You speak more Spanish than you think

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Which English words are secretly Spanish?

[00:00:03]>> What do armadas and armadillos have in common?

[00:00:06]>> And why do some Spanish speakers in Ethpia appear to have a lift?

[00:00:10]>> From the influence of Iberia to the animals of the Americas and well beyond, we are examining Spanish words in English on this episode of Words Unraveled.

[00:00:29]Benito to another Words Unraveled. I'm Rob Watts from the YouTube channel Rob Words >> and soy Jess Zeris, author of etmology books including useless etmology and today we're talking about espanol.

[00:00:42]>> Yeah, we are. See, see Jess, we're talking about Spanish and its influence on English, which is, you know, largely about vocabulary that has slipped into English from Spain from various places in the world. Actually, >> Spain and the Americas because we have this these different routes where uh Spanish crossed the ocean and then came through many Central and South American countries. Yeah, we talk a lot about the transatlantic divide in English, but there's very much one in Spanish too, which we will get into because there are also differences in the Spanish spoken in those two places and like quite sort of big differences that you can really sort of point to. So, we'll get into that, but let's talk about what we like to talk about here, the ethmologies of some words that we use that actually do bring them over from either Spain or from usually the Americas, right? More often than not otherwise. Should we start in the old world though? It just feels chronologically like it makes more sense.

[00:01:40]>> I think that makes the most sense to you. And and in any case, any many of these words that came through South and Central America were also borrowed from indigenous people who lived there and had nothing to do with Spanish before the Spanish arrived.

[00:01:51]>> Yeah. Yeah. It's it's complicated story, but we are going to make it less complicated for you where we can. It's actually, I think, easier to find words that came into English from Spanish, your side of the Atlantic, than it is my side of the Atlantic. But we do have sort of historic words like Armada, for example, which is used to just describe a general fleet of ships. Now, it can be, but most famously the Spanish Armada. Jess, did you just raise your hand?

[00:02:18]>> I did. I did. I did because we also have Armadillo, which is >> Yes, we do.

[00:02:25]>> The little armored one.

[00:02:27]>> Yeah. So armada just means an armed unit, an armed force. It's ethmologically speaking the same as army really. Army is just a word we get from French and it's armada is kind of the Spanish equivalent of the word army from French. But also if you put that cute little dimminative from Spanish, you get aro which is little armored one. Very similarly, this is less cute I suppose, but but we also have the words for war and then gorilla as that we've adopted as well, which is a little war.

[00:03:00]>> That is a very good link because that is also a word that does enter English from Spanish in Spain very specifically during the um peninsula war which took place between uh 1808 and 1814. The Gera fighters were sort of ad hoc Spanish bands of peasants and the like who were also fighting on behalf of Spain as well as the the conventional forces and that word enters English as does the word hunter around the same time or juna as it sometimes gets pronounced in English which were these were the sort of controlling councils I think of the regions and and that word really takes off during the same peninsula war. So those we actually get we get those words because of Napoleon ultimately because he's he's he's the guy that's stirring things up.

[00:03:47]>> You know what's cool about Geria is that it is a Germanic word which is not true for many of the words that we'll discuss because Spanish is a romance language but we have some Germanic words in there too.

[00:04:00]>> Yeah, we've talked about this before, haven't we? how the French G and the English war are both sort of Germanic words for the same thing and have exactly the same the same roots. But a lot of these G words that you do find in Latin languages are actually >> left over by the Franks. But as well as the sort of historical words, we have words like Sherry that you have to attribute to Iberia because her is in Spain and originally Sherry referred to the white wine that was made in that region. Uh it's called Heres de la Frontterra nowadays. Um yeah, but now we talk about the fortified wine that's made in that region and we call it Sherry because that is a nice sort of anglicization of the name of the place.

[00:04:46]But um it actually if you look at the word written down doesn't look very much like Sherry at all.

[00:04:51]>> No. You know what what also blew my mind that that in researching this episode that is related to this is that the word cork is also from Spanish. What? No.

[00:05:01]How?

[00:05:02]>> Okay. So, in the 1300s, a species of oak tree that was native to Iberia and North Africa and was used for lots of purposes was transported throughout Europe. And in Spanish, it was called alora, I think. And it's >> I think we should just vote I think after every honestly >> Spanish skills very low. Etmology skills medium high.

[00:05:26]>> You lost confidence in your pronunciation. Is that neither of us are going to nail any of these pronunciations. Let's get that out of the way. I mean, I I'm not quite as bad as I was with the Arabic, but >> I'm still pretty bad.

[00:05:38]>> Well, anyway, the the root here is the Latin quirkus, which means oak or like cortex. It's also related to that word, which was also originally a word for bark.

