Tehuan (MH490v)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name Tehuan shows a human hand holding what may be a face or perhaps a rock. The hand stands for the phonetic syllable relating to possession (-hua). It is a right hand and it is facing toward the viewer's right. If there is a face, it could serve as a semantic indicator for the Te- (nonspecific human object prefix), referring to someone. Thus, the name may translate as "He Has Someone," or "In the Company of Someone" (tehuan).
Stephanie Wood
In his blog from 2014 about naming patterns in the Morelos census of 1544, Magnus Pharao Hansen gives "owner" for names ending in -hua. For example, he translates Tochhua as Rabbit Owner. Alfonso Lacadena coined the "grasping hand" sign as having the value hua, carrying "meaning in addition to sound" (i.e., not just phonetic. [See his article, "The wa1 and wa2 Phonetic Signs and the Logogram for WA in Nahuatl Writing," The PARI Journal 8:4 (2008), 42.]
Tehuan is a reasonable alternative to the name Tehua. Tehuan, with the final "n," means "in the company of someone."
Stephanie Wood
juā tegūa
Juan Tehuan
Stephanie Wood
José Aguayo-Barragán
tehuan, in the company of someone, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tehuan
te(tl), stone, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tetl
-hua, possessor of, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/hua
Tiene Alguien (?)
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 490v, World Digital Library. https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=60&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).
