A query about a translation in Andrews's Nahuatl textbook

[Frances Karttunen]

on 9/1/03 5:51 PM, anthony.appleyard at UMIST.AC.UK at
anthony.appleyard at UMIST.AC.UK wrote:

> Amazon.com has at last coughed up the new version of Andrews's
> Nahuatl textbook. I have been reading through it.
>
> On page 502 (in the new version) in a discussion about place
> names he says that A:yo:to:chcuitlatlah means "at the abundant
> armadillo excrement". This seems such a strange idea that I must
> point out that [cuitlatl] also means "bottom", which may be the
> meaning here. If any of you can identify and go to the place, I am
> wondering if near the place is a land feature looking like the back
> end of an armadillo. (I am in Manchester in England.)
>
> It says that Teotihuacan is Teo:-ti:uh-huah-ca:n = "at the place of
> the owners of the elder gods", not "the place of deification" or similar.
>
Well, if the locative really is -tlah rather than -tla:n, it would mean
'place of an abundance of (whatever).'  Like Cuauhtlah 'place of an
abundance of trees.'  'Place of an abundance of armadillo rear ends' seems
pretty funny too, but I wouldn't dismiss it as more of an improbability than
'place of great piles of armadillo scat.'

The question is whether Andrews has some evidence that what is probably
orthographic "tla" represents -tlah rather than -tlan. Final nasal
consonants are frequently omitted from Nahuatl spelling and I am willing to
bet that Ayotochcuitlatla isn't a high-frequency item in written Nahuatl.

Even if there is a stylized turd in the place-name glyph, it's not
definitive, since that symbol may be used rebus-style to suggest the
pronunciation of a syllable, not the meaning of an element of the word.