[00:05:47]>> I like these surprising ones that have come from Spanish, like sort of a lot further back. We'll get into some more of those because I know you've got a little list of them that you said you're going to treat me to. I'll just reel off a few more that we specifically get from Spain and then we're going to talk more about what's going on your side of the Atlantic. But there are certain cultural phenomena in Spain like the siesta which is a word that we you know we call it an afternoon nap a siesta but you know that comes from the Latin for sixth because siesta was traditionally taken at the sixth hour of the day. So the hottest, if you imagine, you know, your baseline is getting up at 6:00 a.m. 6 hours later is midday. It's the hottest time of the day. Although it's not actually, is it really? But theoretically, that's when you have your siesta, which is from the Latin sea.

[00:06:39]Yeah, just sex, which is where siesta comes from. Incidentally, there's a similar story, a side sidebar here behind our word noon because our word noon comes from the Latin for nine.

[00:06:49]You're supposed to noon is supposed to be the the ninth hour of the day. So, actually about 3:00 in the afternoon. It should be, but it's ended up being the middle of the day. Also, my favorite little facts. And another word that I found came from uh Spanish culture is aicionado.

[00:07:08]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:07:09]>> I mean, obviously sounds well Spanish.

[00:07:11]Obviously, a Spanish word essentially means um someone who's affectionate for something. But the first people to be described as aficionados sort of you know or at least to to gain that label in any sort of real sense are amateur bull fighters or bull fighting fans.

[00:07:31]Yeah. So you know you know in the same way that amateur >> I think quite literally implies that you're doing something for the love of it.

[00:07:38]>> Well aficionardo is the same thing. So if you are an amateur bull fighter you are doing it for the love of the bull fighting rather than for money. You are therefore unprofessional. You are amateur.

[00:07:50]>> Does that mean that it's related to the word affection?

[00:07:52]>> It's directly related to the word affection.

[00:07:54]>> That's so cool.

[00:07:56]>> Yeah. Exactly. Again, this is going to change how I use the word afficionado now. Being sort of like expert, but really it's not about expert. It's being devoted to something to having a real a real love for it. And yeah, the first aficionados were really into bull fighting. Um, great.

[00:08:15]>> Yeah.

[00:08:17]One thing that you're really good on is the um Spanish words that came from Arabic and then we ended up with them.

[00:08:27]>> Much like the English words that come from Arabic, they tend to have that that either an assimilated form or just straight up that definite article a on the front. So we've got like the the Spanish word for olive oil is from Arabic. It's a I think but similar words along those lines >> because it's easy to forget or or maybe many people don't know that Spain or at least parts of Spain were Muslim for 800 years there or thereabouts from the 700s through to the the late 1400s large part of it was yeah essentially Arab. So they spoke Arabic in there and that means that a lot of Arabic words they seep into modern Spanish. A a neat thing here is the word alpaca, which you would think like that sounds like it could be an Arabic word, but it is we got it we got it from Spanish, but it's probably from an Incan Ketwa word meaning yellowish red and it would be something like pekka and that would be like the common coat color for the animal. and the L was probably tacked on based on the assumption that it might have something to do with Arabic or like it was added to it. A similar thing happened to the word almond which is from the Greek amydalos, but the al bit was added in Spanish on the assumption that it had something to do with Arabic.

[00:09:57]>> Oh, no way. So the the story there with the alpaca, it mirrors almost sort of mirrors in as far as it does completely the opposite uh to to what happens with albatross because our word albatross comes from alcatra which is an Iberian Spanish word for a pelican. Melican, >> which in turn comes from the Arabic, and I'm going to say it wrong, Alcadus, which means the vase or the jar. Uh is a reference to, you know, that gross bit that pelicans have.

[00:10:32]Yeah. And anyway, that gets um bastardized for once a better word in English from Alcatraz to to albatross perhaps influenced by Alba which is the Latin for white. So call this white bird an albatross rather than an Alcatraz. Uh and we haven't even mentioned the prison yet, >> right? One of the potential Arabic words it came from is alas, meaning the diver.

[00:11:02]Ah, that works as well, doesn't it? I like that theory. A couple of more with the alalfa. That's comes to us from Spanish, but ultimately from Arabic and al cove as well, which meant like a a dome or a vault in Arabic. But those are just a handful of the words that we get from Spanish in Spain.

[00:11:30]foreigner.

[00:11:45]This little bit of Spanish has been brought to you by Speak, who have kindly sponsored this video. Speak is a language learning app built around actual conversation, which immediately appealed to me because I spend an alarming amount of my time thinking about how people actually speak.

