Tlaco (MH576v)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name Tlaco (perhaps “Middle Child," attested here as a man’s name) shows a frontal view of a device used to constrain an enslaved person (tlacotli). It involves a horizontal stick (tlacotl) with black hash marks or stripes and a half (tlaco) circle, perhaps the cuauhcozcatl, that would go around someone's neck. Another possibility is that he is a middle child, "Tlaco," but this is more commonly used for girls.
Stephanie Wood
Given these three possibilities of logograms, a definitive translation is a challenge, just as it is a challenge to call this a "simplex" glyph. The most prominent visual choice for the translation is the tlacotli device, but we know that "Tlaco" (often a middle child, relating to the meaning "half") was a common name. John Frederick Schwaller explains (The Church in Colonial Latin America, 2000, 88) how Tiacapan was often the name of the oldest child, Tlaco the name of the middle child, and Xoco the youngest.
Stephanie Wood
peo. tlaco
Pedro Tlaco
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
families, familias, hijos, children, orden de nacimiento, esclavos, personas esclavizadas, tecnología, aparatos
tlaco(tli), enslaved person, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlacotli
tlaco(tl), stick, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlacotl
tlaco, half, middle, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlaco
El Segundo Hijo, o El Esclavo, o El Palo
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 576v, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=232&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).
