PIPILA

[Frances Karttunen]

There is another sense of "pipil"--namely speakers of a variety of Nahuatl
(or a sister language, if you want to take that route) spoken in Central
America.  I think the sense is the same:  people of lineage.

It's possible that (pi:)pil- derives from the verb piloa: and literally has
to do with being a dependent, or depending from/hanging off a lineage (a
tla:camecatl, literally a 'person rope' and often pictorially represented
as a twisted cord).

Not so very surprising that two societies with such strict class structure
as the Spanish world and the Aztec world would have similar concepts of who
is important and how that importance is assigned (through heritage and
service).

Fran