Nice one. Also a good amount of time, you still have a moment to think and if you are quick you can guess a couple, but you certainly can't rattle off all 50 in that time!
The name "California" derives from a fictional place in a Spanish chivalry novel from the 16th century, a kind of terrestrial paradise, ruled by the warrior queen Calafia.
It's well known in California's first capital, Loreto, BCS, MX that the novel mungomatic mentions ("Las sergas (adventures) de Esplandián" by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, around 1500) is the source of the name, California.
There's a spectacular mural here in city hall of her. Also used to be a mural in a museum in Sacramento that's now in Mark Hopkins hotel in SF. And for Disneyland Whoopi Goldberg narrated a short Disney movie about it that I cannot find anywhere.
I keep reading that the author came up with the name Calafia by feminizing the arabic word, caliph. So "female religious leader" could be the word origin.
From what I've heard the name of Queen Calafia comes from the Arabic work Khalifa meaning successor, ruler, or leader, basically meaning California's origin comes from the Khalifa.
The state's name appears to originate from an earlier Spanish name, Arizonac, derived from the O'odham name alĭ ṣonak, meaning "small spring", which initially applied only to an area near the silver mining camp of Planchas de Plata, Sonora. I always thought that it was Spanish.
"Colorado" means red, not colo(u)red. As in "chile colorado", red chile. The Spanish word/phrase for colo(u)red is "de color". ¿Quiere la de color o la de blanco y negro? Do you want the colored one or the black-and-white one?
"California" was the name of a fictional island nation in an old Spanish novel published around 1510: Las sergas de Esplandían. The book was apparently popular when Spaniards first reached Baja California in the 1530s. They landed near the southern tip and assumed it was a large island rather than a peninsula, so they named it after the fictional island in the book.
The fictional island in the novel was itself named after its fictional ruler: Queen Calafia. It's likely that the author was inspired by the word "caliph" or the Arabic name "Khalifa" when naming Queen Calafia.
My understanding is that etymologically "colorado" and "colorido" have similar origins and obviously both mean "coloured", but "colorado" has come to mean "coloured red" specifically - as marlene57 says, often meaning "blushing", while "colorido" means "colourful", and the simple word for "red" is "rojo".
No, it doesn't. "Colorido" means colored-in, "de color" or "de colores" means colored-as-opposed-to-grayscale. It's a false friend. And before anyone asks, there are multiple words for red in Spanish, so yes, "colorado" means red and "rojo" also means red.
I thought so too, but I looked it up and according to my source the Spanish explorers heard the name used by the Native American Caddo people which was "Teyshas" meaning friends or allies. They recorded it as Tejas or Teyas. (statesymbolsusa.org)
The naturalist John J. Audubon referred to the area in the 1830s as "The Texas," plural. It was thought at that time, to mean The Yews (as in yew trees), derived from the Taxus genus, which grew abundantly in what we now call Texas.
And Colorado is not red. Colorado took its name from the river, which got its name from the red silt it carried. Similarly Nevada took its name from the Sierra Nevadas, which are a snow-covered sierra.
California takes its name from Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián), a popular XVI century chivalric romance by Garci [sic] Rodríguez de Montalvo. The Quijote, as an aside, was inspired by and in many ways engages the Sergas and the widely popular genre.
Per Wikipedia, the name of the queen of California, Calafia may come from the "Arabic word khalifa (religious state leader) which is known as caliph in English and califa in Spanish". It is known that Hernan Cortes and some of his men, who were the first Europeans to arrive in the southern part what became New Spain's province of California (now Baja California Sur) in 1534 and 1535, had read the book.
Also from Wikipedia,
It is not known who first named the area California .... the name California also appears in a 1542 journal kept by explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who used it casually, as if it were already popular.
Oregon could possibly come from Spanish, or it might come from the French word for Hurricane, or it could come from Native Americans. Nobody is really sure, and for that reason I've decided to exclude it from this quiz. While Texas does come from Tejas, Tejas is a Spanish spelling of a Caddo word, so the name does not originally come from Spanish. Arizona is a very similar situation, coming from the O'odham name for the region. New Mexico, for one has the English word "New" in it, and "Mexico" originally comes from Nahuatl, not Spanish.
There's a spectacular mural here in city hall of her. Also used to be a mural in a museum in Sacramento that's now in Mark Hopkins hotel in SF. And for Disneyland Whoopi Goldberg narrated a short Disney movie about it that I cannot find anywhere.
I keep reading that the author came up with the name Calafia by feminizing the arabic word, caliph. So "female religious leader" could be the word origin.
"California" was the name of a fictional island nation in an old Spanish novel published around 1510: Las sergas de Esplandían. The book was apparently popular when Spaniards first reached Baja California in the 1530s. They landed near the southern tip and assumed it was a large island rather than a peninsula, so they named it after the fictional island in the book.
The fictional island in the novel was itself named after its fictional ruler: Queen Calafia. It's likely that the author was inspired by the word "caliph" or the Arabic name "Khalifa" when naming Queen Calafia.
Coloreado means colored.
Colorido means colorful.
https://dle.rae.es/colorado
https://dle.rae.es/colorear?m=form
https://dle.rae.es/colorido
Per Wikipedia, the name of the queen of California, Calafia may come from the "Arabic word khalifa (religious state leader) which is known as caliph in English and califa in Spanish". It is known that Hernan Cortes and some of his men, who were the first Europeans to arrive in the southern part what became New Spain's province of California (now Baja California Sur) in 1534 and 1535, had read the book.
Also from Wikipedia,
It is not known who first named the area California .... the name California also appears in a 1542 journal kept by explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who used it casually, as if it were already popular.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_name_California
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calafia