the -ti- in -titlan in placenames

[Susan H Noguez]

Dear Listeros:

I vaguely remember having had a long discussion about the meaning of
Teotihuacan in 1999. Did we decide that the best translation would be
"The Place of Apotheosis"??

Now I'm still working with place names in the various manuscripts, and to
me it's still a puzzle the difference between "Popocatepetl" and
"Popocatepec", a word  never seen in the codices or Colonial Nahuatl
texts. The reason might be something linked with the cosmovision. As Mr.
Appleyard says: "...a hill is one thing and a village (altepetl) is
another thing..."

Any input about the matter will be welcome

Saludos

Xavier Noguez


On Fri, 14 Jul 2000 16:02:20 GMT "Anthony Appleyard"
<mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk> writes:
>  Frances Karttunen <karttu at nantucket.net> wrote:-
>> -tla:n with a long vowel is a locative meaning 'place of, at.'  It
>doesn't
>> take the ligature -ti-.  The short-vowel postposition -tlan 'at the
>base of,
>> below, next to' takes -ti- when bound to nouns to form place names
>but not in
>> ordinary postpositional constructions.  It can go either way with
>body parts.
>
>Excuse a somewhat woolly idea, but I seem to remember hearing that
>-ti- can
>mean "become", as in the placename Teo-ti-huacan = "god-become-place"
>= "the
>place where men bacome gods". If so, could placenames of the type
>X-titlan
>have originally meant "X become next_to" = "place where you come to be
>next to
>X"? E.g. Tenochtitlan might have meant once "place where you come to
>be next
>to rocks and prickly pears". Such precision in thinking by people
>naming
>places seems to vary between different peoples: e,g, English-speakers
>might
>set up a settlement and call it "Church Hill", and Welsh-speakers
>might call
>it "Bryn Eglwys", routinely and unremarkably; but Nahuatl seems to
>realise
>that a hill is one thing and a village is another thing, and would
>call the
>settlement not "Teocaltepetl", but "Teocaltepec" = "_at_ the temple
>hill".