Tecocohua (MH515r)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph that stands for the personal name Tecocoa (also seen as Tecocohuatl, Tecocohua, and Tecocoatl) possibly means "Someone Ill" or "Someone in Pain." The glyph here shows a man's head (perhaps standing for the Te- of someone) with a hand grasping (providing the "hua" phonetic syllable) the throat. The man is shown in profile looking toward the viewer's right. The hand is a right hand, presumably that of another person who is doing the choking, causing pain (tecoco or cocoa).
Stephanie Wood
This name was also held by a famous person of Cuauhtitlan at the time of the Spanish invasion. This could be a simplex glyph except for the double duty of the hand, which seems to be the cause of pain but also stands for the possession of pain. Alfonso Lacadena (2008b, 42) discusses the grasping hand sign (in other cases) as standing for "hua" (relating to possession) and serving as a phonetic complement. The resulting meaning of the name may be "One Who Has Pain." If the analysis of the gloss of the name should really point to Tecocoa, with the hua simply as a phonetic indicator, the overall meaning might be something else. For instance, tecoa means "to entrust something to someone else," and Tecocoa could represent a reduplication of that verb.
See Teyahualo, below, for another example of the "grasping hand."
Stephanie Wood
peo tecocohua
Pedro Tecocohua
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
pain, dolor, estrangular, personas malas, personas dañosas, Tecocohua and Tecocohuatl variant, nombres de hombres
Tecocohua, someone who is ill or in pain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tecocohua
te- (nonspecific human object prefix), someone, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/te
cocoa, to be in pain or cause someone pain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cocoa
tecocoani, something that stings and hurts, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tecocoani
tecoco, something causing pain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tecoco
-hua, grasping, possessing, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/hua
Él Que Sufre Dolores
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 515r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=109&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).