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.

popoloni.

Headword: 
popoloni.
Principal English Translation: 

to stammer, stutter, speak unintelligibly (see Molina and Karttunen)

IPAspelling: 
pohpoloːni
Alonso de Molina: 

popoloni. ni. (pret. onipopolon.) ser tartamudo, o empedido dela lengua.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 83v. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen: 

POHPOLŌN(I) to stammer, stutter, speak unintelligibly / ser tartamundo o impedido de la lengua (M) [(1)Cf.74v]. redup. POLŌN(I).
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 201.

Attestations from sources in English: 

Often paired: in popoloni, in tzatzacui, to refer to stuttering and stammering. (see Sahagún)

auh injn imônjca, inteputzco pillotl, coneiutl ticchioa: popolonj, tzatzacuj, njcan cententli, cencamatl toconqujxtia aijtoloian, aitlaliloian toconeoa, tocontlalia = But in their absence we perform in childish, in baby-like fashion. Stuttering, stammering are the word or two which we here deliver; ill-spoken, disordered is what we intone, what we set forth (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), 152.