ilamatl. | Nahuatl Dictionary

Headword:

ilamatl.

Principal English Translation:

an elder woman (see Molina)

IPAspelling:

ilɑmɑtɬ

Alonso de Molina:

ilamatl. vieja.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 37r. col. 2. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen:

ILAMA-TL pl: ILAMATQUEH; possessed form -ILAMATCĀUH old woman / vieja (M) M gives this with an absolutive suffix and in its more common form without the suffix. A T appears in the plural and possessed forms, but there is no attestation of a corresponding stem-final glottal stop in the singular as in HUĒHUEH ‘old man’. The shape of the absolutive suffix in M’s entry requires that the stem end in a vowel. From the plural and possessed forms, ILAMA seems to be a truncation *ILAMATQUI. T and Z have lost the initial vowel.
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 103.

Attestations from sources in English:

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

plurals: ilamatque, ilamatqueh

in jtlan onoque, in qujpia piltzintli, in vevetque, in jlamatque = those in charge of the baby, those who watched over it, the old men, the old women (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 6 -- Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, No. 14, Part 7, 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), 185.

Attestations from sources in Spanish:

ico tlalnenemoac otlapisaloc osilin in tepostli teopan tepostli ic oquixoac mochi tlacatl huei tepiton yhuan suame ylamacque mostin omo sen nechicoque oc otes tlaltama chiuque = Salimos dirigiendo a ésta gente para recorrer las tierras entonces hubo más música y repique de campanas, de las campanas del templo, esto fué al salir toda la dicha gente: grandes y chicos, también mujeres y jóvenes y ancianos, todos lo que se reunieron, para medirnos la tierra (Estado de Hidalgo, ca. 1722?)
Rocío Cortés, El "nahuatlato Alvarado" y el Tlalamatl Huauhquilpan: Mecanismos de la memoria colectiva de una comunidad indígena (New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, Colonial Spanish American Series, 2011), 32, 43.

themes:

Women, Men, Gender