Tenahuac (MH756r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Tenahuac (perhaps, “Near Someone” or “With People”) is attested here as a man’s name. The glyph shows a frontal view of a horizontal stone (tetl), with its typical curly ends and diagonal lines across the middle. The stone serves as a phonetic indicator for the start of the name (Te-). As the contextualizing image shows, the stone is placed just above and near the tribute payer’s head, perhaps suggesting the sense of near (-nahuac), which is the second part of the name. Thus, perhaps the glyph could be considered a compound.
Stephanie Wood
The implication is that the person with this name is "with someone" or "a partner to someone," according to Alonso de Molina's vocabulary. And having the one extra person's head would concur visually with the singular interpretation. But the Te- (generic, someone singular or plural) could mean that the person with this name would be accompanied by people, not alone. Our Online Nahuatl Dictionary provides a sixteeeth-century example of tenahuac with this plural sense: huel tetloc, tenahuac tinemiz = podrás vivir al lado de la gente, entre la gente = you will be able to live at the side of people, among people. (See the link in the dictionary field in this record.) It is a beautiful thought for naming a baby to predict that future of being among people all its life, not alone. Perhaps it was a gregarious baby.
-Nahuac is also an adverb that appears in this collection to refer to towns that are near something, such as woods (Cuauhnahuac), or near a bend (Acolnahuac), on the verge of war or near a battlefield, perhaps (Yaonahuac). Sometimes a speech scroll (evoking the word nahuatl) is used as a visual for this geographical sense of -nahuac.
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
near, cerca, with, junto, acompañado, people, gente
tenahuac, with or near someone, or with people, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tenahuac
te-, nonspecific human object prefix, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/te
te(tl), stone, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tetl
-nahuac, next to or near, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/nahuac
tehuan, with another person or persons, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tehuan
Cerca de Alguien, o Acompañado de Gente
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 756r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=590&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).
