Oaxaca Etymology

Most modern etymologies of Oaxaca derive the name from Nahuatl huāxyacac, which is assigned a variety of meanings; OED Online, for instance, glosses it ‘plateau of the acacias’. The Nahuatl etymon should probably be given instead as huāxacac (without the <y>, where <> indicates a written letter). huāxyacac is, I believe, the underlying form, and I've seen it only in modern reconstructions; I've seen no <y> in the early or modern forms of the name itself [n. 1].

The etymology is something like this:

Nahuatl huāx-in ‘guaje tree (Leucaena esculenta)’ [n. 2] + yaca-tl nose [n. 3] + -c locative

➔ *huāxyacac ‘at the guaje nose’ (the absolutive suffix of huāx-in is dropped in compounding, and that of yaca-tl is dropped before the locative suffix; * indicates a hypothetical underlying form)

➔ *huāxxacac (assimilation occurs across the morpheme boundary: -xy- becomes -xx-)

➔ huāxacac [wa:ˈʃakak] or [wa:ʃˈʃakak]; later Spanish [wa:ˈxakak]; where [ ] enclose phonetic representations, a colon indicates vowel-length, ˈ indicates stress on the following syllable, and ʃ represents an sh sound (-xx- is reduced to -x- by the shortening of doubled consonants, as found in some modern Nahuatl dialects, or by scribal neglect)

➔ Spanish Oaxaca [waˈxaka] (where <oa> is pronounced like <hua>; the not-very-Spanish final <c> [k] is dropped) [n. 4]

Notes:

[1] I've found the following early forms of the name:

• guaxacac, huaxacac (c1540 in the Codex Mendoza)

• Huaxacac (1578 in the English title of Nichols’ Pleasant Historie of the conquest of the VVeast India, now called new Spayne, atchieued by the vvorthy prince Hernando Cortes, marques of the valley of Huaxacac, a translation of López de Gómara’s La historia general de las Indias, 1554)

• huaxacatzi[n] (c1690 in a Nahuatl “primordial title”, in K. Terraciano & L. M. Sousa, “The ‘Original Conquest’ of Oaxaca: Mixtec and Nahua history and myth”, Ethnohistory 50/2 (2003) 349-400; -tzin is a diminutive/reverential suffix)

[2] The guaje is a leguminous tree, similar to the acacia. It has long red seed-pods—see the glyph and the photo above—and feathery foliage.

[3] I’m struggling with nose, as there are at least three senses of the word (derived from the literal, anatomical ‘nose’) that might fit here. (Note that, in the glyph, the guaje protrudes from the man’s nose.)

• spur of a mountain (covered with guaje woods). Huaxacac was the name of a hill in the present city of Oaxaca; note the green hill in the glyph.

• beginning or salient point (of guaje woods).

• odor ([good or bad] of guaje). The seeds and foliage of guaje have a distinct garlic odor; the Florentine Codex (1540-85) says “it is a little bad smelling”.

I know of no early source that translates the name. The 16th-century pictographic-ideographic glyphs of this name and of others with similar elements offer hints but nothing conclusive so far (to me). At present, I favor the mountain-spur etymology.

[4] The pronunciation of Spanish <x> changed (by the 17c.) from [ʃ] (esh) to [x] (as in Ger. Kuchen).