In the morphological form I add these suffix when I believe that is the case, because I think it is taken off optionally when it is used as a personal name or predicate. Many names are derived from nouns, but lack the absolutive suffix (and also sometimes the agentive suffix -qui). Perhaps Nahua personal names changed over their lives times. It seems that some names are dependent on the persons social status such that some names for small children seem to be baby nicknames, later to be replaced with a real name, and some names seem to describe some kind of experience. many men's names seem to be calendar names. Men also tend to be named after animals much more frequently. Tecapan I am not sure what means, and xoco means "fruit".Although there are other interesting female names, overall men's names seem a lot more imaginative. If we stick with the "survivor" meaning the fact that mostly married women have it could suggest that these women were taken as war-captives, but since we don't have any evidence for such a practice among the Nahuas I think we can go with the former interpretation. This makes me think that is a name taken by women who have parted with their families and married into another household. This could be interpreted as referring to a survivor of warfare, but why would one name ones child that? And furthermore it seems mainly to be a name of adult married women (there are some young girls with the name though). So in my opinion the word would mean something like "she who has been left behind" or "she with whom people have parted". Molina gives the word necahualiztli as " despedida" (farewell/parting), but here we don't have the - liztli ending but a - lli ending that usually gives a "passive" meaning. The name clearly comes from the verb cahua "to leave" with an indefinite reciprocal prefix so the meaning of necahua would be "people leave each other". Necahual is translated as "survivor" around the internet, but this meaning is definitely not a literal one, and I wonder where it comes from. Teicuh means "someone's older sister", tlaco probably means "middle sibling/daughter". One striking thing is that there is much more variability in male names than in female names, five names account for almost all of the women in the census, necahual, tecapan, teicuh, tlaco and xoco. The meanings of proper names are not alays clear, so if I have no idea what a name might mean I dont add anything, if I have an idea but am not really sure I add my idea followed by a question mark, and if I am pretty sure about a meaning I just give the meaning.įor some names it is clear from the context that they are either for males or females, but for others, especially those of unmarried children, it is not always possible to be certain if a name is a male name or not.
#Aztec names for cats full#
I give the names in a standardized "classical" orthography, followed by my interpretation of their full phonological form (sometimes the words appear to be abbreviated or to have sounds missing), and my interpretation of their meaning. There are 134 male names, 35 female names and 30 of unknown gender.
In the following I give a list of many of the names in the census of the communities Huitzillan and Cuauhchichinollan, as published by ethnohistorian Sarah L. This means that in this census we have a large collection of actual names of men, women and children, names that we know were in use right around the time of the Spanish Invasion. They are full of names, because every household and its inhabitants are mentioned as well as what they were paying in tribute to the Marques del Valle (Hernan Cortes). We only have three books from this census describing all the families in a number of small communities in Northern Morelos. In Morelos a large census was carried out in 1544 only 23 years after the invasion when many people were still not baptized and many had lived through the Spanish invasion.
To get a sense of what actual common people were named and not just the rulers and nobles it would also be great to have names form some kind of secular everyday context. Lockhart shows us that across most of Nahua speaking Mexico Nahuatl language names disappear very quickly after the conquest, so the best source of names has to be early documents. James Lockhart has a brief analysis of changing naming customs from the early colonial to late colonial period and includes a short list of Nahuatl names in his "Nahuas After the Conquest", but doesnt list nearly as many names as we actually know. But finding good ones is hard, the few common names such as Cuauhtemoc, Xochitl aren't quite sending the signals many people are interested in anymore.īut there is very little work done on Nahuatl naming. Lots of people are interested in giving their children Nahuatl names.
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