Xoxouhtla (Mdz23r)

Xoxouhtla (Mdz23r)
Compound Glyph

Glyph or Iconographic Image Description:

This compound glyph for the place name Xoxouhtla has three components, a hill or mountain (tepetl), silent here and perhaps a semantic complement that reinforces the locative], a circle with the color turquoise or blue-green (xoxouhqui), and teeth, which provide the phonetic locative -tlah, very close to the locative suffix -tlān, which is much more common. The teeth are the classic two, upper, front, white teeth with red gums, and as always, they re not meant to convey any meaning such as teeth, but rather place of abundance of something or simply place. The tepetl is the standard two-tone green bell shape with horizontal strips of red and yellow at the base. The color turquoise simply fills the circle in between the hill and the teeth.

Description, Credit:

Stephanie Wood

Added Analysis:

Because the final -n often drops off an intended -tlān in alphabetic writing, and because vowel length is rarely indicated in the colonial-era glosses, it is often impossible to know when -tla (or -tlah if we show the glottal stop) is actually meant in place of -tlān. [See Gordon Whittaker, Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs, 2021, 101.]

Added Analysis, Credit:

Stephanie Wood

Gloss Image:

Gloss Diplomatic Transcription:

xo xovtla pu^o

Gloss Normalization:

Xoxouhtla, pueblo

Gloss Analysis, Credit:

Stephanie Wood

Source Manuscript:

Mendoza/Mendocino, Codex (Mdz)

Date of Manuscript:

c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest

Creator's Location (and place coverage):

Mexico City

Semantic Categories:

place name

Syntax:

locative (visual but silent)

noun(s)

reduplication (in gloss/text)

Cultural Content & Iconography:

Anatomy, human body parts

Cultural Content, Credit:

Stephanie Wood

Colors:

Shapes and Perspectives:

bell-shaped (upright)

circle, circular or rounded

Reading Order (Compounds or Simplex + Notation):

upward

Keywords:

greens, blues, mountains

Glyph or Iconographic Image:

Relevant Nahuatl Dictionary Word(s):

xoxouh(qui), blue-green, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/xoxouhqui
-tlah, where there is a lot of, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tla-1

Additional Scholars' Interpretations:

"Where There's A Lot of Blue-Green" (Whittaker, 2021, 94)

Whittaker's Transliteration:

(XO)XOUH-tla-MOUNTAIN

Image Source:

Codex Mendoza, folio 23 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 56 of 188.

Image Source, Rights:

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).