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Mexican X Part XVII: Hot Xalapeños
I’ve eaten both Ethiopian and Korean food with jalapeño peppers, so I thought it was time to explore the etymology of this worldwide phenomenon.
“Jalapeño” is short for Spanish “chile jalapeño” or “jalapeño pepper.”
The suffix -eño makes nouns and adjectives out of place names (for example isla, “island” becomes isleño, “islander”). It evolved from -ineus, a Greek and Latin adjectival suffix that indicated material or color. In Vulgar Latin it transformed to -ineu, then -eniu -> -enyo -> eño en Spanish.
As a result, “Jalapeño” (also written “Xalapeño”) is someone or something from the Mexican city of Xalapa, Veracruz.
As I’ve shown previously in this series, “x” in 16th-century Spanish was pronounced [sh] (and was used to represent that sound in Indigenous Mesoamerican words as well).
“J,” which in Medieval Spanish was pronounced like the “z” in “azure,” had also pretty much shifted to [sh] by the Conquest. But the [sh] sound became /x/ (a hard [h] like Scottish “loch”) by the end of the 1500s.
That’s why we don’t say “shalapeño.”
Xalapa is from Nahuatl “xālāpan.” It has three elements:
- xālli -> sand
- ātl -> water
- -pan -> suffix used in place names (“beside”)
