The meaning of "Tollan"

[Jonathan Amith]

Hi Julian,

Actually, in the Balsas Valley of central Mexico to:hlan (the equivalent of
the form you cite) has the same meaning as 'a large crowd of people'. For
example, in talking about a fiesta in the center of town one may simply
say: to:hlan 'there are a lot of people'. It can be an intransitive verb:
o:pe:w (from pe:wa, 'to begin') to:hlanti (i.e., 'a large crowd has begun
to gather'). Finallly, there is a transitive verb, often used with the
nonreferential marker tla- that means 'to stimulate the formation of a
large group of people'. I have heard it used in reference to someone who
has a TV that they place near the entranceway/door to their house and put
on a movie: Tlato:hlantilia Juan, mohmo:stla kite:pano:ltilia cine"  (Juan
attracts a large crowd [to his house], every day he shows a movie'.

I hadn't known that this use of to:hlan exists elsewhere, nice to see that
it is found in Cuentepec.

Best, Jonathan


On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:46 PM, Julian Watrous <jfwatrous at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> My name is Julian Watrous, I'm a high school student in 11th grade from New
> York City .  I have a strong interest in Mesoamerican history and culture,
> so about a year I started taking Nahuatl classes at a Mexican cultural
> center in Brooklyn called Mano a Mano, where I studied a dialect from
> Puebla. Over the summer I went to Cuernavaca to learn Nahuatl from a
> Nahuatl teacher at UNAM, Victorino Torres Nava, who was born and raised in
> Cuentepec, Morelos, the last fully Nahua-speaking community in the state.
>
> Anyway, for the entire school year I've been doing an independent research
> project at my high school on the Toltecs. Specifically, I've studied
> late-postclassic ideas about Tollan (the Toltec capital) and the Toltecs,
> mostly from an Aztec, Yucatec Maya, and Highland Guatemalan point of view.
>
>  Something that has often come up in my studies has been the meaning
> of *tollan.
>  *I think it's generally agreed upon that it comes from *tollin *and -tlan,
> meaning "place of rushes."  And most sources I've read say that the word
> *tollan*, due to the way rushes grow together, was a metaphor for any urban
> place where  "people were as thick as rushes," and that as a result the
> appellation Tollan was extended from Tula, Hidalgo to places like Cholula,
> Tenochititlan and Teotihuacan.
>
> In the Nahuatl dialect of Cuentepec, *tollan *now means something like "a
> lot of people" or a "crowd."  I haven't read about the same meaning
> occurring in any other Nahuatl dialects of today, or even in Classical
> Nahuatl.  So that's really my question: does the word "tollan" still exist
> in other Nahuatl dialects besides that of Cuentepec, and if so, does it
> have the same meaning? Also, in Classical Nahuatl, can the word "tollan" be
> directly linked to the metaphorical meaning mentioned above?
>
> Thanks a lot and would really appreciate some insight,
> Julian Watrous
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