Ixicayan (Mdz40r)

This is a visual for the verb, ixica, to leak. The water, with its lines of current and turbinate shells and droplets (which some people interpret to be chalchihuites, or local jade stones) emerges from the site of the horizontal red and yellow lines that suggest the location for a mountain spring. Together, water (atl) and mountain (tepetl) form the word altepetl, which means town or a socio-political unit. This has the potential to be applicable in any number of representations for place names, as a visual and silent locative in the form of a tepetl can be serving as what Whittaker would call a "semantic complement." These same yellow and red lines also appear where water emerges from the top of an arm, at the shoulder (acolli), in the compound glyph for Acolhuacan (see below, right).

The locative suffix -yan is one that attaches to verbs and indicates customary action, as pointed out by Frances Karttunen (unpublished manuscript, used here with her permission.) So, this would be a place where the leaking occurs regularly, and therefore, again, it is likely the site of a natural spring.