Xochipepena (MH812r)
This black-line drawing of the compound glyph for the personal name Xochipepena (“He Chooses Flowers” or "He Harvests Flowers") is attested here as a man’s name. The glyph shows a flower with four visible petals, a tripartite base, a stem, and a single leaf. The fingers of a right hand hold onto the stem of the flower. The hand has selected or harvested (pepena) this flower (xochitl).
Stephanie Wood
Pehpena (here showing the glottal stop) was used in many cases to refer to a kind of labor, a harvesting. Frances Karttunen notes how the term is combined with many "harvestable" or "collectable" items, such as firewood, maize, and tomatoes (see our Online Nahuatl Dictionary). If flowers were a required item for harvesting, that says something interesting about the culture. The term pehpena also applies to elections (choosing a leader). See our dictionary for examples of the term's usage.
Stephanie Wood
miguel zochipepēnā
Miguel Xochipepena
Stephanie Wood
1560
Jeff Haskett-Wood
flores, escoger, cosechar, nombres de hombres
pepena, to choose or to harvest/pick, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/pepena
xochi(tl), flower, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/xochitl
Escoge Flores, o Cosecha Flores
Stephanie Wood
Matrícula de Huexotzinco, folio 812r, World Digital Library, https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_15282/?sp=698&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).