Temiz (MH497v)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name Temiz (here, attested male) consists of a profile view of the the full body of a wild cat or mountain lion (temiztli) apparently climbing on a horizontal stone (tetl). The cat's visible eye is open. The stone has curling ends and diagonal lines across it.
Stephanie Wood
The tetl in this compound does not have a semantic role but provides a phonetic indication that the name starts with Te-, for Temiztli and not some other animal. But reading the glyph out loud would not require that the stone be read. Wild cats, cougars, mountain lions (called pumas in Spanish) are formidable animals. According to twentieth-century ethnography, a nahualli could take the shape of a cat. See Los cuentos en náhuatl de Doña Luz Jiménez, recop. Fernando Horcasitas and Sarah O. de Ford (México, UNAM, 1979), 32–33.
Stephanie Wood
luys
temiz
Luis Temiz
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
mountain lions, pumas, stones, piedras, wild cats, wildcats
te(tl), stone, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tetl-0
miz(tli), wild cat or mountain lion, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/miztli
temiz(tli), a wild cat, https://aztecglyphs.wired-humanities.org/content/temiztli
El Puma
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 497v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=74&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).