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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: <a href="http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/pfnm2/fichas/jarilla_caudata.htm">http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/pfnm2/fichas/jarilla_caudata.htm</a>
and <a href="http://www.caletao.com.ar/rve/jarifina.htm">http://www.caletao.com.ar/rve/jarifina.htm</a>
<br>And the dahlia coccinea that Roger mentions is much closer. Images
of it can be seen here:
<br><a href="http://www.thompson-morgan.com/seeds/uk/product_7911_1.html">http://www.thompson-morgan.com/seeds/uk/product_7911_1.html</a>
<br>The following page says this plant was used for medical purposes, so
maybe it can be found in Hernandez's work.
<br><a href="http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/pfnm2/fichas/dahlia_coccinea.htm">http://www.semarnat.gob.mx/pfnm2/fichas/dahlia_coccinea.htm</a>
<br>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.
<br>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?
<br>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.
<p>Galen
<br>
<br>
<blockquote TYPE=CITE>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<i> Dahlia coccinea</i>, 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<i> Dahlia</i> <i> coccinea</i>
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. <i>Dahlia
coccinea</i> 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<i> Dahlia coccinea</i> as "<font face="Lucida Grande"><font color="#000000"><font size=-2>acocohxôchitl</font></font></font>".
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.<i> Dahlia coccinea</i>
is not one of them. Roger Byrne <tt>--</tt>Dr. Roger Byrne
<br>Associate Professor
<br>Geography Department
<br>501 Mc Cone Hall
<br>University of California, Berkeley
<br>Berkeley, CA 94720
<p>Phones: 510 643 9170 (office)
<br>510 643 1834 (lab)
<br>510 642 3903 (secretary)
<br>Fax: 510 642 3370Email: arbyrne@uclink4.berkeley.edu</blockquote>
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