Thursday, January 12, 2012

Tlomatlo, Tlomahtlo

Question: Hi, I really like your site but I was wondering: you spell the name of the Aztec gods wrong on all their pages. They're spelled Aztlanti on your site but the book spells it Atzlanti. Someone probably mentioned it before, but why is that?

The book also spells the name of the Aztec death god "Miclantecuhtli", but that doesn't make it right. His name (which means "Lord of the Underworld") has a very important T in it, "Mictlantecuhtli", because the Underworld he's in charge of is called Mictlan, not Miclan.

As far as I can tell the spelling "Atzlanti" is just kind of a misguided etymological mistake. The word doesn't actually exist pre-Scion and is just a mash-up that means "those from Atzlan", which is all fine and dandy - except that the name of the legendary ancestral land from which the Aztecs hail is Aztlan, not Atzlan.

Not to rag on the folks who wrote the books, of course - Nahuatl (the Aztec language) is pretty hard. "Atzlan" (and "Miclan") seems, to an English-speaker, to make more sense - it just looks more like it's right, even though it's not. English just doesn't put T and L together like that, but Nahuatl does: not only is it in the name of the language itself, but you can see it in almost every god-name on the list (Chalchiuhtlicue, Huitzilopochtli, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc, Tlazolteotl), and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

So we call them the Aztlanti because the Aztecs are from Aztlan, not Atzlan, and it's most likely just a typo that the books spell it that way. If you want to be even more accurate, however, you might want to ditch the made-up word and just refer to Aztec gods as teotl instead, a legitimate Aztec word meaning "divinity" or "god".

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