catzahuac. | Nahuatl Dictionary

Headword:

catzahuac.

Principal English Translation:

something dirty, soiled

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), 213.

Orthographic Variants:

catzauac

IPAspelling:

kɑtsɑːwɑk

Alonso de Molina:

catzauac. cosa suzia.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 12v. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen:

CATZĀHUAC something dirty / cosa sucia (M) Catzactic is to be found in M with the same sense but is not attested in the sources for this dictionary. See CATZĀHU(A).
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 25.

Lockhart’s Nahuatl as Written:

catzāhuac. pret. agentive from a verb catzāhua, to get dirty.
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), 213.

Attestations from sources in English:

auh yn çan quixcahuitinemi yn tlaelpaquiliztli yn tliltic yn catzahuac, in oquichtin in cihua cenca quinmotlaelittilia = but those men and women who live only devoting themselves to the black and filthy pleasures of the flesh He abominates (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, 144–145.

catzaoac = dirty-colored; cacatzactic = black; cacatzactli = black (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 10 -- The People, No. 14, Part 11, 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, 1961), 95.

ayc ytetzinco acic in ma ytla tliltic catzahuac = Nothing black or dirty was ever done in regard to her or ever reached her. (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), 66.

themes:

Religion (Indigenous)