Calmecahua (MH721r)
This black-line drawing of the compound Nahuatl hieroglyph for the personal name or title, Calmecahua, is attested here as pertaining to a man. Calmecahua was either a title that went with teuctli/tecuhtli (lord) in a place called Calmecahuacan, or perhaps this person was named after a man who wrote a history of Tlaxcala in 1548. The town Calmehuacan had a school, calmecac. The compound has two elements, a building in a frontal view and a rope. The building could be a house (calli) and serve as a phonetic indicator for the start of the name, Cal-. Or, it could be a logogram for calmecac, school. The twisted cord (mecatl) coming out from the entrance to the building is a phonetic indicator for the middle of the name (-meca-), a disyllabogram. The -hua (possessive singular) is not shown visually.
Stephanie Wood
luys calmecaua
Luis Calmecahua
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
cordones, sogas, casas, edificios, escuelas, nombres de hombres

cal(li), house or building, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/calli
meca(tl), a cord or rope, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/mecatl
calmecac, school for youth, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/calmecac
-hua (singular possessive suffix), https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/hua
(un título o el nombre de un historiador famoso)
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 721r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=520&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).

