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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”)
It’s often analyzed as a compound of xālli and āpan (beside the water): “sand beside the water” (spring, river, lagoon, etc.) or “at the water’s edge amidst the sand.” But it’s more likely a combination of xālātl (“sandy water,” i.e. “water flowing through sandy terrain”) and -pan: “place where water flows through sand.”
A few early dictionaries define “xālātl” as “weak fountainhead,” and indeed, chronicles of the time claim that the city arose in the 13th century when Toltec and Totonac settlements around three nearby springs combined into a single community.
An oasis where the dry tropical zone of the coast meets the humid temperate zone of the central plateau. The perfect birthplace for a pepper that would spread throughout Mexico and then the entire world.
