Tonal (MH528v)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name Tonal (here, attested as a man’s name) shows a bird's eye view of a quincunx--a four-petal flower shape with a circle in the middle. This may be a representation of the word tonalli, a vital force and a name for "day." Surrounding the flower are swirls of water (atl). This is a phonetic complement that emphasizes the "-al" of Tonal.
Stephanie Wood
The phonetic "-al" is logically placed on the perimeter in this example, according to Gordon Whittaker (in a comment made at the Library of Congress on 4/18/2023).
The verb tona is "to make warm from the sun," and the tonalli is something that connects to "heat-light-energy" in the words of James Maffie (Aztec Philosophy, 2014, 590).
Incidentally, the nopalli cactus in the contextualizing image suggests that Francisco Tonal may have had the occupation of processing cochineal (nocheztli), a natural dye for textiles.
Stephanie Wood
franco tonal
Francisco Tonal
Stephanie Wood
1560
sun, sol, día, agua
tonal(li), day, sun, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tonalli
a(tl), water, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/atl
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 528v, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=136&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).
