Not very seasonal I know, but it occurred to me today as I was driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, through Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, Santa Maria etc, and then passed an exit for Santa Claus Road.
Surely Santa is the feminine form of “Saint”? Certainly all the place names I can think of with a male name are either San (San Jose, San Fernando etc) or Santo (eg Santo Domingo), while the female ones, eg those named above, are Santa.
So why does the chap with the white beard get “Santa”?
“Santa” is not from a Romance language, in this case, but an Anglo (actually American), corruption of a Germanic word.
The original (for our purposes) is the Dutch Sinter Klaas (Klaas being the nickname of Niklaas). That name came to North America with the Dutch who settled Nieuw Amsterdam and who continued to make up a sizable ethnic minority after it became New York. The name was eventually corrupted in pronunciation among the New Yorkers who absorbed some of the Sinter Klaas Christmas traditions as Santa Claus.
The Dutch sinter is of the same origin as Italian and Spanish san(to) / santa, both originating from Latin sanctus / sancta. But sinter seems like colloquial or dialectal Dutch, since the word for saint in standard Dutch is heilig or sint. When I searched for “sinter” in the Van Dale Woordenboek, it only came up as part of Santa Claus.
and to add something more to tomndebb’s posting, Sinter Klaas itself was a bastardisation od Sint Nicholas, or Sint Niklaas.
This particular saint was living a few centuries ago, in Spain, and he used to give children presents. I think he died on 6th December, and to commemorate that, all kids were given presents on that day.
That tradition still lives on in Belgium and the Netherlands, kids are given presents on 6th December. We do also celebrate Christmas, but then the whole family gets a present, not just the kids.
In some parts of belgium, this day is referred to Sint Maarten, instead of Sint Niklaas.
I have no idea why.
Because Santo Claus would have to wear a silver mask and wrestle Jack Frost before he could deliver presents.
That’d be pretty cool…
The Saint Nicholas referred to as the origin of Santa Claus was Bishop of Myra, a Greek city in what’s now Turkey, and died in 326 AD, on December 6 (a saint’s feast day is normally the date of his death).
Here’s a short biography of him.