Etimologia de Texcoco

[Galen Brokaw]

I don't know anything about the jarilla, but Roger is right. The
descriptions and pictures of this plant that I found online don't sound
or look anything like the flower in the glyph. See:
http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/pfnm2/fichas/jarilla_caudata.htm  and
http://www.caletao.com.ar/rve/jarifina.htm
And the dahlia coccinea that Roger mentions is much closer. Images of it
can be seen here:
http://www.thompson-morgan.com/seeds/uk/product_7911_1.html
The following page says this plant was used for medical purposes, so
maybe it can be found in Hernandez's work.
http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/pfnm2/fichas/dahlia_coccinea.htm
This is very interesting. I don't know if this is the flower represented
by the glyph, but it could be. I definitely think Roger is right in
suggesting that it is an attempt to represent a specific kind of flower.
I was a too hasty in suggesting that the flower in the glyph was just a
conventionalized image of a flower. I don't know what I was thinking.
First, even without comparing it to other glyphs it is very obvious that
this apparent flower is not like the generic flower used as one of the
twenty iconic signs in the calendar. And the Codex Mendoza does use the
conventional flower as it appears in calendric dates in other toponyms
such as Xochimilco. This would suggest that the image in the Tezcuco
(this is how it is spelled alphabetically in the Mendoza Codex) glyph is
intended to be a mimetic representation of a specific kind of plant as
opposed to an iconic image of a generic flower. This would also imply
then that this image does not necessarily invoke the phonetic
articulation of the word "xochitl" unless the name of the plant
originally had "xochitl" as part of its name, but it is very likely that
it did. I think most--maybe all?--flower names used "xochitl" with some
kind of qualifier at the beginning as in the name "acocohxochitl" that
Roger pointed out.
The phonetic coincidence or common denominator in the terms--namely the
"x", in texcalli and xochitl, and the "o" or "u" in xochitl and
Texcoco-- and the semantic convergence in meaning indicated by the glyph
with a flower-like plant that grows in rocky places is very intriguing
here. Whatever plant it is, if it characteristically grows in rocky
places as implied by the Mendoza version of the glyph, it's name might
very well have indicated this quality by qualifying the term "xochitl"
with "texcalli", which would produce "texcalxochitl". It kind of makes
you want to posit that there was an original word "texcalxochitl" that
somehow got transformed into texcotli which produced Texcoco, or that
the name of the town was originally Texcalxochco and then it got
transformed into Texcoco. That means, though, that the "alx" and the
"ch" would have suffered elision. Stranger things have happened, right?
As in many languages, Nahuatl place names tend to be metonymic in that
they refer to some quality associated with that place. But just like in
any language, maybe the name can become so conventional that
consciousness of the original meaning can disappear. This can lead to at
least two phenomena which make it difficult to establish etymological
origins: 1) the name may be more susceptible to idiosynchratic
modification independent of other general linguistic transformations of
the langauge; and 2) general linguistic developments may not affect the
name because it has been disassociated with its morphological origins
through conventional use. So basically the word may diverge from the
rest of the language, and it is either transformed or not independent of
other linguistic phenomena. I'm not sure if this actually happpens; I'm
suggesting it as a theoretical possibility. Of course, this phenomenon
would be more common and the problem more acute in oral cultures. The
point I was trying to make before, was that in this case, the culture
isn't strictly oral. So, the question is to what degree do pictographs
stabilize words such as toponyms that may be represented through mimetic
(or even rebus) morphology in the pictogram. Does this kind of
pictography fix language in ways similar to that claimed for alphabetic
writing? And in what way?
It should be pointed out that the morphology of most (although I don't
think all) Nahuatl toponyms is fairly transparent and consistent with
the words from which they derive. So why is this one so difficult? I
figure there are at least three possibilities: 1) there is the theory
about a Nahuatlization of a non-Nahuatl place name; 2) we just might not
be familiar with the word/s that make up the toponym either because they
dropped out of the language at some point or because we just haven't run
across them yet; or 3) some process like the one I described above has
transformed (or preserved?) the word beyond definitive morphological
interpretation. However, in addition to searching texts for words
consistent with the toponym, an exhaustive study and analysis of glyphs
might also help here. For instance, if we were able to find another
glyph that used this same flower image and/or the rocky hill in a more
transparent way, it might corroborate an interpretation of the Texcoco
glyph. And if the glyphs are not rebuses, then it would also shed light
on the actual morphology of the word.

Galen



> Now that the Texcoco discussion has turned botanical, I thought I
> should point out that the flower depicted in the Mendoza glyph for
> "Tezcuco" (folio 3V) looks very much like Dahlia coccinea, perhaps the
> most beautiful of all Mesoamerican ornamentals.  The artist confused
> me at first because he shows the ray flowers as yellow and the disk
> flowers as red.  However, a quick check of Dahlia  coccinea images via
> Google did produce a hybrid which has ray flowers that are red and
> yellow, with the central part of the petal red and the outer part
> yellow. Dahlia coccinea has a wide distribution in Central Mexico and
> although Oscar Sanchez  doesn't report it specifically for the Texcoco
> area in his "La Flora del Valle de Mexico",  he does note that it
> grows there  between 1,000 and 3000 meters. Possibly also relevant
> here is that Alexis Wimmer's Classical Nahuatl Dictionary site lists
> the Nahuatl name for Dahlia coccinea as "acocohxôchitl".  I will leave
> the linguistic analysis to the linguists. Orozco y Berra's "Texcotli,
> es la jarilla de los riscos"  may be a reference to another member of
> the Asteraceae.  Sanchez lists "jarilla" as the common name for 5
> different species of Asteraceae in his Flora. Dahlia coccinea is not
> one of them. Roger Byrne --Dr. Roger Byrne
> Associate Professor
> Geography Department
> 501 Mc Cone Hall
> University of California, Berkeley
> Berkeley, CA 94720
>
> Phones: 510 643 9170 (office)
> 510 643 1834 (lab)
> 510 642 3903 (secretary)
> Fax: 510 642 3370Email: arbyrne at uclink4.berkeley.edu
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