Coatlan (Mdz23r)
This compound glyph for the place name Coatlan consists of most of a curving snake's (coatl) body (brown, facing to yellow and then a white belly) in profile, facing to the viewer's right. Its tongue is protruding, red at the base and yellow where it forks. A bit of a rattler is visible on the left end of the snake, and it is painted a turquoise color. Below the snake are two white, upper, front teeth (tlantli) with red gums. They provide the phonetic element for the locative suffix -tlan (near).
Stephanie Wood
It interesting that the artist did not choose here to tuck the teeth up into the curve in the snake's body as we see on the compound glyphs for Coatitlan and Chontal Coatlan. Perhaps that closer placement was intending to convey the ligature (-ti-). As is visible in many compound glyphs, the postposition -titlan is often presented differently (such as the full set of teeth, compared with the two front teeth for -tlan).
Berdan and Anawalt mention that Clark (1938 2:28) notes that the town of Coatlan had "a large sculpture of a snake" in the square. There are towns called Coatlan in the states of Morelos and Oaxaca, at minimum.
Stephanie Wood
coatlan . puo
Coatlan, pueblo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
snakes, serpents, serpientes, dientes, cohuatl
-tlan (locative suffix), place, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlan
"Snake Place" [Frances Karttunen, unpublished manuscript, used here with her permission.]
"Where There are Many Snakes" (Berdan and Anawalt, 1992, vol. 1, p. 179)
Codex Mendoza, folio 23 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 56 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).
