Axayacatl (Mdz19r)

Some have translated this name as “Water Face,” but axaxayacatl and axayacatl are also names for an insect, the "water boatman." This is discussed more fully in Mexicolore, in an article by Matthew McDavitt dated 14 July 2011. If water boatman (the insect) is intended, then this glyph is fully phonographic. But it is also semantic, because the insect has transparent eyes that look like they are made of water.

Axayacatl (or Axayacatzin, with the reverential suffix -tzin) was a late fifteenth-century ruler of Mexico-Tenochtitlan who expanded the empire considerably. His father was Huehue Tezozomoctli. He bore two sons, Moteuczoma Xocoyotl and Macuilmalinaltzin. [See: the Codex Chimalpahin: Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Culhuacan, and Other Nahuatl Altepetl in Central Mexico; The Nahuatl and Spanish Annals and Accounts Collected and Recorded by don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), vol. 2, 96–97.]

For another rendition of the glyph for Axayacatl, see Marc Thouvenot's vignette about an image from the Códice Matritense de la Real Academia, https://vignettes.sup-infor.com/imagen/5-RA_01_051r_f. In that one, the water curves around the top of the head and spills down over Axayacatl's face.