Principal English Translation:
an elder; an old man; also, a personal name (see attestations)
Orthographic Variants:
veue, veuentzin, huehueçi, uehue, huēhueh
Alonso de Molina:
ueue. viejo o anciano.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 157r. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.
Frances Karttunen:
HUĒHUEH pl: HUĒHUETQUEH; singular possessed form: -HUĒHUETCĀUH old man / viejo o anciano (M) This has T before the plural suffix but a glottal stop word-finally in the singular, except in Z, which has T thoughout. Before -TZIN and –TŌN this has the form HUĒHUĒN. See HUĒHUĒNTŌN, HUĒHUĒNTZIN.
HUĒHUET See HUĒHUEH.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 84.
Horacio Carochi / English:
huēhuȇ = old man
Horacio Carochi, S.J., Grammar of the Mexican language with an explanation of its adverbs (1645), translated and edited with commentary by James Lockhart, UCLA Latin American Studies Volume 89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 2001), 502.
Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written:
huēhueh, an old man, something old. abs. pl. huēhuetqueh, frequently elders, the ancients. combining form huēhueh- or huēhuetcā-; it may be that the constructions with the first are not really bound forms. related to huēi.
James Lockhart, Nahuatl as Written: Lessons in Older Written Nahuatl, with Copious Examples and Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press and UCLA Latin American Studies, 2001), 218.
Attestations from sources in English:
ça huehueçi yn ita aoc amilchiva = just a little old man; he no longer works irrigated fields (Cuernavaca region, ca. 1540s)
The Book of Tributes: Early Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Censuses from Morelos, ed. and transl. S. L. Cline, (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1993), 176–177.
in teopixqui catca veuentzin ytoca Simeon = the priest, who was an elderly man named Simeón (early seventeenth century, Central Mexico)
Louise M. Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies Monograph 13 (Albany: University at Albany, 2001), 66.
Attestations from sources in Spanish:
auh in huehuentzin, in ilamatzin yhuan in ycnotlacatl, in enetlacatl = y al anciano, la anciana, y al necesitado, al desventurado
Huehuehtlahtolli. Testimonios de la antigua palabra, ed. Librado Silva Galeana y un estudio introductorio por Miguel León-Portilla (México: Secretaría de Educación Pública, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991), 52–53.