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tlatzontectli.

Headword: 
tlatzontectli.
Principal English Translation: 

a weapon, a kind of arrow (see attestations); or, a judgement (see Molina and Karttunen)

IPAspelling: 
tɬɑtsontektɬi
Alonso de Molina: 

tlatzontectli. cosa juzgada y sentenciada.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 143r. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

TLATZONTEC-TLI judgement / cosa juzgada y sentenciada (M) [(1)Bf.10r]. See TZONTEQU(I).
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 302.

Attestations from sources in English: 

auh yn mitl yn mitohua yn tlacochtli. yn motocayotia tlatzontectli. quicuitlalpique. ypā motlallique yn atlan ynic hualpanoque = And the arrows, called tlacochtli, named tlatzontectli, they bound to their waists and rested on them as they swam across (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. 1, 98–99.

nimā ie ic contlaça in acalchimalleque in tlatzontectli in impā in Españoles: necoccampa necoc in valhuetzi in tlatzontectli = Then the war-boat people hurled barbed darts at the Spaniards; from both sides the darts fell on them
(Mexico City, sixteenth century)James Lockhart, We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico, Repertorium Columbianum v. 1 (Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1993), 154.