tzapotl (Mdz53r)
This element for tzapotl (zapote in Spanish, sapote in English), a fruit borne by a tree, has been carved from the compound sign for the place name, Tetzapotitlan. It is a tree in two tones of green, showing only part of the trunk, with a leader and two branches, each one with foliage. Protruding from each clump of foliage are two rounded fruits. The term for the fruit is tzapotl; in Book 11 of the Florentine Codex the tree is called a tzapocuahuitl.
Stephanie Wood
In the other examples of the tzapotl (zapote, sapote) fruit trees that we have from various compound glyphs (below right), we see green balls (an apple-like fruit) in lieu of the stones. Some of these trees have one, two, or three fruits per branch. Alonso de Molina translates tzapotl as "cierta fruita conocida," a type of fruit that is known (i.e. locally]. Some call this tree the Mexican apple, or "sapote tree" in English. According to Wikipedia, the fruit is edible, it contains pharmacological properties such as histamines, and the seeds may have been used by the Aztecs to make poison.
Stephanie
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
trees, branches, roots, árboles, ramas, raíces, fruits, frutas
tzapo(tl), sapote, a fruit tree, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tzapotl
zapote tree
el árbol zapote
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 53 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 118 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).
