Principal English Translation:
to be gravely ill, worsen, be near the end, to be in bad shape, almost dead, almost finished
Robert Haskett and Stephanie Wood's notes from Nahuatl sessions with James Lockhart and subsequent research.
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), 237.
Alonso de Molina:
tlanaui. ni. (pret. onitlanauh.) estar muy enfermo.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 127v. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.
Frances Karttunen:
TLANAHU(I) for a sick person’s condition to worsen, to be terminally ill /estar muy enfermo (M), se pone grave, se empeora (T) Z and X have a long vowel in the second syllable, but the other sources have it short. M has the derived noun tlanauhqui ‘person close to death.’ The basic sense of this is ‘to worsen, to go from bad to worse.’TLANAHUĪHUA nonact. TLANAHU(I).TLANAHUĪTIĀ caus. TLANAHU(I).
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 283.
Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written:
ni. Class 2: ōnitlanauh. related to -tlan. 237
Attestations from sources in English:
cenca tlanahui = very sick