tizatl. | Nahuatl Dictionary

Headword:

tizatl.

Principal English Translation:

a certain varnish; white earth, chalk; whitewash (see Molina and Karttunen); chalk and feathers together have an association with sacrifice (see tizatl ihuitl, link below)

Orthographic Variants:

tiçatl

IPAspelling:

tiːsɑtɬ

Alonso de Molina:

tizatl. cierto barniz, o tierra blanca.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 113r. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Frances Karttunen:

TĪZA-TL whitewash, white earth, chalk / cierto barniz o tierra blanca (M) [(5)Cf.57r,60v].
Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 241.

Attestations from sources in English:

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

This entered Spanish as tiza (chalk).

yxaval tiçatl = her facial paint is chalk
Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Primeros Memoriales, ed. Thelma D. Sullivan, et al. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 106.

ioan qujtoa amo tlalquaz, amo no tiҫaquaz in otztli = And she said the pregnant woman should not eat earth nor eat chalk (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), 156.

We are awaiting attestations, but Brinton gives "tizaitl" for "chalk, anything white, an example or model."
Daniel Garrison Brinton, Ancient Nahuatl Poetry: Containing the Nahuatl Text of XXVII Ancient Mexican Poems (1887), 164.

quitocaiotia tonatiuh, tiçatl, hiujtll: ipampa iuhqujn ytiçaio, yujio = They named [the captor] the sun, white earth, the feather, because [he was] as one whitened with chalk and decked with feathers. [The reference to chalk and feathers seems to refer to human sacrifice. -SW] (16th century, Mexico City)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 2—The Ceremonies, No. 14, Part III, 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, 1951), 47–48.

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