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nentlamati.

Headword: 
nentlamati.
Principal English Translation: 

to feel malaise, be unhappy, languish
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), 227.

IPAspelling: 
neːntɬɑmɑti
Alonso de Molina: 

nentlamati. ni. (pret. oninentlama.) estar descontento y afligido, o hazer lo que es ensi en algun negocio.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 68v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written: 

ni. Class 2 irregular: ōninēntlamah. nēn- in vain, tla-, mati. 227

Attestations from sources in English: 

See an image that represents nentlamati in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities, 2020-present).

Nentlamati, a personal name = "He's Pining Away"
James Lockhart (The Nahuas, 1992, 121) translated this name from the c. 1580 census of Culhuacan.

nentlamati (verb) = to be afflicted, disconsolate
Daniel Garrison Brinton, Ancient Nahuatl Poetry: Containing the Nahuatl Text of XXVII Ancient Mexican Poems (1877), 159.

"injc njnentlamati in tlacoiooan, in iooalli xeliuj, in canjn nemj noiollo, in temo, in tleco = for this I am unhappy at midnight, at the parting of the night. Wherever my heart goeth, it sinketh, it riseth." (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 6 -- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, No. 14, Part 7, 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), 89.

"in icuac tlacachiva cenca motolinia tlaihiyovia nētlamati = when she bears a child she is much afflicted; she suffers; she is uncomfortable."
Arthur J. O. Anderson, "Aztec Wives," in Indian Women of Early Mexico, eds. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999, p. 73.

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