chapolin.

Headword:

chapolin.

Principal English Translation:

a grasshopper; or, a locust (see Molina and Karttunen)

Orthographic Variants:

chapulin, chapullin, chapollin, chapoli

Alonso de Molina:

chapulin. langosta.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 19r. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen:

CHAPOL-IN pl: -TIN a type of locust, grasshopper / langosta (Z) [(2)Tp.123,(4)Zp.38,151,182]. Z consistently gives the vowel of the second syllable as long, but T has a short vowel. See CHACHA-TL.
[Source: Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 46.]

Attestations from sources in English:

See an image that represents chapolin in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities, 2020-present).

"Chapulín," which was how chapolin entered Spanish as a loanword, was a term used in the late seventeenth century to describe leaders of a riot involving the burning of the Royal Palace in 1692. One witness referred to the "Ratones y Chapulines."
Archivo General de la Nación, Tierras, vol. 1466, exp. 1, fol. 459r., Cuaderno 6. I owe this information to María Castañeda de la Paz, who mentions this in a recent book. The same book also refers to chapulines as features of indigenous families' coats of arms.

chapullin = grasshopper
George E. Fay, Katunob, vol. 10 (1977), p. 9.

ahuaca chapullin = locust
Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, ‎Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions, eds. James Richard Andrews and ‎Ross Hassig (1984), 205.

Frances Krug quotes three different sets of annals that all discuss a problem with locusts (called variously chachapolti and chapolme) in the years 1556, 1557, and 1558.
Frances Krug, "The Nahuatl Annals of the Tlaxcala-Puebla Region," ch. 5, p. 67, Ph.D. Dissertation draft written in the 1980s, with transcriptions and translations approved by James Lockhart. Cited here by SW.

Attestations from sources in Spanish:

Yej Icya Quitaqueh Totajhuehuejmej: Chapolin (Lo que vieron hace muchos años los abuelos: los chapulines). "En una época anterior a la nuestra una viejita menesterosa fue a pedirle maíz a su hijo. El hijo se lo negó y todos los granos de su maíz se volvieron chapulines y se comieron al hombre. (Este relato también podría haberse colocado bajo los ejemplos morales ya que predica contra la tacañería)." (Escuchado en Mecayapan, Ver. Hernández, 1974, 1-10.)
Fernando Horcasitas, "La narrativa oral náhuatl (1920–1975)," Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 13 (1978), 177–209, ver 183.

ipan Çe Tochin, 1558 años, tlachapolcualoc = En el [año] 1 Tochtli, 1558, hubo plaga de chapulines (Mexico City, c. 1572)
Ana Rita Valero de García Lascuráin and Rafael Tena, Códice Cozcatzin (México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1994), 99.

Chapollin ó chapullin-chapulin o saltamontes.
Fernando Ramírez Aguilar, Toponimía michoacana (1992), 26.

"El nombre correcto mexicano [de un pueblo] es Chapulapan, que se compone de chapullin, langosta, de atl, agua, y de pan, en."
Cecilio Agustín Robelo, Nombres geográficos indigenas del estado de México (1966), 74.

IDIEZ morfema:

chapolin.

IDIEZ traduc. inglés:

grasshopper.

IDIEZ def. náhuatl:

Ce piltecuanitzin tlen nemi pan zacatl huan xihuitl zo tlaltzintlan; ni zan huitontinemi canahya pampa quipiya ome iicxi huehhuehueyac; cequin quipiyah ome ieltlapal tlen ica patlanih. “Naman ininpohual chapolimeh, yeca zan tlahuitontoc pan zacatl.”

IDIEZ gramática:

tlat.

themes:

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

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