Nochco (Mdz38r)

The interpretation of the "coc" part of this place name has troubled various scholars. The verb zo, to bleed, might have been intended to be written as ço, with the tail of the "ç" inadvertently left off. The final locative suffix would be -c, if that were the case. Because the nochtli was considered a metaphor for the heart and its red juice was seen as blood-like, one can imagine that Nochzoc could have been meant ("Where the Cactus Fruit Bleeds"). And, Blanca M. Jiménez P. and ‎Samuel Villela (in Historia y cultura tras el glifo, 1998, p. 101) refer to a place called Nochzoc in Guerrero. But Berdan and Anawalt (Codex Mendoza, 1992, vol. 1, p. 195) are doubtful that the "ç" was written incorrectly. Returning, then, to analyze the name, we discover that Gerardo Gutiérrez (see ch. 33 of the Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs, 2017, p. 476) identifies the modern town of Nuxco, on the coastal plan of Guerrero, as being the Nochcoc (or Nochco) of the Codex Mendoza. Thus, Nochco might have been what was meant, and the double locative suffixes (-co and -c) were the error. If that is the case, then the locative suffix would just have been -co. The mountain or hill may suffix as a semantic locative.