Teicui (MH896v)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Teicui (“Young Girl”) is attested here as a woman’s name. The glyph shows the head of a woman in profile, facing the viewer’s right. This is not the head of the tribute payer herself, but the head of a woman provided with the intention of writing the name in hieroglyphs. She wears the hairstyle that puts the ends of her braids up above or next to her forehead, which is emblematic of her gender, but also conveys a sense of an adult woman, even while the meaning of “teicui” is meant to convey a young age.
Stephanie Wood
It is interesting that a young girl (teicui) would be represented visually with the hairstyle (neaxtlahualli) that is associated with adult women. But perhaps this is because teicui is a near homophone with teicuic (“she coiled someone’s hair”). If so, then the hairstyle is an intentional phonetic complement, and the glyph is a compound.
Stephanie Wood
maria . teicuī
María Teicui
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
género, gender, viudas, muchachas, jóvenes, cabello, juventud, nombres de mujeres
teicui, a young girl or the second of four tlazolteotl (divine forces of vice?), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/teicui
Muchacha
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 896v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=865&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).
