Xochimilcatzinco (Mdz24v)
This compound glyph for the place name Xochimilcatzinco has three prominent features, two multi-colored flowers (xochitl) in yellow, red, green, and turquoise blue. The flowers are sitting on a horizontal, rectangular, segmented agricultural parcel (milli), with alternating purple and orange segments. The land is textured with dots and tipped-over u's or backwards c's. To the left of the land and flowers is the half-body of a man, in profile, meant to call forth the reading of buttocks (tzintli), which provides the phonetic value for the -tzinco of place names that says "At the Little," "At the Lower," or "At the Lesser." The half-body is facing into the land (in the direction of the viewer's right), and it was painted with a terracotta color.
Stephanie Wood
The thrust of this compound glyph is to point to a settlement probably meant to have the name "At the Lesser Xochimilco." The -ca- in the name could be a ligature between Xochimil- and -tzinco. Alternatively, might it refer to the people of Xochimilco, the Xochimilca?
Stephanie Wood
xochimilcaçinco. puo
Xochimilcatzinco, pueblo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
butts, buttocks, rear end, little, lower, -tzinco locative, flowers, fields, nalgas, pequeño, bajo, flores, milpas, parcelas, agricultura
xochi(tl), flower(s), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/xochitl
mil(li), agricultural field, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/milli
-ca-, affiliation in the plural (singular is -ca), the plural can also have an indication of the glottal stop at the end, -cah, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/catl
tzin(tli), buttocks), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tzintli
-tzinco (locative suffix), lower, little, or new [town], https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tzinco
-co (locative suffix), at, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/co
"At the Lesser Xochimilco [In the Fields of Flowers]" [Gordon Whittaker, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs, 2021, 104]
XOCHIMIL.TZINCO
Codex Mendoza, folio 24 verso, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 59 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).