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This is a list of Spanish words of uncertain origin. Some of these words existed in Latin and/or Ancient Greek , but are thought by some scholars to ultimately come from some other source. Many of these words have alternate etymologies and may also appear on a list of Spanish words from a different language .
Because Spanish is a Romance language (which means it evolved from Latin), many of its words are either inherited from Latin or derive from Latin words. Although English is a Germanic language , it, too, incorporates thousands of Latinate words that are related to words in Spanish. [ 3 ]
Teherán = Tehran (تهران Tehrân, Iranian capital), from Persian words "Tah" meaning "end or bottom" and "Rân" meaning "[mountain] slope"—literally, bottom of the mountain slope. tulipán = tulip, from Persian دلبند dulband Band = To close, To tie.
from Spanish, a type of spicy chilli named after Jalapa de Enríquez, a town in Mexico, and the capital of the state of Veracruz jerky via Spanish charqui, from Quechua ch'arki, "dried flesh" junta from Spanish junta literally "joint"; a board of joint administration; sometimes used to refer to military officers command in a coup d'état. As an ...
Many grammars of Spanish suggest that nouns ending in -a are feminine, [14] [15] but there is no requirement that Spanish nouns ending in -a be feminine. [10] Thus, grammars that pose such a requirement also typically include a long list of exceptions, such as el alerta 'alert', el bocata 'sandwich', el caza 'fighter plane', and many others.
The Spanish and Portuguese termination -o usually denotes the masculine, and is normally changed to feminine by dropping the -o and adding -a. The plural forms are usually -os and -as respectively. Adjectives ending in -ish can be used as collective demonyms (e.g. "the English", "the
This word ending—thought to be difficult for Spanish speakers to pronounce at the time—evolved in Spanish into a "-te" ending (e.g. axolotl = ajolote). As a rule of thumb, a Spanish word for an animal, plant, food or home appliance widely used in Mexico and ending in "-te" is highly likely to have a Nahuatl origin.
Words of Germanic origin are common in all varieties of Spanish. The modern words for the cardinal directions (norte, este, sur, oeste), for example, are all taken from Germanic words (compare north, east, south and west in Modern English), after the contact with Atlantic sailors. These words did not exist in Spanish prior to the 15th century.