Otlica (MH809r)
This black-line drawing of the simplex glyph for the personal name Otlica (“On the Road”) is attested here as the name of a man who wove mats (petlatl). The glyph for otlica shows two horizontal parallel lines, which represent a road (otli, or ohtli, with the glottal stop). Alternating footprints fill this space, going in the direction of the viewer’s right. The alternation creates a feeling of movement across the landscape, on the road (otlica).
Stephanie Wood
Otlipan and opan are other ways of saying “on the road.” Otlica literally says “with the road.” The parallel lines filled with footsteps are the most common visual for otli. Sometimes otli (and by extension, footprints alone) are employed as phonetic syllabograms for the sound of the letter “o.”
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
ohtli, caminos, senderos, canales, conductos, nombres de hombres
o(tli), road, channel, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/otli
-ica, with or through, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/ica
En el Camino
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 809r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=692st=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).