In other words, "guacamole" could be translated as "testicle sauce" in exactly the same way "football" could translate to "foot-testicle. 1529), more popularly known as La Malinche la malinte, a Nahua woman from the Mexican Gulf Coast, became known for contributing to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire (15191521), by acting as an interpreter, advisor, and intermediary for the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. Of Hawaii-Manoa there is an exotic tree known as a “dead-rat tree” and people, myself included, are forever looking at it and imagining its fruits as rats hanging by their tails.)īut, except in jest, I don’t think a Nahua would imagine a:huacamo:lli to be anything other than mashed up avocado. Seems to me that contemporary Nahuah get a giggle out of looking up at the fruit hanging in the trees and thinking of them as vegetable testicles. The Spanish loanword aguacate (stress on the ca) is used to refer to “testicle" does huevo. Very conveniently for you, the website I have included as a reference relates to baby names. Frances Karttunen, who has written several books on the Nahuatl language, had this to add: The word "guacamole" is part of Nahuatl as auacamulli, and there's no evidence, past or present, to suggest it was ever used to mean anything but avocados. This may seem to be splitting hairs, but the fact remains that even if pre-Columbian Nahua peoples might have ever had occasion to utter the phrase "testicle sauce," they would likely not have called it "guacamole" instead, they would have used some variant of the more common words cuitlapanaatetl or atetl(testes rocks) and m ōlli or chīllacuēchōlli (sauce). M ōlli is in fact Nahuatl for "sauce," which in a linguistic coincidence sounds much like the Spanish infinitive moler (meaning "to grind"). However, it's not totally accurate to say that "guacamole" means "testicle sauce," because in becoming the Spanish word aguacate (further distorted to avocado in English), the original Nahuatl for "avocado" word lost its second, more vulgate meaning (i.e., testicle). Write Your Name in Runes: Convert Letters to Runic Symbols. Spanish conquerors had a difficult time with the glottals and fricatives of local languages such as Nahuatl, and so over time the names of native flora and fauna became simplified: coyotl became coyote, mizquitl turned into mesquite, and āhuacatl became aguacate but lost its double meaning in the process (and became more of a double entendre).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |