hoary spoonbill

[David Wright]

Estimado Michel:

 

Yeah, the semasiographic expression of the toponym through the avian
representations, and the visual calquing of the Hapsburg dynasty
double-headed eagle, are fairly evident. My “if” was just an expression of
my habit of looking for alternative hypotheses for just about everything
(especially when consensus is involved), but we can be pretty sure the
painter was thinking “quecholli” (or the semantic equivalent in another
language) given the context of the image. The thrust of my comment was to
try to determine the possible identification of this representation with the
various species, quite diverse really (as Joe’s recent contribution
illustrates so well), that fall under the obscure (to me) native taxonomic
category of “quecholli”. Maybe this category involves the relative value of
these species’ feathers in conquest-period Mesoamerican culture.

 

An alternative hypothesis, which I think is less likely, but which shouldn’t
be discarded unless there is a good reason to do so, would be that one or
both of the birds are glottographic signs involving homophonous word plays,
since quecholli can mean one of several species of birds, “projectile”,
and/or a twenty-day ritual period, and in this tradition of pictorial
writing we sometimes see eagles (cua:uhtli) used to convey the idea of
forests/trees/sticks (cuahuitl), which have cuasihomophonous stems [kwa:w]
and [kwaw], and vice versa. Taking these alternative meanings into acount,
we can come up with a list of several hypothetical translations for the
toponym Cuauhquechollan. In this case náhuatl would be the only language
possible, since these meanings are only expressed in a homophonous or
cuasi-homophonous manner in this language. Even when early colonial native
authors provide etymologies that support one translation or another of a
toponym, we often can’t rule out the possibility of folk etymologies. A more
secure method involves collecting the equivalents of the toponyms in
neighboring languages, since the meaning usually (but not always) passed
from one language to another as a semantic loan, or calque. It’s usually a
good idea to run all of the possibilities through one’s head and pour them
through our analytical filters before arriving at a conclusion. Sometimes
the answer lies beneath the surface.

 

By the way, there’s a ridiculous error in the rough draft of a footnote on
the probable meaning of the twenty-day ritual period quecholli that I
included in my last post, in a final attempt to get some feedback for
improving it. I wrote “cucharada” (spoonful) instead of “cuchareta”
(spoonbill) twice! This is the sort of thing than can provide decades of
embarrassment if it makes it into print. What makes me a bit uneasy is that
our posts to this list are instantly archived and come up in Google
searches! Fortunately we can post corrections as easily as we can post
mistakes.

 

Saludos y un abrazo,

 

David

 

De: Michel Oudijk [mailto:oudyk at hotmail.com] 
Enviado el: miércoles, 09 de diciembre de 2009 12:19 a.m.
Para: David Wright; schwallr at potsdam.edu
CC: nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
Asunto: RE: [Nahuat-l] hoary spoonbill

 

Dear David and Fritz,
 
Maybe I should have said this in the previous message, but yes the bird on
the left is the quecholli. The image of the double headed eagle is used here
to express the identification of Cuauhquechollan with the Spanish Crown and,
at the same, represent their toponym Cuauh(tli)-quecholl(i)-an. Of all
people they should know what the quecholli looked like. 
Still, it's a beautiful example of the creation of a colonial indigenous
world. Also note the sword and the macana, and of course the crown. In other
places of the lienzo conquest is represented as a European sword (instead of
an arrow) perforating a toponymic glyph, and the Cuauhquecholteca are
depicted with a white skin contrary to their indigenous oponents. I highly
recommend reading Florine Asselbergs' study of this lienzo.
 
Un fuerte abrazo,
 
Michel

 

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