tlatlauhqui (Mdz51r)
This element of a circle full of the color red (tlatlauhqui) has been carved from the compound sign for the place name, Tlatlauhquitepec.
Stephanie Wood
The reference to red is like most color names in this collection, where Gordon Whittaker notes, "color terms themselves are almost always represented by the relevant colors, not by logograms or phonetic spellings." [See Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs, 2021, 94–95.] But in this example, the mountain is not just painted red, the circle is added and filled with red to help support the reading. The word for red here involves a reduplication that is retained in the place name where this element appears. And the tepetl (hill or mountain), being also painted red in that compound, might be considered a visual reduplication.
Stephanie Wood
c. 1541, or by 1553 at the latest
Stephanie Wood
colors, nombres de colores, rojo
tlatlauhqui, red, https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/tlatlauhqui
rojo
Stephanie Wood
Codex Mendoza, folio 51 recto, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/2fea788e-2aa2-4f08-b6d9-648c00..., image 112 of 118.
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).