Acolhuacapan (MH606r)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the place name Acolhuacapan (perhaps "On the Bend in the Canal") shows a swirling body of water (atl), which is a phonetic indicator that this place name starts with A-. It could also have a logographic and semantic role, if water is the important feature in the local landscape. Below the water is a human arm, meant to indicate a shoulder (acolli), which, in place names, typically refers to a bend in a river or a curve in a mountain top. The swirling water has thin and thick black lines that show its current/movement. The water also sprays off the swirl in three short streams, each one with a turbinate shell at the tip. The -hua- refers to possession, and the -pan is a locative suffix (in, on). There seems to be an extra syllable -ca-, unanalyzed as yet.
Stephanie Wood
The gloss indicates that this is is a neighborhood (barrio, in Spanish). In this time frame one also sees estancia and sujeto as Spaniards tried to understand and rename the smaller settlements that made up what they would call a municipality. Huexotzinco was an altepetl in Nahua terms. Furthermore, Acolhuacapan may have been a tlaxilacalli, a teccalli, or a calpulli in Nahuatl. Benjamin Johnson (Pueblos within Pueblos, 2018, 93) reports: "Local community structures in Tlaxcala and Huexotzinco, called teccalli, were slightly different than the tlaxilacalli studied here."
Stephanie Wood
aculvacapā
barrio/
Acolhuacapan, barrio
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
agua, curva en el río, canal
a(tl), water, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/atl
acol(li), shoulder, or bend, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/acolli
-hua (possession), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/hua
apan(tli), waterway, canal, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/apantli
En la Curva del Río (o Canal)
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 606r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=294st=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).