Tecuanatl (FCbk11f224v)

According to the text of the Book 11 entry, this is “large river…where there are many caimans, and they call it Tecuanatl, which means water in which there are ferocious beasts, which eat people, because those ferocious animals are raised in it.” It is interesting to note that, rather than picturing a crocodilian creature in the glyph, the more generic “wild animal” tecuani (though fashioned as a feline, it must be said) is used instead. This is undoubtedly something that should be tracked as more examples are found in other glyphs. As far as the “people-biting” meaning of the Nahuatl term is concerned, and while whoever translated the word into Spanish in the Florentine Codex glossed it as meaning “an animal that eats people,” John Sullivan has suggested an alternate reading. arguing that “there is no word for animal in Nahuatl. Nahua speakers use tecuani to name a certain class of living creatures: non-humans that bite. Tecuani does have its root in the verb cua, to eat. But another sense of cua is to bite, and this is the meaning of tecuani, a people biter. Obviously there are some tecuani that, aside from biting people, can also eat them, but this isn't the sense of the word” (2012; see the Online Nahuatl Dictionary).