The meaning of "Tollan"

[Michael McCafferty]

Julian,

In Classical Nahuatl, it is 'among the rushes'.

It is actually composed of /to:l-/ 'rush' + /-tla:n/ 'among'.

Note that the /l/ in 'rush' is not geminate, and that the vowels in 
both cases are long, which I've marked with a /:/.

Good luck in your research into modern dialects.

Michael McCafferty



Quoting Julian Watrous <jfwatrous at gmail.com>:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Nahuatl mailing list
> Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
> http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl
>



_______________________________________________
Nahuatl mailing list
Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org
http://www.famsi.org/mailman/listinfo/nahuatl