maitl (Mdz50r)
This element that we are naming maitl (hand, arm) has been carved from the compound sign for the place name, Tlapacoyan, where it plays a semantic role. This is a left hand and arm, coming from the viewer's left and reaching toward the right. The elbow is bent. The fingernails are white.
Stephanie Wood
One might expect that this element be named simply "arm," but maitl and its stem, ma-, were typically used for both hand and arm. Hieroglyphs for maitl will often show the whole arm including the hand. There is a measurement that is the length of an arm, cemacolli, but it has yet to be attested in our Online Nahuatl Dictionary to mean just arm (and not hand).
Stephanie Wood
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
hands, arms
mai(tl), hand or arm, and a measurement, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/maitl
ma(tl), hand or arm, and a measurement, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/matl
cemacol(li), a measurement the length of an arm, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cemacolli
hand or arm
la mano, o el brazo
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 50 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 110 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).
