Mollanco (Mdz13r)

The rubber does not appear to have a semantic contribution, just a phonetic one. The rubber element "ol" (the combining form of olli, rubber) phonetically reinforces part of the the "mol" sound. The word for sauce bowl is molcaxitl, but here the bowl just stands for the "mol" that is the start of that word, serving as a kind of shorthand. When the "tlan" (which is not a locative here, unusually, but plays a phonetic role) combines with the "mol," the result is the double l, and the t drops away. This explains the doubling of the l in normalizing the spelling of the place name in the gloss. The final meaning could be a town famous for its sauce, but could that have been accomplished with just Mollan? Karttunen suggests the place of the grinding bowl. Perhaps the town made molcajetes (sauce bowls, using the Mexican Spanish term for molcaxitl here).

Karttunen concludes that the three elements of this glyph would work better for a place name "Molotla," and that would return the locative role to the tooth glyph. We do have a compound glyph for the place name "Molotla" (or possibly meant to be Molotlan) in this collection. In that case, the glyph refers to the place of the house finch.

In his study of the history in the Codex Chimalpopoca, John Bierhorst (1992, 190) notes that Mollanco was a town that paid tribute to Tetzcoco and perhaps also performed labor for Mexico City. It may have been conquered by Ahuitzotzin. Two towns with the Hispanized place name, Molango, are found today in Hidalgo (near Metztitlan) and in Veracruz.