by Jon Martinez Aguirrebeña
Spanish exchange student at JMHS
SOUTHERN COLORADO — If you live at the foot of the Spanish Peaks- or in southern Colorado, you’ve probably noticed the fact that it’s not hard to point out a place whose name is a Spanish word in our map, and you might even know what the vocabulary’s meaning is supposed to be. The reality is, though, that many of these place names are terms that are currently meaningless due to the development of languages through time.
One of the towns that suffers from a current lost-meaning name is La Veta.
For an 1876 Spanish person’s lexicon, ‘a veta’ would mean ‘a vein’, since the town’s mines were considered to be “mineral veins”. Over the centuries however the Spanish language evolved, and with it, the word would change too. Therefore, if La Veta’s name was to get a change to a more contemporary term, it would become La Vena (pronounced vei·nuh)
In the next case, the only difference is the reduction of the original words: if you looked for Alamosa’s name’s meaning in a modern Spanish dictionary, you wouldn’t find an answer. It’s original significance was “cottonwood”, for the cottonwood trees which grow along the Rio Grande and throughout the town. The modern word for that concept in Spanish is “Álamo”, and that would be its new name in case a term modernization happened.
The last name we’re analyzing is Las Animas: it has an interesting origin, given by the river which flows next to the city, the Purgatoire, the french term for “purgatory”. The river was originally called El Río de las Ánimas Perdidas en Purgatorio, “the river of the lost souls in purgatory”, paying tribute to Spanish conquistadores killed in a Native American attack Some French trappers came along later and thought that was too long, so they shortened it to Purgatoire. However, the word ‘Ánimas’ exists no longer in the Spanish vocabulary: we have ‘almas’ instead, which means “souls”. In consequence, if we wanted to update Las Animas’ name, it would probably become “Las Almas”.
It’s a fact that languages evolve over time, generating questions like “would we understand a person who lived 200 years ago if we had a chance to talk to them?”
These places’ names act just like some geological sediments which preserve the different rocks and history over the Earth’s history, making us the witness of the development of the languages we talk.
