Chayahual (MH831r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Chayahual (perhaps “Gate”) is attested here as a man’s name. The glyph shows a frontal view of a rectangular gate with four upright posts and a horizontal piece at the top and the bottom. Dots (bits of grass or seeds?) appear on the ground in front of the gate, providing some depth and suggesting this is imagined as being out of doors.
Stephanie Wood
This looks like a wooden gate, which is usually cuauhchayahualli, so it is unclear why the cuauh- is omitted in the gloss. See below for other examples of such gates. One is more like a railing–carved and painting–that was used indoors. The -yahual part of this term would seem to suggest that it goes around something, like a fence. But nothing in the visual evidence suggests this as of yet. The seeds may be a phonetic indicator for the homophonic verb chayahua, to sprinkle seeds on the ground.
Stephanie Wood
tolibio chayaval
Toribio Chayahual
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
puertas, entradas, madera, nombres de hombres
cuauhchayahual(li), wooden gate, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cuauhchayahualli
chayahua, to scatter, sprinkle or disperse wheat seeds or the like, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/chayahua
Puerta
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 831r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=736&st=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).
