Ana (BMap H45)
This painted black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Ana (female) shows a horizontal stream of water painted turquoise blue. It flows from left to right and it has a line of current (movement) down the middle. Three tiny offshoots flow downward from the horizontal stream, and each one ends in a bead or droplet. This is a phonetic indicator that the name starts with A- (for Ana).
Stephanie Wood
Water typically seems to flow downward, suggesting a gravitational force, in some cases it will flow upwards and in many cases it will form a whirlpool. This is a baptismal name that comes from the colonizers’ religion. Nahua glyphs exist for a number of Spanish given names and surnames, as shown below.
Stephanie Wood
This glyph is not glossed; the decipherment of the glyph comes from Gordon Whittaker’s contribution to the study by Mary E. Miller and Barbara E. Mundy (2012).
c. 1565
Jeff Haskett-Wood
agua, nombres de mujeres
a(tl), water, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/atl
Ana
Beinecke Map/Codex Reese, section 8, no. 45 in the Whittaker study (published in the Miller/Mundy book, 2012), and see the original at: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3600017
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).
