tetzcohco

[Galen Brokaw]

I don't really think that the flower in the glyph has anything to do with the actual meaning of the toponym. I don't think there
is that much, if any, analogical stylistic evidence in other toponyms to back up such a theory. But it would account for the
hypothesis about the toponym meaning a plant. Anthony's interpretation of the glyph morphology in which the flower (xochitl) is a
rebus representing the phonetic sound "x" seems much more plausible than taking the flower as some kind of indication of the
actual meaning of the word itself. But it isn't as clear cut as that. Of course, there is a flower in the glyph, so that
automatically suggests that the name contain the morpheme for flower or part of another morpheme that sounds like the root of
xochitl. I thought about this before, but I didn't want to digress into all of my speculation about the strengths and weaknesses
of this hypothesis. I should have figured someone would pick up on that. So here is my wandering theoretical speculation about
this glyph, just in case anyone is interested.
I should mention that the glyph appears slightly differently in different codices. In the Codex Mendoza, there is no pot. It is a
rocky hill with flowers growing out of the crags. [By the way, there is also a bent arm with water coming out of it which
indicates Texcoco as the place of the Acolhua: a (from atl) and col (from colli: curved or bent).]
The version with the pot appears in the Mapa Quinatzin. I don't recall the nuances of the toponymic conventions used by the
scribes in that document, but a pot is sometimes used to represent the locative "co". To check, you'd have to look at the
conventions of the toponyms in that document to see if that is what the scribe usually does. If the pot is used as a locative in
the Mapa Quinatzin, then we would still have to correlate some how the rest of the glyph to the whole segment "texco" or "tetzco".
The Codex Mendoza doesn't usually include a rebus to represent the locative, but there are at least a few toponyms that I know of
that use rebuses to indicate the locatives "pan" and "tlan".
If the flowers are used to represent the "x", it is curious that the pictographic name would not use the conventional stone glyph
but rather a rocky or craggy hill for the "te" (and this is both in the Codex Mendoza and the Mapa Quinatztin). In the Codex
Mendoza, as far as I can tell, when the scribe/s want to represent "te" they use the conventional "tetl" glpyh. On the other hand,
although a hill is generally used when "tepetl" is part of the name of the town, it can symbolize a town even when the term
"tepetl" is not part of the name. This serves to identify the glyph as the name of a place; a strictly pictographic locative that
does not necessarily correspond to the morphology of the word itself. This seems more common in Mixtec conventions, but a few of
the toponyms in the Codex Mendoza seem to do the same thing. But in most cases these are not rebuses in the sense of a
pictographic representation used to represent a sound not linked to the meaning of that which is represented; they represent hills
and coincide with the actually morphology of the place name. I think this is why the pictographic morphology of the "tex" or
perhaps even "texc" in Texcoco has been interpreted as coming from "texcalli". If the rocky hill is meant the represent "texc"
then the "u" or the "o" may be ignored by the pictographic symbols. This is often the way rebuses work: they get as close as they
can; that is to say that the pictographic morphology doesn't have to be ponetically precise, and it doesn't have to account for
every single sound in the actual linguistic morphology. But as Anthony points out, that doesn't explain the presence of the
flowers in the glyph. Anthony's explanation would work for the glyph in the Codex Mendoza if we take the hill to merely idicate
that it is a town, and its rockiness to represent the "te". The objection to this hypothesis would be that based on the other
glyphs in the Codex it seems more likely that the combination of stone and flower would have been represented simply by a flower
and a stone. There are many examples of similar toponyms that do precisely this. And the craggy hill seems to clearly suggest
"texcalli" without the need for flowers to produce the "x". So that would mean that there was a redundancy in the pictogram in
that the "x" would correlate to both "texcalli" and "xochitl". I had another possible explanation for the "x" as related to the
flowers but not "xochitl", but it was pretty far fetched, so I won't bore you with it.
