Some friends of mine live near a Las Posas Road in San Diego County. We were discussing what it might mean, so I looked it up, and the best I got was “la posas”, which apparently means backside (not of a building), butt (not of a joke), ass (not a donkey). I found there was a land grant Rancho Las Posas, but I can’t find any explanation of why they called it that. I also found reference to a Las Positas Elementary School, which is amusing and a bit creepy.
So were the ranch, road, and school really named for … rear ends? If so, whose? Is “la posas” a common word in Spanish?
In Spanish geographical nomenclature a distinction is made between posa, “puddle,” and poso, “well.” In Spanish California, however, either word (also spelled posa and *poso) *was apparently used indiscriminately for “water hole” in the widest sense.
Yeah on the spelling Ají, but Joya has a y and La Jolla does mean “jewel (spelled by someone who couldn’t spell/whose spelling didn’t match current norms)”. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that our current spelling isn’t necessarily the way someone would have spelled in the 17th Century, specially someone whose education had been centered on “spelling properly in Latin” or on “how to grab a sword properly”.
Posa could also be an apocope for posada, “inn, road stop”, but given cases such as the aforementioned La Jolla I’m happy with the explanation of it meaning wells.
ETA: Ají, I wanted to sent you a piece on the confusion caused by phonetic spelling in a modern classroom in Spain, but your email isn’t listed. Mind dropping me a line, as mine is?
This seems to be a good place to pose this slight highjack in the same vein.
I recently purchased a home in the Village of El Palacés, Almeria province, Spain.
Can’t find a rational definition of why you would use the singular article “La” with the (seemingly) plural “Palacés".
Nor can I find a definition that satisfies me for “Palacés”.
Your question is about as clear as mud, bahimes, but my crystal ball will give it a try.
Palacés doesn’t mean anything, so at a guess it’s either somebody’s nickname or a geographic name (we know it’s a geographic name, but it could be something else as well). For every geographic name which makes sense (Traslapuente: “tras el puente”, “beyond the bridge”, “at the other side of the river”) there are thousands which do not (Tudela, Murchante, Arguedas, Corella…) or which require a philologist to decipher (Zaragoza, Pamplona, Cartagena). By the same token, it carries whichever article (or none) whomever invented the word figured was right - in this case the male singular “El” tells me they may have been thinking of Palacés as (for example) a “término” or “lugar”, both of which are m. words meaning “place”.
Ending in an -s doesn’t make something an automatic plural. Our plurals usually end in -s, but it doesn’t work the other way 'round, same as ending in -a doesn’t necessarily make a word be “the f version of an identical word ending in -o” (there are no águilos).
Thanks, Nava, I thought I was clear, but I see I used “La” in stead of “El” at one point.
Anyway, your explanation makes much more sense than any I have come across yet.
What page was that on? I checked that book specifically and couldn’t find anything. Did I forget to look under “P”? It’s possible.
@Nava – La Jolla residents sure claim that jolla in their town name means jewel. However, the more common explanation for the name is it was an Indian word meaning hollow (or just holes), maybe referring to the sea caves that are still a prominent feature there. The aforementioned Gudde favors this origin, and so does Wikipedia. Chamber of commerce type say it means “the jewel” and anyone that says otherwise can go to LA. (A vulgar insult in San Diego.)
I’ve also seen an early Nineteenth Century map of the area with the title *La Hoya *placed about halfway down the descent of Ardath Road to the coast. In this sense it may be referring to the Latin American usage of the word to denote a river drainage, specifically the intermittent creek that ran from the saddle below Mt. Soledad down to La Jolla Shores.
Just chiming in to agree. Margaret Langdon suggested in the 1970s that it was from the Kumeyaay Mat kulaahuuy, with ultimate stress; both the space and the final -a were supplied by the Spanish. It refers to the caves which are a pretty prominent feature of the landscape.
ETA: Both joya and -huuy require Mexican Spanish to have LL & Y as homonyms.
