tzanatl. | Nahuatl Dictionary

tzanatl.

Headword:

tzanatl.

Principal English Translation:

Slender-billed Grackle, a bird (see Hunn, attestations)

IPAspelling:

tsɑnɑtɬ

Frances Karttunen:

TZANA-TL pl: -MEH grackle / pájaro negro de pico encorvado, de tamaño del estornino; su carne no sirve para comer (S) [(3)Xp.79]. X has initial Z for TZ.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 311.

Attestations from sources in English:

TZANA-TL, Slender-billed Grackle (Quiscalus palustris) [FC: 50 Tzanatl]: “It is black. Its bill is curved. It is a well-textured [black].” This is the Slender-billed Grackle, not seen in its highly localized Central Mexican highland marshland habitat for the past 100 years and likely extinct, as its marsh habitat was drained. See also TEO-TZANA-TL, the Great-tailed Grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus).
Fr. Bernardino ]de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 11 – Earthly Things, no. 14, Part XII, 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, 1963); and, with quotation selections, synthesis, and analysis here also appearing in E. S. Hunn, "The Aztec Fascination with Birds: Deciphering Sixteenth-Century Sources," unpublished manuscript, 2022, cited here with permission.

themes:

Animals, Bugs, Insects, Reptiles, Fish, etc.

Colors

Feathers