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.

tle.

Headword: 
tle.
Principal English Translation: 

what? what thing? or, when preceded by in, that, that which; anything (see Lockhart and Karttunen)

Orthographic Variants: 
tlen
IPAspelling: 
tɬeh
Alonso de Molina: 

Tle amaxtoque? que hazeys?
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, f. 147r.

Frances Karttunen: 

TLE(H) pl: TLEIHQUEH what? / ¿que? o ¿qué cosa? (C) According to C, this has a final glottal stop in phrases when the following word begins with a consonant and drops the glottal stop elsewhere. In some contexts it does not sustain its interrogative sense. With negation it means ‘nothing.’

TLE See TLE(H).

TLEIHQUEH See TLE(H).
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 307.

Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written: 

tle(h). what, interrogative. preceded by in, that which. the glottal stop is not present when a vowel follows in the same phrase.
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), 239.

Attestations from sources in English: 

Yhuan quen ca tle yca tle ypampa = And how, why, for what reason (central Mexico, early seventeenth century)
Codex Chimalpahin: Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Culhuacan, and Other Nahuatl Altepetl in Central Mexico; The Nahuatl and Spanish Annals and Accounts Collected and Recorded by don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), vol. 2, 216–217.

Auh quen ca tle yca tle ypampa = And how, why, for what reason (central Mexico, early seventeenth century)
Codex Chimalpahin: Society and Politics in Mexico Tenochtitlan, Tlatelolco, Culhuacan, and Other Nahuatl Altepetl in Central Mexico; The Nahuatl and Spanish Annals and Accounts Collected and Recorded by don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Susan Schroeder (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), vol. 2, 216–217.

tle = what?
yn tle = what, that which (not a question)