Tlachquiyauhco (Mdz16r)
This compound glyph for the place name Tlachquiyauhco (perhaps "Just Outside the Ball Court") features a ball court (tlachtli) and rain drops (quiyahuitl) falling on the court. The locative suffix (-co) is not shown visually, but perhaps the landscape provides a semantic locative. This ball court has the classic shape of a capital letter "i" lying on its side. The court a colorful one, with turquoise blue in the upper right corner, followed by (clockwise) red, green, and yellow. It also has yellow rings in the center. There are four water signs with a single droplet at the bottom of each one, representing rain (quiahuitl) or quiyahuitl).
Stephanie Wood
Quiyahuitl and quiahuitl are really the same word with two different spellings, both acceptable. The colors of the four quadrants of the ball court vary in this glyph as compared to the other one in this collection. (See below, right.)
Importantly, the rain in this compound could be playing a phonetic rather than a logographic role, in that -quiyahuac is an adverb that says "outside" or "at the entrance," and that may be the referent.
Stephanie Wood
tlachquiyauhco. puo
Tlachquiyauhco, pueblo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
ball courts, ballcourts, canchas, pistas, juegos, pelotas, rain, lluvia, Tlaxiaco, Mixteca, entradas, afuera

tlach(tli), ball court, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlachtli
quiahui(tl), a heavy rain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/quiahuitl
quiyahui(tl), rain, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/quiyahuitl
-quiyahuac, outside or at the entrance, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/quiyahuac
-co (locative suffix), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/co
a(tl), water, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/atl
Justo Afuera de la Cancha del Juego de Pelota
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 16 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 42 of 188.
The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, hold the original manuscript, the MS. Arch. Selden. A. 1. This image is published here under the UK Creative Commons, “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License” (CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0).