[00:12:01]>> Same. I've tried plenty of apps where you tap buttons for 20 minutes and learn some vocab, but you can finish the lesson without saying a single word out loud. And speak throws you into the conversation immediately, >> which feels a bit terrifying at first, though in a useful way. The app uses these generated conversations and role-playing scenarios. So instead of memorizing isolated vocabulary, you practice situations you might actually encounter in real life. And for this video, I've been using speak for at least 10 minutes a day for two weeks to improve my Spanish, which wasn't very good in the first place. Before I started, it was mainly hola espanol, which I also learned how to say in conversation along with other helpful ways to say you don't know much Spanish.

[00:12:44]I too have hit a 14-day streak as well.

[00:12:47]>> 14 days.

[00:12:48]>> I've got quite a few Spanish and Latin American friends here in Berlin. So basically, I just want to impress them.

[00:12:54]>> One feature I really like is the custom learning path. You can choose topics and goals that actually matter to you.

[00:12:59]Travel, dating, career stuff, family conversations, ordering food, surviving awkward social conversations. I was even able to simulate a conversation with you.

[00:13:07]>> I beg your pardon. How?

[00:13:09]>> Yeah. You just tell it that you know your your name is Jessica and then your co-worker's name is Rob and then you have a conversation.

[00:13:18]>> Oh, that's brilliant. I also really enjoyed the the free talk feature because it lets you practice these open-ended conversations. So instead of repeating sentences forever, you're creating your own answers. There's also this whole roleplay community section where people share different prompts and conversation scenarios which makes the practice feel much more alive and less like a standardized test from high school.

[00:13:40]>> And because speak is designed around speaking aloud, you don't really need to use your fingers all that much. You can do it all handsfree if you like or you can sit on the subway and look a little bit like you're talking to yourself.

[00:13:52]>> I did it while in line for a roller coaster over the weekend as a matter of fact. And if you want to try it yourself, you can start your free week with speak using the link in our description.

[00:14:01]>> Gracias.

[00:14:11]>> Another animal that begins with L here is the alligator, which we got from the Spanish phrase elato, which again, not like faux Arabic >> beginning on that word.

[00:14:24]>> It's not from the Arabic at all, right?

[00:14:25]Is it >> originally? It was the Lagarto de Indius, which is the lizard of the Indies, which would be the reptiles that they saw in the Americas. So the, you know, the alligators over there.

[00:14:37]>> Alligator just means the the lizard.

[00:14:39]>> The lizard. Yep.

[00:14:42]>> And legato is is related to the word lizard, right? It's a it's just a you know, that word takes a different route and it ends up sounding one way um rather than the way it ended up sounding in English. Another way that this that word has made its way into English is that the the adjective lertus ending in o us u s in English was once a word for muscley because it supposedly looked like lizards were crawling under your your arm or under your skin. Much in the same way that muscle means mousy as we've >> mice crawling under your skin. Why why ruin something beautiful by saying oh it's like you got critters under your skin.

[00:15:23]Gross.

[00:15:26]Give us some more animals. More Spanish animals. I like these.

[00:15:29]>> This one was introduced from Spanish, but it is from an Arowakan language, uh, specifically the Tyino word for the animal, which is iguana, and these were observed in Central and South America and the Caribbean. This is going to happen a lot. We got the word from Spanish, but it came through the indigenous languages of the Americas.

[00:15:49]Apparently, sometimes the iguana is sometime is called the pouyo de los arbolis, the chicken of the trees for its flavor and because it's high in protein. And that in some cases is actually a good thing because iguanas have become quite invasive beyond their native territories in the Americas.

[00:16:08]>> That's like we call pigeons like the rats of the skies.

[00:16:11]>> You're right. One of my favorite things about iguanas in general is that Darwin didn't have very nice things to say about the ones that he observed in the Galapagos. He described it as a hideousl looking creature of a dirty black color, stupid and sluggish in its movements. He also observes them being very skillful swimmers. In fact, I have heard one account, not sure how true, that he continuously chucked one into the sea to see if it would come back to the shore.

[00:16:42]>> And if it didn't, >> just casual bit of lizard murder.

[00:16:47]>> Well, they I mean, they're they are marine iguanas, so they're very much in the water all the time.

[00:16:52]>> They can hack it >> most of the time. Mhm.

[00:16:55]>> I like it when Well, not I like it, but it's it is funny how Europeans have traveled the world slagging off the local wildlife. Like the descriptions of the dodo from Maitius are really really mean. You know, this this stupid disgusting tasting fat bird as the Europeans are describing it as they destroy it. They say it doesn't taste very nice, but they still eat them all.

[00:17:16]>> Speaking of which, did we get dodo from Spanish?

[00:17:19]>> It's the Portuguese take on a word from another language. And it's it's difficult to to pin down because Maitius doesn't have a native population. you know, it's it's only ever been populated by people that have traveled there from elsewhere in, you know, the past few hundred years.

