tepetlatl.

Headword: 
tepetlatl.
Principal English Translation: 

a brittle volcanic rock; taken into Spanish as "tepetate"; a type of porous rock used in construction (see Karttunen)

IPAspelling: 
tepetɬɑtɬ
Alonso de Molina: 

tepetlatl. tosca o cuzilla.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 102v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

TEPETL(A)-TL pl- -MEH a type of porous rock used in construction; someone rough, uncouth / tierra dura (C), peña, tepetate (T), tosca o cucilla (M) See TE-TL, PETL(A)-TL.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 230.

Attestations from sources in English: 

“The term tepetate, as used among campesinos, has a wide semantic range, including weakly cemented sands, pumice, clay, conglomerates, and caliche. I have suggested elsewhere that all of these materials are classified as tepetate because the term is generic for rocklike or soft rock (Williams, 1972). Various classes of tepetate are sometimes distinguished by campesinos, such as tepetate delgada (thin), tepetate ligera (light) or simply tepetate.” (p.59)
Barbara J. Williams, "Pictorial Representation of Soils in the Valley of Mexico: Evidence from the Codex Vergara," Geoscience and Man 21 (1980), 51–62.

“...tepetate (tepetlatl), a widely occurring surface material in the Valley of Mexico (Williams, 1972, p. 618). One variant is composed of a stone (tetl) resting on a mat (petlatl) giving the two syllables te- and pet-. Variations of the stone graphene shown in Figure 5b are insignificant and rather are free variants. The other variant of tepetate soil is composed of lips (tentli) and mat. Here the syllable te- is derived from tentli rather than tetl, a convention that is also found in the personal name glyphs (Aubin, 1891, p. 25). The two variations account for 73% of the tepetate glyph. In the other 27%, the stone-mat combination in the milcocoli section is matched by glyph composed of dots and the mat element.” (p. 56)
Barbara J. Williams, "Pictorial Representation of Soils in the Valley of Mexico: Evidence from the Codex Vergara," Geoscience and Man 21 (1980), 51–62.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

onechtlatolehuiyaya onicotoni motlacoton qui[nma]caque tepetlatl = me habían levantado falso de haberlo dividido por la mitad y que les habían dado de tepetate
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), 226-227.