Although the writing system of Teotihuacan (100 ೬೭–೫೮ 600) continues to resist
phonetic decipherment, many important forays have been made in recent decades. With
phonetic values still wanting, these texts cannot be verbalized and yet, semantic values can be
proposed for discrete combinations of signs. Progress has been made using this exploratory
method, yielding semantically coherent sequences, known from important linguistic groups of
central Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest. These sequences constitute metaphorical
expressions, and as pairings are characteristic of Mesoamerican lyricism, which are all the more
remarkable given the intervening millennium. These poetic expressions pair terms together
as metaphorical units, which are often translated across languages in a process known as
linguistic calquing. Most linguistic investigations of calques focus on modern attestations
in Mesoamerican languages, at times retracing these features to the ethnohistoric literature
produced in the wake of the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. The present study delves
much further back, by focusing on the poetic pairings attested in the graphic corpus of
Teotihuacan a millennium before. These poetic expressions therefore provide an apt avenue for
investigating the language and writing of the great city and reveal that such poetic pairings fi nd
their origin in the language of this metropolis. As a contribution to contact and areal linguistics,
this paper presents a study of lexical calques attested at Teotihuacan, examining their spatial and
temporal distribution, prompting a discussion of language affi liation to evaluate whether these
can reveal evidence for linguistic adscription.