[00:17:38]>> It's a slightly strange one. It might just mean stupid person in Portuguese, but >> that's also what it means in English.

[00:17:45]So, >> indeed it does. It's not very nice, is it? But they're not around to defend themselves.

[00:17:50]>> Speaking of which, we did get bozo from Spanish, I believe. Unfortunately, it it had it has some dark origins. It was used in the slave trade and and was sometimes used to mean someone who speaks Spanish poorly, but also just unfortunately used for people who are perceived as less intelligent in that context. Um, but Vaudeville got a hold of it and then turned it into a clown name. Another somewhat sad one and I'll just get these out of the way is unfortunately the word galute is also from Spanish and came through the same context and it was it a a galute is literally a person who is on a a little gall.

[00:18:31]>> I don't know that word. What does it mean?

[00:18:33]>> The way I've heard it used in context is you big galute and it means someone who's like giant like awkward large and clumsy.

[00:18:40]>> Not very nice then.

[00:18:41]>> Not very nice. But back to animals, which are which are more fun to talk about, more pleasant to talk about. I would love to talk about coyotes, which is a cool one.

[00:18:50]>> Coyote, again, not not a Spanish word though, right?

[00:18:53]>> Yeah. And we we can use this to get into some words from Noatal. So coyote is a Spanish/English evolution of a Noat word, which is coyotal. Both the animal and a god were associated with this word. and and the god is features heavily in trickster myths and shape-shifting lore and he has this tendency to outwit and be outwitted by other deities and so Spanish colonists borrowed it as kyote which in turn entered English via the American southwest by the early 19th century and before that they were in English called prairie wolves by English speakers who encountered them even though they only have about like 4% in common genetically with wolves, which is about the same as humans and orangutans.

[00:19:43]>> Again, it's just naming local things, you know, exotic animals after what you know from back home, isn't it? Like a prairie dog, right? Prairie dogs probably not very closely related to dogs. I wouldn't have thought.

[00:19:55]>> Definitely not. But one of the things that's interesting about this one is the way it's been pronounced in English throughout the years because coyote and coyote and coyote have all all been options. It's been pronounced coyote and still is in many regions, but coyote is more common among English speakers now, especially I guess in the region where I live. It It's kind of neat.

[00:20:16]>> That t ending is added to a lot of nat words by the Spanish because they can't basically handle the at the end as we would struggle to do in English as well.

[00:20:29]So they they put a t at the end of it.

[00:20:32]Yeah. So chocolate is another one.

[00:20:34]Chocolate becomes chocolate in Spanish once they've picked it up in Mexico, but it actually ends with a sound in the the language that it's borrowed from.

[00:20:46]>> It's dropped sometimes entirely, too, like the word ocelot was a noal term adopted by Spanish colonists. And it originally referred to jaguars, but then it was applied in English to the smaller spotted cat we know now as an ocelot.

[00:21:04]Jaguar is a word from Portuguese, but the Portuguese got it from the people living in Brazil at the time.

[00:21:15]>> Two big Guarani languages.

[00:21:17]>> Yeah, exactly. It's actually worth mentioning the the history between Portugal and Spain, particularly in southern and and central America, because the Spanish and the Portuguese, they basically signed a deal that drew a line around the world going from north to south and then back up again, right?

[00:21:35]And the Spanish everywhere, one side of it, it's fair game for them and Portuguese the other side of it, it's all fair game for them. It basically means that the Portuguese can have as much of sort of Africa and India as they like, but the Spanish get the Americas.

[00:21:53]But there is just this little sliver of South America that sticks out that crosses that line. And that is where Brazil is now. And that's why Brazil is this Portuguese speaking exception.

[00:22:07]>> It has the most Portuguese speakers in the world. Correct.

[00:22:11]>> Oh yeah. Yeah. By a long shot. By a long shot, actually. So, here's a mad thing.

[00:22:17]I think there might be more Portuguese speakers in South America than Spanish speakers in South America.

[00:22:24]>> I think that's probably correct.

[00:22:26]>> Well, that that is crazy. Crazy if true.

[00:22:29]>> Big if true.

[00:22:31]>> Maybe someone can check that for us and stick it in the comments. One of the funny things that has happened between Spanish and Portuguese is because they diverged in some like usage and pronunciation differences and a couple other things, there are a number of false friends between them. And I again I discovered this online. So I would love if someone confirmed for me that like the Spanish embarada means pregnant while the Portuguese embarada means embarrassed. Yeah, it's a false friend with English as well, right? You have to watch out for that.

[00:23:07]>> Mhm. And then exquisito means exquisite, while in Portuguese, exquisito means strange.

[00:23:14]>> That's interesting, isn't it? It's a bit like the word peculiar, isn't it?

