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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering if anybody can shed light on the prevalence of 'TL' in so many Aztec language words? IIR it's a latinized way of representing a single unique consonant, but it's fascinating that it's in nearly every name and in so many other Aztec words I've seen.

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In Classical Nahuatl, non-possessed nouns would take the absolutive case with -tl for nouns ending in vowels, and -tli for nouns ending in consonants. [0] Here, as you mentioned, <tl> marks a single consonant: the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate /tɬ/ [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Nahuatl_grammar#Noun...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_aff...

There is some limited discussion here[0] which doesn't fully explain the prevalence of "tl" but suggests the word "atl" meaning "water" was very common and often combined with other words to create new words metaphorically.

[0]https://basketmakeratlatl.com/?page_id=1508

I've read that 'tl' was similar to the welsh 'll' sound (a kind of hissy L sound, though not really, youtube will have some spoken examples) but when I've heard 'tl' spoken it usually sounds like a 'tl', as in 'little'.

Yes, it’s a very similar sound. The Welsh <ll> is the voiceless lateral fricative /ɬ/, which is effectively <tl> without the initial ‘t’ at the start of the phoneme.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...

It is a common noun-forming suffix in Nahuatl. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-tl

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