I have learned from a Mexican-Canadian member of my stamp club that the word "TONANZINTLA" on each of the six stamps of Mexico's 1942 Astrophysics Issue is misspelled. It should be "TONANTZINTLA," with a "T" at the end of the second syllable. Here are the stamps:
Tonantzintla is a Nahuatl word; Nahuatl was the language of the Aztecs:
To = our, ours
Nantzin = nobility
tla = close to or place of
Not surprisingly, the Scott catalogue repeats the error in its description, as does my 1948 edition of Sanabria's Air Post Catalogue; three of the six stamps are airmail stamps. Could someone with a Stanley Gibbons catalogue please provide their description?
re: Mexico 1942 Astrophysics Congress issue in Stanley Gibbons
Thanks very much for your help. I'm not overly surprised. There always seems to be at least a couple of degrees of separation between publishers of anything -- stamps, the news, books -- and the people who actually know the subject. And then it gets endlessly repeated.
It's too bad someone didn't notice the error right away and correct it with a new issue. That way, my stamps would be worth even more! But, then, they would probably have cost more!
re: Mexico 1942 Astrophysics Congress issue in Stanley Gibbons
Bob,
I have to question whether this is as simple as a spelling error. Aztecs did not originally use Latin characters to write their words. Could the method of transcribing Nahuatl into the Latin alphabet have changed over time, or could there be multiple systems like there are for Japanese?