Search Issues: Update 2026-09-16 - Repairs to some of our search pages are ongoing. Thank you for your continued patience!

Meanwhile, elements of the Advanced Search are working and the Alphabetical Listings are working, too.

icnopil.

Headword: 
icnopil.
Principal English Translation: 

that which one deserves, merits; to be deserving, worthy of something

Alonso de Molina: 

icnopil. no. ser merecedor o digno de algo.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 33r. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Attestations from sources in English: 

can nocnopil. Can nomacehual = where is my merit, where is my desert (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), 51.

niman mitoa. Inin tlatoani: amo icnopilpan nemitiliztli, quitoznequi: amo icnotlacatl ichan calaquiz = Among the poor is no life for this king. This means that he should not enter a poor man's house.
Thelma D. Sullivan, "Nahuatl Proverbs, Conundrums, and Metaphors, Collected by Sahagún," Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 4 (1963), 122–123.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

lo que le quitaron al pobre = yn moquicuilique ycnopiltzintli (Santa Agueda, sin fecha)
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), 200–201.

themes: 
Politics, Power, Governance