Tlalomi (MH522r)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name Tlalomi (here, attested as a man's name) has two prominent elements. One is a bird's eye view of a parcel of agricultural land (tlalli). The land is dotted as though to suggest cultivation. But it could also be an area of earth with some stubble on it. In front of the land is a broken bone (omitl). The epiphysis at the top has two rounded parts. At the bottom is a jagged edge, suggesting that it is broken.
Stephanie Wood
The literal translation is Land- or Earth-Bone, but often the meaning can diverge widely from the literal translation. For instance, a tlalomixochitl is a short-stemmed type of lily, where tlal- refers to the earth and plants that grow low to the ground. The -omi- part may be the "short-stemmed" component, given that it is a bone that is broken off. This comes from the book, An Aztec Herbal: The Classic Codex of 1552. Another suggestion is a "small, whitish and shiny worm, which hides under the ground; it is firm and always straight, hence its name, bone of the earth." This comes from Rémi Siméon, Dictionnaire de la langue nahuatl ou mexicaine (1885, 544).
Stephanie Wood
franco tlalomi
Francisco Tlalomi
Stephanie Wood
1560
Stephanie Wood
land, earth, tierra, bones, huesos, flores, gusanos
tlal(li), land or earth, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlalli
omi(tl), bone, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/omitl
(un tipo de lirio o de gusano)
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 522r, World Digital Library.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=123&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).
