Tecocohuatl (MH519v)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph stands for the personal name Tecocohuatl (also seen as Tecocoatl, Tecocoa, and Tecocohua). The glyph here shows a man's head with a hand grasping (providing the "hua" phonetic syllable of possession) the throat. The man is shown in profile looking toward the viewer's right. The hand is a left hand, presumably that of another person who is doing the choking, causing pain (tecoco).
Stephanie Wood
The name was held by a famous person of Cuauhtitlan at the time of the Spanish invasion. It is unknown whether the various men with this name in 1560 Huejotzingo had been named for the famous person.
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 (hua) of pain. Alfonso Lacadena (2008b, 42) discusses the grasping hand sign as standing for "hua" (relating to possession) as a phonetic complement. The resulting meaning of the name may be "One Who Has Pain" or "One Who is Sick." See Teyahualo, below, for another example of the "grasping hand."
Stephanie Wood
gonçalo tecocohuatl
Gonzalo Tecocohuatl
Stephanie Wood
1560
personas malas, personas dañosas, choke, estrangular, Tecocohua variant
cocoa, to feel pain or to cause pain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/cocoa
tecoco, to cause pain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tecoco
hua, possession, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/hua
Tecocohua, someone who is ill or in pain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tecocoatl
Él Que Sufre Dolores
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 519v, World Digital Library. https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=118&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).
