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 wildcat 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. Wildcats, 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
gatos silvestres, gato salvaje, gato montés, mountain lions, pumas, stones, piedras, wild cats, wildcats, nombres de hombres
te(tl), stone, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tetl-0
miz(tli), wildcat or mountain lion, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/miztli
temiz(tli), a wildcat, https://aztecglyphs.wired-humanities.org/content/temiztli
Gato Montés
Stephanie Wood
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).