Miacatla (Mdz23r)
This compound glyph for the place name Miacatla includes an arrow [mitl and, behind, it, a reed plant [acatl. The arrow has an unusually elaborate (white) point. The rest of the arrow is classic, with the yellow shaft with red on each end, the brown eagle feather, and the white down feather ball. It is vertical. The reed plant is painted a turquoise blue and has four somewhat curling leaves. The locative suffix is not shown visually.
Stephanie Wood
The mitl apparently gets its shaft from the acatl plant. The acatl can also appear--especially in its visual for a calendrical name--as an arrow itself. The locative suffix here is -tla (or -tlah, if we show the glottal stop), referring to abundance. It could also be -tlan, if the final "n" has inadvertently dropped away in the gloss, and that would simply refer to the place. Karttunen mentions the possibility of the word miac (much, many) being intended. Perhaps if this were combined with "a" for atl) (water), it could be a place of much water.
Stephanie Wood
miacatla.puo
Miacatla, pueblo
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
arrows, flechas, reeds, cañas, carrizo
mi(tl), arrow, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/mitl
aca(tl), reed, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/acatl
-tla or tlah; (locative suffix), place of abundance of, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tla-1
"Place of Arrow Reeds" (i.e. the reeds used for arrow shafts) [Frances Karttunen, unpublished manuscript, used here with her permission.]
"Where There Are Many Reed Arrows" (Berdan and Anawalt, 1992, vol. 1, p. 191)
"El lugar de muchas cañas con que se hacen flechas"
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 23 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 56 of 188.
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).
