Cecil’s correspondents Charlie and Linda didn’t mention which Santa Fe they had in mind. There is also a Santa Fe, Argentina, which was originally Santa Fe de Vera Cruz (“Holy Faith of the True Cross”). There are other places named Santa Fe (or Fé): one in Cuba and one in California, for example.
But one other Santa Fe continued to baffle me until I looked it up today: Santa Fé de Bogotá (the full name of Bogotá, Colombia). It got its name from a corruption of the native name (Bacatá), and from Santa Fé (in Granada), the home town of the Spanish conquistador Quesada.
I still have one unanswered question: What’s the difference between Fe and Fé? My Spanish dictionaries list only Fe.
What year was your dictionary printed? Sometimes the “Academia Real” changes the rules. My 1996 Larousse Dictionary has an unaccented “fe”. I think it was once spelled fé, but there was a move to eliminate unnecessary accent marks.
… is that someone took the time to answer this. Aynone with any real interess would have picked up a Spanish-English dictionary and find the answer. So someone took the time to look it up and “waste” a one day answer on such a ridiculously simple answer…
but probably a simple of case of English not using acentuation (as far as I know). So Santa Fé was probably changed to Santa Fe to simplify things… for what I see it is not as people actually know what the name means…
“Fe” doesn’t seem to be a member of a minimal pair (as opposed to, say, “se” and “sŽ”), so whether it’s accented wouldn’t affect the meaning, whatever the Academia’s whims. Certainly in a place name, especially in the diacritically averse United States, it could be unaccented. Similarly, we have San Jose, Calif., but San JosŽ, Costa Rica; there also seem to be two accentless San Joses in the Philippines. Just to be a smartass :D, I always use the accent when referring to the California city.
As for shortenings of long city names, consider El Pueblo de Nuestra Se–ora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula, better known to us today as L.A.