[00:23:17]Peculiar can mean special, specific, particular. Actually, those peculiar and particular are two very closely related words. Um, but peculiar can also mean weird. These two concepts aren't that far apart.

[00:23:30]>> But with uh cows Anyway, another one is uh the Spanish vaso means drinking glass and in Portuguese it can mean vase or toilet bowl.

[00:23:45]>> Oh, no. I mean, but again, you can see how all of those happen. They're just >> that mean the same concept, right?

[00:23:50]>> I would like to go into the differences between Spanish in Spain and Spanish in Latin America.

[00:23:56]>> Let's do it. because there are quite obvious pronunciation differences. You know, in southern and central America and the Caribbean, you're not going to hear the th sound that sometimes gets described as the the Spanish lisp. You heard about this. Um the the old story goes that Spanish people ask for uneva and say gracias because a king of old Ferdinand uh he had a lisp and they wanted to copy him. That's obviously nonsense. It's just it's just a sound.

[00:24:30]>> So, there are three ways of speaking Spanish in this regard. They're known as distinion, which means you have a s sound and a th sound. An s can make either of those. There's co which is what is spoken. So, so distin is what's spoken in Spain mostly as in they have variations within Spain. You can't just talk about it like that. But but you know if you're hearing distur that's what's being spoken in Spain. CO is what's spoken in Latin America which is where you don't have the th sound at all. You just have s. So for example uh the words that would be catha and casa.

[00:25:12]So that's hunt and home. In Iberian Spanish castellano or castellian Spanish as it's known. There's a differentiation between those. But in South America where they use this ceil uh catha and casa are both pronounced the same as casa casa. So hunt and home are homophones in Latin America in a way that they're not in Spain. And then there's another one which is theo which is you can find in some parts of Andalucia or Andaluthia indeed where they th even the what would normally be a s sound. So you'd have gracias, not just graias. But the reason that you have the ceo in Latin America is that the people that traveled from Spain primarily across the Atlantic were from andalia.

[00:26:03]But back then they they had this ceo there. So in Ander Lucia and in the Canary Islands, they didn't have this separation, this distinion between the th and the s sound because and because that was sort of the the big sort of naval area where a lot of the shipping went. That's the the pronunciation that traveled across the Atlantic. All right.

[00:26:26]I think that's worth talking about.

[00:26:27]>> It really is. That's amazing.

[00:26:29]>> The fun story about the king isn't true.

[00:26:31]The differences are quite the difference quite interesting. It is not a lith. It is a very well uh defined difference between a s and a th sound.

[00:26:42]>> Yeah. The the like emblematic example that I would immediately associate that with is Barcelona vers versus Barcelona.

[00:26:50]>> Exactly. If if an English person says Barcelona, they sound pretentious. But uh also I I don't know how that name is pronounced in Catalan and they're proudly Catalan in Barcelona. Um, but in Castellian Spanish, yeah, it is it's Barcelona. You got thaga as well as uh that are pronounced with this this th sound. There are also grammatical differences like quite quite key ones.

[00:27:22]For example, in Latin America, is used as the informal u in a way that it's not used in Spain.

[00:27:31]In Spain, they're more likely to use to, you know, like to to as it's as it's written. But if you use that in Latin America, it can seem a little bit over informal. It can be almost rude if you're not using it to someone very close to you. So is like the safest pronoun, second person pronoun to use in Latin America, whereas it gets used much less >> in Spain. And Spain also has a votros, which has been all but lost in Latin America, which is another um it's an informal plural form of you. But in Latin America, they go fores instead. I think I've got that all right. Again, correct me below if I haven't, but I think I've got that right.

[00:28:15]>> That's excellent. I I'm learning so much today.

[00:28:17]>> Yeah, you got to watch it. So, we were learning um using Speak, the sponsor of this video. And at the start, it asked me why I was learning and I said I wanted to speak to my Latin American friends. And I know for a fact that it took that into account and started teaching me Latin American Spanish because, for example, it was teaching me the word beautiful as Linda, which is actually a Latin American word choice rather than a Spanish word choice. In Spain, they're much more likely to use the word um guapa. Guapa guapo for someone who is handsome or beautiful.

[00:28:52]Whereas Lindo and Linda is more commonly used in Latin America.

[00:29:04]We should talk about the ways that many Latin American and Spanish terms ended up in uh northern American place names on the western frontier in particular.

[00:29:16]Many of our Spanish place names, cities like Los Angeles and whatnot are from Spanish. And uh and it's because there was a there was a good deal of uh of drama between the Spanish and existing Americans during the age of westward expansion. We had SpanishAmerican War.

