Tlatol (MH614v)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Tlatol ("Word") is attested here as a man's name. It shows a group of four large, curling speech scrolls emerging upward from the mouth of the tribute payer himself (rather than adding another head). Perhaps eight other small, leaf-like shapes aurround the scrolls.
Stephanie Wood
Speech scrolls that come out of a human mouth (also, for instance, from an eagle's beak) can represent a range of vocabulary, including: tlatolli (word), itoa (to speak), tzatzi (to announce), motenehua (aforementioned), nahuatl (language, or a pleasant sound), chalani (to speak a lot), and cuica (to sing). This list is not exhaustive.
It is interesting that "word" is represented as oral rather than alphabetic or hieroglyphic. Oral communication was paramount in Nahua culture.
Stephanie Wood
pabro tlatol
Pablo Tlatol (or Tlahtol, if we include the glottal stop)
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
nombres de hombres
tlatol(li), speech, words, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlatolli
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 614v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=311&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).