In any case, for me the presence of the flowers in the glyph raises some interesting questions that may be related to the
pronunciation of the toponym. Does anyone know (Fran perhaps?) the distribution of Texcoco versus Tetzcoco? Is this a synchronic
dialectical difference? Or is it a diachronic development--recognizing that there may also be synchronic differences--in which the
alveolar africate became a palatal fricative? Or the othe way around? Or is it merely a synchronic variation within a dialect? I
somehow got deleted from the list about a year and a half ago, so I've missed all of the discussions between then and now. But I
was reading through the archive and there was a discussion a while back about the pronunciation of "Xochitl" as a personal name. I
think somebody said that they hear people pronounce the "x" as a palatal fricative producing "shochi". I have friends who named
their daughter Xochitl. They and others I know all pronounce it as an alveolar fricative/sibilant producing "sochi". I don't know
to what extent these differences reflect dialectical variation, general changes in phonemes, or specific changes in the
pronunciation of this word. And of course, the status of Nahuatl as a kind of substrate in Mexican Spanish makes it even more
complicated.
My question--and I realize that there are many reasons why this may not be so--is whether or not it is possible that the "written"
pictographic word influenced its phonetic articulation. The idea would be that a tlacuilo is trying to create a rebus to represent
the name for Tetzcoco. And he is having a lot of trouble with the "tetz", because he just can't find any easily representable
object linked to a morpheme similar to "tetz" (although I suppose they could have used a mirror (tezcatl) to approximate the
sound; and this is a common pictograph in place names). But of course, "te" is ubiquitously represented by stone. And maybe the
toponym has alternate pronunciations in speech as both "tetzcoco" and "texcoco" which would explain the use of a flower to
represent the "x". So, as with many other rebuses, the tlacuilo settles upon objects that invoke sounds that are close to the word
he wishes to represent, which then influence the direction of phonetic development or stabilization. If this were the case, an
explanation for the redundancy ing the glyph including the flower and the rocky hill may be that it is a composite of what
originally were alternate glyphs developed to represent the same town by scribes or schools of scribes who pronounced it
differently. That is to say that maybe there was a glyph comprised of a flower and a stone and another one comprised of a craggy
hill. And later they got combined somehow and the redundancy got conventionalized. After the glyph is developed and passed on and
becomes a convention, the scribes may not have been consciously thinking about the phonetics or morphology of the pictograph
(which doesn't necessarily mean they were ignorant of it).  And the difference bewteen the Mendoza Codex and the Mapa Quinatzin
would be that the scribe decided not to use the locative in the glyph.
Of course, none of this tells us anything definitive about the meaning of the word itself. Sorry John. In this case, especially,
it is hard to determine the difference between a rebus disconnected from its original meaning and pictograms that coincide with
the actual morphology of the word. If pot is used for the first "co" and not as a locative, for example, I would tend to doubt
that it coincides with a morpheme in the word. But craggy hill, on the other hand, would make more sense as a place name.
I'm just throwing all this out as speculation. So don't take this as any kind of informed analysis. As anyone who knows me can
tell you, I'm not that informed.
Galen


anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk wrote:

> On 17 Jun 2003, at 18:00, Galen Brokaw wrote:
> > ... the glyph is a pot and a flower on a rocky hill ...
>
> This likely merely represents "te[tl]-xo:[chitl]-co[mitl]" or similar as an approximate phonetic rendering of the name.
>
> On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Coon, Brad wrote:
>
> > Perhaps it represents a Nahuatlized version of a pre-existing (i.e.,
> > pre-Nahua speakers in the area) place name.
>
> English examples are :-
> (1) Catterick in Yorkshire, which came not from Anglo-Saxon but from Celtic Katuraktonion = "(place of) battle ramparts"
> (2) York, which comes from Anglo-Saxon Eoforwic = "wild-boar diary-farm", adapted from Celtic Eborakon = "place of yew trees".