[00:29:36]We had a number of other conflicts that ended up determining who controlled things areas like California and New Mexico and Texas and uh and the Alamo and whatnot. It's possible that Europeans watching this won't be fully aware of the fact that Mexico did stretch up into a lot of the territory that is currently part of the United States.

[00:30:01]>> Mhm. A good a good deal of the West was controlled by the Spanish for a good long time before northern European Americans started heading in that direction. And this is a fakund time for Spanish words entering English because on the frontier they're sort of rubbing up against each other but also they're sort of hanging out doing the doing the same things like being cowboys or being buckaroo.

[00:30:30]>> I was going to say cavalieros but yeah >> I like cavalier is good as well isn't it? Yeah. So buckaroo is from the Spanish uh vero which means a a cowboy, right? And and I'm I'm sort of hesitating on the pronunciation there because this is another thing I've only just learned is that v and basically pronounced exactly the same >> in in Spanish. The Spanish word that becomes the English buckaroo is spelled with a v as in it's it's it's related to the the French fa vash. You know these words associate vaccination or these word these cow related words. You also have vakerero or bakero which gives us buckaroo.

[00:31:12]>> Yeah. American spaghetti westerns don't really reveal the fact that most cowboys as we would know them were Hispanic.

[00:31:19]>> It's not my biggest gripe with the the westerns in terms of sort of history and um relations between certain groups.

[00:31:28]Speaking of the people who uh the people who were cowboys and cavalias and whatnot, I need to remember the exact flow of horses in the Americas because most horses, most mustangs in particular in the Americas are descended from Spanish horses is my understanding. I might need a refresher on that one, but mustang is originally from the Spanish meango, which means stray animal. But there's some wild history here, too. Oh, wild.

[00:31:58]Very good.

[00:32:00]>> I mean, that is >> I'm not let that one go.

[00:32:02]>> Running free. Um, in any case, the it the word meant stray animal, but they are named after the meesta or the honado conca, which means the honorable council of the meesta, which was an association of livestock owners that protected lands and migrations and rights pertaining to their flocks and herds in the 14th century in Spain. Messa is supposed to be from the Latin word mixed which also describes the horses but like accurately but it is it in the original context of the honorable council of the messa it described annual assemblies who came together to divide up strays among herds and flocks and sort of the common ownership of the animals and the collective management of them. So, this got ported over to American Horses, which because correct me if I'm wrong, but a a wild horse would not be called a mustang outside of this the Americas, right?

[00:33:05]>> No. No, it wouldn't. But also, Spanish has another word for a wild horse, which is a bronco. Bronco also means untamed.

[00:33:16]It would be a a cabo. Bronco would be an untamed horse, but we've just taken the Bronco bit to describe specifically an untamed horse as well, running wild.

[00:33:28]>> One word you see in frontier, by no means exclusively, but one word you see in frontier like contexts tends to be the word Sierra. It appears in the names of mountain ranges and things like that.

[00:33:40]And I actually didn't know that it means saw >> like cuz it's like a jagged mountain range. Sierra makes so much sense.

[00:33:49]>> Saw. Isn't that fascinating? And so it's related to words like serate, too.

[00:33:54]>> Okay, I've got another one of these that's that's going to hopefully astound you in exactly the same way as you've just you probably already know it.

[00:34:00]>> Canyon. Canyon means exactly the same as cannon. The word is it's the same as the word cannon.

[00:34:07]>> Is it because it's like a tube? A canon is like Yeah, that's cool.

[00:34:12]>> It means tube.

[00:34:14]I love this. And the canyon's got that fun little uh in in Spanish tilda on top. The letter is actually called an N, right? The the the N with the little thing on it that you also see in espanol. But that that started off as another N. So double N's scribes started, you know, getting a little bit lazy or trying to save space. They take the second end, they put it or or maybe they take the first end and put it on top of the second, but whatever. And then that gets sort of reduced until it just becomes a sort of squiggle. So for example, ano which means year would have been written a n o. But then >> over time it gains this little squiggle.

[00:34:53]The the n becomes an na and ano is just now spelled a n o. And canon, our word cannon is c a n o n. And canyon is c a n o n in Spanish. and and our word canyon with that Y in it is is just us phonetically spelling out the Spanish word.

[00:35:16]>> That's extremely cool. In English, we would call that a a tilda, which is it's from the Latin word titulus, which means heading or superscription. So, it's a hat.

[00:35:30]>> Oh, like title.

[00:35:32]>> Exactly. That's also the origin of the word tit. Tit, >> which would be the um the dot on an I or a J.

[00:35:40]>> Oh, we got metaththesis. That's one of our favorite things there between Tilda and TD. Y >> we do. Look at that.

[00:35:48]>> Have a little bit of metaththesis.

[00:35:50]Rodeo. Rodeo is a good one.

