Essays of an Americanist / I. Ethnologic and Archæologic. II. Mythology and Folk Lore. III. Graphic Systems and Literature. IV. Linguistic.

by Daniel G. Brinton

Beginning with proper names drawn from other languages, we find that the Nahuas had a number of such, which, of course, had no meaning in their own tongue. One of their documents speaks of the town of the Huastecas, called by that tribe Tamuch, which means in their tongue “near the scorpions,” and by the Aztecs, in imitation, Tamuoc.[^[212]] As the Huasteca is a Maya dialect, totally distinct from the Nahuatl, this word had no sense to the ears of the Aztecs. To convey its sound, they portrayed a man holding in his hands a measuring stick, and in the act of measuring. Now, in Nahuatl, the verb “to measure” is tamachina; the measuring stick is octocatl; and to make the latter plainer, several foot-prints, xoctli, are painted upon the measuring stick, giving an example of the repetition of the sound, such as we have already seen was common among the Egyptian scribes.

Fig. 1.—Tamuoc.

Fig. 2.—Mapachtepec.

In another class of proper names, in their own tongue, although they had a meaning in the Nahuatl, the scribe preferred to express them by ikonomatic instead of ikonographic devices. Thus, Mapachtepec, means literally, “badger hill,” or “badger town,” but in place of depicting a badger, the native writer made a drawing of a hand grasping a bunch of Spanish moss, the Tillandsia usneoides. The hand or arm in Nahuatl is maitl, the moss pachtli; and taking the first syllables of these two words we obtain ma pach: the word tepec, locative form of tepetl, hill or village, is expressed by the usual conventional ideographic or determinative sign.

In other names, the relative positions of the objects are significant, reminding us of the rebus of a well-known town in Massachusetts, celebrated for its educational institutions:

&

Mass.

which is to be read, “Andover, Massachusetts;” so in the Aztec scrolls, we have itzmiquilpan represented by an obsidian knife, itztli, and an edible plant, quilitl, which are placed above or over (pan), the sign for cultivated land, milli, thus giving all the elements of the name, the last syllable by position only.