acolli (Mdz5v)
This element for shoulder (acolli) has been carved from the compound sign for the place name, Acolhuacan. It consists of an arm that includes the (right) hand, elbow, and upper arm, finishing with a protruding bone at the site of the shoulder.
Stephanie Wood
The presence of the bone may intend to call attention to the shoulder (acolli) site of this arm. This arm is not adorned the way some other signs for acolli appear in this collection. Gordon Whittaker calls "acol" a pseudo-logogram, for in place names it is not literally about a shoulder but provides the phonetics for "a" (water) and "col" (bend, or curve), referring to "the curve of the lakeshore." [See Whittaker, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs, 2021, 180.]
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, but by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
shoulders, bones, arms,hands
acol(li), shoulder, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/acolli
ma(itl), hand or arm, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/maitl
coltic, curved, bent, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/coltic
shoulder
el hombro
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 5 verso, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 21 of 188.
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).
