Molca (MH681r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Molca (“Underdeveloped Ear of Maize”) is attested here as a woman’s name. The glyph shows a small ear of corn, shucked, but with the kernels intact.
Stephanie Wood
When the parents are naming a baby, it might be seen as a cute, little, undeveloped ear of corn, given that corn is so central to daily life. While Karttunen suggests that these ears can be considered "inferior," that might not be what the parents were thinking at the time. Note how these little cobs do resemble the cintli corn cobs, with a similar shape and unwrapped, whereas the xilotl is still partially wrapped and it has silk (below). The IDIEZ native-speaker group from the Huaxteca explain that these tiny ears are immediately shucked upon harvesting. See our Online Nahuatl Dictionary for both entries for molcatl. See below for other glyphs pointing to different types of ears of corn.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
maíz, mazorcas, nombres de mujeres
molca(tl), a secondary ear of maize that never develops fully, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/molcatl
Mazorca Subdesarrollada
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 681r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=442&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).
