Malinal (MH595r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Malinal (“Twisted Grass,” attested here as a man’s name) shows a frontal view of a twisted piece of grass. It has a loop at the top and two twists below that. The grass is not connected at the bottom.
Stephanie Wood
In many codices, some version of the word for twisted grass (malinalli) is used as a hieroglyph for the increasingly popular women's name María. Here, it is a man's name, and he was probably named for the day sign under which he was born, given that malinalli is a day sign in the 260-day divinatory calendar (the tonalpohualli). We no longer have the numerical notation that accompanied the day sign. These numbers were regularly falling away (or being suppressed) at the time of this manuscript (1560), and yet calendrics were an important part of Nahuas' religious views of the cosmos.
Stephanie Wood
alonso malinal
Alonso Malinal
Stephanie Wood
1560
Stephanie Wood
grasses, hierbas retorcidas, hierbas entrelazadas, nombres de hombres
malinal(li), twisted grass and a day sign, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/malinalli
La Hierba Torcida
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 595r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=269&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).
