Cempasúchitl vs maravilla

Question

I was reading about the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico and learned that the yellow marigold flower is a central theme in its celebrations. And I also read that it's traditionally called by its Classical Nahuatl name, cempasúchitl. But that sounds like such a difficult word to pronounce! I don't mind learning it but I am really curious to know if it's really the most commonly used name for this flower in Mexico or do they prefer the regular Spanish name, maravilla? I just want to know which of the two words am I more likely to hear in Mexico out of the context of this festival, say at a flower shop. Also, some websites spell it as zempasúchitl; which of the two is "more correct"?

Answer 1

This flower in Mexico is called Cempasúchil, Cempasúchitl is the nahuatl name. If there are other names, I've never heard them before, I didn't know that was called maravilla in Spain.

Words written with final "tl" have two options of pronunciation:

-tl: yes, hard to pronounce.

and

-l: just an l or lt, but in this case only for extremely common words, for example "Xóchitl" is a female name but I've never heard someone saying it as "Sochitl"[the X sounds S], I've allways heard and said "Sóchil" or "Sóchilt"[Names can be written sightly different from the pronunciation]. Remember, this is not a correct pronunciation, it appears in some words and is ok but if you see a word "tl" say it as it written.

And the Zempasúchitl, is a misspelling, I found a couple of English sites that have that Z but it can be an archaism, old writing, all the antiques "ze" and "zi" now is "ce" and "ci".