638r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=358st=image.
This manuscript is hosted by the Library of Congress and the World Digital Library; used here with the Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SAq 3.0).
