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izcaltia.

Headword: 
izcaltia.
Principal English Translation: 

to raise (as in a child), to educate (see Molina, Karttunen, and Lockhart), also seen in conjunction with raising silkworms in the Codex Sierra (plate 37) (SW)

IPAspelling: 
iskɑltiɑː
Alonso de Molina: 

izcaltia. nite. (pret. oniteizcalti.) criar niño.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 49r. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

(I)ZCALTIĀ vt to raise children / criar niño (M), crio a personas, como a niños (C for firs pers. sg. subject) caus. (I)ZCALIĀ
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 123.

Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written: 

niqu. to raise, educate children. Class 3: ōniquizcaltih. causative of izcalia, to come to life, to come to the age of reason.
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), 222.

Attestations from sources in English: 

yn hualmozcaltizque = those who will be raised
(Mexico, late seventeenth-century) (Techialoyan manuscript from San Cristóbal Texcalucan and Magdalena Chichicaspa)
James Lockhart, personal communication, May 23, 2008.

ça yçi y quizcaltia = it is just her grandmother who is raising her
Sarah Cline, The Book of Tributes: The Cuernavaca-region Censuses, in James Lockhart, Lisa Sousa, and Stephanie Wood, eds., Sources and Methods for the Study of Postconquest Mesoamerican Ethnohistory (Eugene, OR: Wired Humanities Projects, e-book, 2007.

mozcaltia = it grows (speaking of a tooth) (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 10 -- The People, No. 14, Part 11, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1961), 109.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

nicnomaquilia ynonamic Elena yquimizcaltiz ynopipiluantzintziuan omeme = se la doy a mi mujer Elena para que críe a mis hijos, que son dos (Ocotelulco, 1593)
Vidas y bienes olvidados: Testamentos indígenas novohispanos, vol. 1, Testamentos en castellano del siglo XVI y en náhuatl y castellano de Ocotelulco de los siglos XVI y XVII, eds. Teresa Rojas Rabiela, Elsa Leticia Rea López, y Constantino Medina Lima (Mexico: CIESAS, 1999), 234-235.

za niman onixpan mizcaltique ynic oniquimixmah = tan luego asi como fueron creciendo los conoci (Tlaxcala, 1567)
Catálogo de documentos escritos en náhuatl, siglo XVI, vol. I (Tlaxcala: Gobierno del Estado de Tlaxcala y el Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala, 2013), 66.