Mimich (BMapG32)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Mimich (perhaps “Little Fish”), attested here as a man’s name. The glyph shows a fish in profile, facing left, looking toward the head of the man whose name this was. The side fins of the fish stretch outward from the body, as though it were swimming (movement).
Stephanie Wood
The gloss for this name includes a reduplication of the first syllable, but there is no corresponding visual reduplication. Magnus Pharao Hansen defines Mimich as "Little Fish." [See his blog from 2014, "Nahuatl Names: The Nahuatl names in the 1544 census of Morelos."] There is a Mimich, for which this man may have been named, who was a Cloud Serpent paired with Xiuhnel and associated with hunting, promiscuity, and drunkenness. See The Fate of Earthly Things by Molly H. Bassett (2015). And the translators of the Primeros Memoriales say that Xiuhnel and Mimich were prominent figures in many migration stories of central Mexican cultures. See the Sullivan and Nicholson edition of the PM (1997, 135). Mimich also has a potential warrior association, as explained in our Online Nahuatl Dictionary. Mimich is a name that has lived on. Multiple examples are found in colonial testaments. See, for example, Teresa Rojas Rabiela, Elsa Leticia Rea López, and Constantino Medina Lima, Vidas y Bienes Olvidados (1999).
Stephanie Wood
This glyph is not glossed; the transliteration of the glyph comes from Gordon Whittaker’s contribution to the study by Mary E. Miller and Barbara E. Mundy (2012).
c. 1565
Jeff Haskett-Wood
peces, cazadores, borrachos, Nube-Serpientes, nombres de fuerzas divinas, nombres de hombres
michin, fish, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/michin
Mimich, name of a divine force, a Cloud Serpent, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/mimich
Pececito (nombre de una fuerza divina)
Stephanie Wood
Beinecke Map/Codex Reese, section 8, no. 32 in the Whittaker study (published in the Miller/Mundy book, 2012), and see the original at: https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3600017
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).
