Tlahuel (MH518v)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Tlahuel ("Hello!") is attested here as a man's name. It shows part of a human face in profile, facing toward the viewer's right, and emitting five speech scrolls, three curling upward at the ends and two curling downward.
Stephanie Wood
Tlahuel is a name that is also attested in the Codex of Santa María de la Asunción. (See the Online Nahuatl Dictionary.) Tlahuel has been translated as "Hola!" in one source and a conjuring expression in another. (See the Gran Diccionario Náhuatl.) Thus, the speech scrolls coming from the person's mouth in this glyph may be a greeting or an expression of conjuring. For other speech scrolls in glyphs, see below.
The noun tlahuelli speaks to rage, fury, and indignation, seemingly provoking the opposite of fine and dignified speech. Huel is an intensifier (like "greatly"), and that ties in with tlahuelli as relating to an intense feeling, although perhaps it was once an intensely positive thing. In contemporary speech, tlahuel seems to be a friendly greeting.
Stephanie Wood
dio tlavel
Diego Tlahuel
Stephanie Wood
1560
Stephanie Wood
scrolls, volutas, palabras, hablar, conjurar, nombres de hombres
Tlahuel, a name, a greeting, or a conjuring expression, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlahuel-0
tlahuel(li), anger, rage, fury, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlahuelli
¡Hola!
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 518v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=116&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).
