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.

tlapichilia.

Headword: 
tlapichilia.
Principal English Translation: 

to play music for another person with flutes and chirimías (see Molina)

IPAspelling: 
tɬɑpiːtʃiliɑ
Alonso de Molina: 

tlapichilia. nite. (pret. onitetlapichili.) dar a otro musica con flautas, cheremias.
Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana, 1571, part 2, Nahuatl to Spanish, f. 132r. col. 1. Thanks to Joe Campbell for providing the transcription.

Attestations from sources in English: 

matlepiltica, mactlaviltica, matlematica, quitlapichilitivj, in oacito in aiauhcalco njman ie ic quitlalia, in ixiptla in Vitzilobuchtli = [The others] went lighting the way with torches, with hand-borne torches—with [torches] to light him held in the hand,—and with incense ladles held in the hand. They proceeded playing flutes for him. When they came to arrive at the Mist House, thereupon they set down the likeness of Uitzilopochtli (central Mexico, sixteenth century)
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 3 -- The Origin of the Gods, Part IV, 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, 1978), 7.

Attestations from sources in Spanish: 

yquac quicahuato campana S[an] Fran[cis]co quitlapichillitiaque yniquihuicaque = entonces fueron a dejar la campana a San Francisco, le fueron tocando música de viento cuando la llevaron (ca. 1582, Mexico City)
Luis Reyes García, ¿Como te confundes? ¿Acaso no somos conquistados? Anales de Juan Bautista (Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, Biblioteca Lorenzo Boturini Insigne y Nacional Basílica de Guadalupe, 2001), 172–173.

themes: 
Music, Song, Dance