[00:35:51]>> A good one. Yeah.

[00:35:52]>> Rodeo. It means an enclosure originally.

[00:35:56]So, it's related to words like round.

[00:35:58]Essentially, it's a place where things have been rounded up. Is a a rodeo.

[00:36:02]>> And now it's a place where you got flung off a horse. Yeah. Have you ever been to a rodeo?

[00:36:07]>> I have been to rodeos before, mostly in the context of like there are like livestock shows and agricultural events and things around, but I lived in Colorado for some time and they they had a big rodeo.

[00:36:19]>> Have you ever been on a a bucking cabay Bronco?

[00:36:22]>> No, I've just been on a non-bucking one.

[00:36:26]>> Oh, that's good.

[00:36:28]I don't think that's more than I have.

[00:36:30]>> Actually, that's not true. I have nearly been bucked off a horse once, but not I don't I don't think it was a Bronco or a Mustang.

[00:36:39]>> I So, here's a here's a a transatlantic difference in English. Lassu and lasso.

[00:36:46]>> You know that we pronounce lasso lassu in English.

[00:36:48]>> Why?

[00:36:49]>> I honestly I cannot explain it to you because it does not reflect the Spanish.

[00:36:55]I don't know why we do that. It's from the Spanish l.

[00:37:00]So it's with that the th sound from Iberian Spanish from castellian Spanish.

[00:37:07]And that lo becomes lasso in Latin American Spanish. And it is directly related to >> lace.

[00:37:17]>> Lace. Yeah. Exactly. So lthl means a a string a cord and lace is ultimately a material made out of string and and cord.

[00:37:31]You know what two words have some funny things in common is the words pina and piñata which they're from the same thing which which means pine cone and it's also why we say pineapple in while the rest of the world says ananas for that word that that fruit.

[00:37:51]Yeah, because again naming an exotic thing after something that's more familiar, right? A pine cone.

[00:37:57]>> In English, we also called a a pine cone a pineapple because it was like a fruit on a pine tree or the closest thing it had to a fruit. And then in the age of colonization of the Caribbean in the 1660s when English and Spanish people encountered these spiky fruits, they thought they looked like big pine cones, but um and they they just compared them to that. And so peninsular Spanish uses pina for pineapples and I I believe other regions of Spanish as well which is why you have like the pina colada drink but a lot of other Spanish speakers use ananas >> and pinata. How does that get its name?

[00:38:35]>> Yes. Pinata is it also is from the Latin pa meaning pine cone. Um but in Mexican Spanish piñata meant jug or pot probably based on the shape of it. I thought it was going to be Oh, because it dangles or something like that.

[00:38:53]>> Yeah.

[00:38:53]>> Again, we don't really have the piñata thing over here in Europe. One more.

[00:38:58]Bonanza. There's a bonanza.

[00:39:00]>> Nice frontier style word. Yeah. Bonanza.

[00:39:05]Spanish word for like some good weather or or prosperity from the the Latin bonus from which we get bonus. I've already told you this, but I realized it during the um the Winter Olympics because I was watching the French coverage with my wife that in French and it's obviously it comes from Latin as well as bonus bonus. They have malus as well for when you have points deducted, you know, like if you fall over while you're ice skating. Like a really good move, you get extra points. That's your bonus. But if you fall over, they take some points off you. And that's a maluse, which I think we could do with.

[00:39:43]That's a good word. Why don't we >> That's a good word. We should absolutely do that.

[00:39:47]>> A surprising word that I did not know was introduced to English via Spanish is the word demarcation.

[00:39:53]>> Oh, >> yeah. I mean, you would think that I was just not expecting those syllables out of your mouth at the end of that sentence at all. You could have given me my entire lifetime. I would have never got to demarcation. Uh, go on. So yes, it is just it is also just a a Latin derived word that it sounds like. But we got it and we wouldn't be using this word if not for in 1737 we adopted the Spanish line de Marcassion or the or the Portuguese version of that word which was the line laid down by Pope Alexander V 6th on May 4th in 1493 that divided as we have mentioned the new world between Spain and Portugal. That was the original line of demarcation.

[00:40:38]>> Fantastic.

[00:40:38]>> I forgot to bring this up earlier.

[00:40:40]>> Can we dance over to a few few dancers because we do have quite a few dancers that have got Spanish names and they're usually from Latin America, from the Caribbean, aren't they? Salsa, which just means source. That's a weirdly modern name because it's weirdly modern dance from the 1970s. Presumably just called cuz it's sort of saucy, a bit spicy.

[00:41:06]And the dance must go back much further.

[00:41:08]But the name for it, >> right? Salsa just >> 1970s >> salted, right?

