tetzcohco

[Galen Brokaw]

Hi John,
I don't think there is a consensus on the morphology of the word for
Texcoco or Tetzcoco. I guess some have argued that "tetzcotli" refers to
a kind of plant. That would neatly solve the mistery, but it would be
nice to know what plant it was. Another possibility that has been
suggested is that "texcotli" may refer to a kind of jar or pot. But I
think this interpretation is based on pictographic toponyms that include
a pot. There are two problems with this theory. First, there is a
perfectly good explanation for having a pot in the glyph that doesn't
require us to posit a different, unknown word for it: it is functioning
as a rebus. Second, the nature of the glyphs themselves don't support
this interpretation: the glyph is a pot and a flower on a rocky hill; if
"texcotli" meant pot, you wouldn't need to combine the picture of the
pot with any other elements to produce the name.
Based on glyphs in different codices, Frances Berdan identifies the
elements of the pictographic word as follows:

tex from texcalli [cliff, crag, precipice, rocky place] or tetz from
tetzcaltetl [alabaster?]
co from comitl [pot]
co (locative)

The glyph often contains a pot and a flower on a rocky hill. But, of
course, these glyphs are rebuses that are used to represent sound rather
than meaning. Grammatically, these words wouldn't combine like this.
Hence the suggestion that maybe the pot in the glyph coincides with a
word "texcotli" meaning pot. But it doesn't seem likely to me that the
pot in the glyph would represent the whole word "texcotli" or
"tetzcotli" because then there would be no need for the rocky hill to
produce "tex" or "tetz". It seems to me that it is more likely that the
pot in the glyph is a rebus used to signify the syllable "co" from
"comitl" unrelated to the original meaning of the toponym. So maybe the
pot and the hill are rebuses functioning as phonetic signs repersenting
the syllables of the word, and the flower is there to symbolize the
plant "texcotli", the true meaning of the word? I know that isn't very
definitive, especially because as far as I know nobody has identified
which plant it might be.
Galen



idiez at mac.com wrote:

> Karttunen gives the place name, "tetzcohco", whose root
> would supposedly be the noun "tetzcohtli". Does anybody
> know what this means?
>
> John Sullivan, Ph.D.
> Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C.
> Francisco García Salinas 604
> Colonia CNOP
> Zacatecas, Zac. 98053
> México
> +52 (492) 768-6048
> idiez at mac.com
> www.idiez.org.mx