zapato (TK222v)
This painted simplex Nahuatl hieroglyph represents a shoe (what we are surmising would be a zapato, a loanword from Spanish that entered Nahuatl). The Spanish-language gloss, however, says “los alpargates” (espadrilles, in English), simple canvas shoes that usually have cords on the soles. The glyph here just shows the bottom of the shoe, an unusual but unmistakable drawing for a tlacuilo. It does have a position something like the footprint hieroglyph, which stood for path, road, and many other translations. (See our essay on this tipic on the left-hand navigation bar.)
Stephanie Wood
Tlacuilos drew and painted shoes (with the plural sometimes being zapatox in Nahuatl) on Spaniards, but when Nahuas were wearing shoes, they were cactli. While cactli became cacles in Mexican Spanish, “huaraches” also refers to the sandals that are descendants of the cactli, having incorporated leather strips after the introduction of cattle from Spain. Alpargate or alpargata were not loanwords to our knowledge, at least not in the period of this manuscript from Tepetlaoztoc. We suspect that the glosses here were not written by Nahuas, although they might have been.
Stephanie Wood
los alpargates
las alpargatas (?)
Stephanie Wood
c. 1556
Jeff Haskett-Wood
los zapatos, pie, pies, tributo, tributos, resistencia, colonialismo
zapato, shoe, a loanword from Spanish, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/zapato
zapatox, shoes, a Nahuatlized loanword from Spanish, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/zapatox
el zapato
Stephanie Wood
The Codex Kingsborough, also known as the Códice de Tepetlaoztoc, and the Memorial de los indios de Tepetlaoztoc, is not on display. It was transferred from the British Library and is now held by the British Museum. It is shared on line at: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am2006-Drg-13964
©The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Please also cite the <em>Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphsem>, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities Projects, 2020-present) and this URL.