[00:41:12]>> Yeah, exactly. It's related to all those where it's like salary that we like to point out, you know, it all just means salt. Getting paid in salt or or whatever. Uh yeah, precisely. And salad.

[00:41:23]Salad was originally salted something, you know, salted meats. It could be salted meats, it could be salted anything. So yeah, salad, sauce, salsa, salt, all related words. another dance which I spent like a day trying to understand this but because I put it in in one of my books but I had to wrap my head around flamingo and therefore I had to wrap my head around flamnco. Both of them in Spanish and Portuguese mean flamecoled from the Spanish flamma. But whether flamingo is a relative of the dance called flamco or not is unclear.

[00:42:00]Both of them contain flashy fiery things like the flamingo flamingo is pink and red and then the flamingo dance is it's flashy. The the clothing that goes with it looks very flashy and splashy and beautiful. Um in Spanish though the name of the dance was also once the dean meaning a person from Flanders as well as a word for the dances performed by Romani people in Andalucia. And the reasoning is super weird and confusing.

[00:42:29]Well, because because Yeah. So, it's it's equivalent to the word Flemish, isn't it? Flamco.

[00:42:34]I think you can tell me if I'm wrong about this, but you know how travelers tend to get called in localities by a distant the name of a of people from a distant locality. I mean, it's why we have sort of Romany as a name. Yes. Um, gypsy as well means people from Egypt >> essentially. Um, and I thought maybe and I I think I read that the reason they were called Flemish was just Flanders was somewhere somewhere far away. Um, the Spanish did control Flanders as well. It was part of their their empire at a time. They have perhaps been conflated because both cultures were associated by the Spanish with dancing and colorful clothes, though they were very different, or because the Spanish used words pertaining to Flemish people as just that catch-all for foreigners.

[00:43:24]As you said, >> flamco is one of those words the more you research it, the less you think you know about it.

[00:43:30]>> Oh, it's it's terrible. I I like writing a paragraph reading that bit of your book clarity.

[00:43:38]It's only like five sentences long and I was like I don't know how to shrug this in the right direction.

[00:43:45]But I definitely should have mentioned that when I was talking about, you know, cultural words from the Iberian Peninsula that entered enter entered English that way because the the rest of the dancers are all from the other side of the Atlantic like tango which is from Argentinian Spanish but originally the name of like a an African South American drum dance because you obviously have this coming together of of African cultures from you know enslaved people who had taken to the Americas and the Spanish people of course descendants of the Spanish people who arrived there. Uh Ramba another one as well Cuban Spanish means party or spree but sort of further ethmology uncertain thought to maybe be related to the word rhombus. Rhombus which is kind of >> weird.

[00:44:40]>> I kind of like that though.

[00:44:41]>> And then you got the mambber. We get it from Spanish, but it comes from Haitian cra. But Haiti is only sort of half of the island of Hispania. I think the island's called Hispania. Hispanola.

[00:44:53]Hispanola. The other half of it is the Dominican Republic, which is traditionally Spanish, whereas Haiti is traditionally French. Um, well, I say traditionally in European eyes anyway.

[00:45:05]But Mambbo is originally a you know a sort of according to the OED a voodoo ritual dance or voodoo priestess. I quote the OED there rather than put that in my own words because we have a history of getting these traditions wrong.

[00:45:21]>> Merang is also from Haitian and Dominican Creole. It means a mixture and uh it's also related to the word meringue like the sweet dessert. Uh, it's a little unclear about why the dance came to be called that, but I mean it makes sense to me.

[00:45:37]>> I wonder if it's related to like melon then because you can imagine the R and the L sounds swapping around like they do between languages, can't you?

[00:45:46]>> Melon becomes merge.

[00:45:48]>> I'm done with dancers. I don't know that many.

[00:45:50]>> Excellent.

[00:45:51]>> Dancers.

[00:45:53]Are we dancing towards the end of this episode?

[00:45:55]>> I think we are dancing toward the end of this episode. It's been It has been >> Lambara. Oh no. knows that one. Should I have looked up Lambarda? Oh, never mind.

[00:46:03]Forget it. Forget I said it.

[00:46:05]>> We've we've danced all over English topical areas in which Spanish has influenced us. There there is a great deal more though and I'm sure uh I would love to learn about more from people who are watching this.

[00:46:17]>> Yeah, thank you very much for watching.

[00:46:18]We do welcome your comments and extra information. So do leave it below if you're watching this on YouTube. If you're listening, then head over to YouTube and and find the video there. I always put a link to the video version of the podcast in the show notes in the podcast. So, you know, indulge me this time because I'm not sure if anyone's ever clicked that link, but but the link is there. The link is there. But for now, let's say um aa legoh.

[00:46:46]See you later.

[00:46:46]>> We'll see you next time on Words Unraveled.