aliso

Forms

aliso m (plural alisos)^[1] Old and classical spellings include alyso, alisio and alizo.^[2] In the Libro de buen amor the word rhymes with paraíso, so the ⟨s⟩ was voiced /z/ in Old Spanish, as the Mirandese form of the word confirms.^[3]

Etymology

The origin of the word for the alder is disputed.^[3][4][5] For Kluge and Gamillscheg it is from Gothic *alisa (“alder”), the Gothic counterpart of German Erle, Old High German erila and English alder.^[3] The DLE gives this etymology with a “perhaps” and compares Elsbeere, and Wiktionary calls it probable.^[5][1]

Corominas rejects it: this would be the only Spanish tree name of Germanic origin, and both the place of the stress and the vowels are hard to explain from Gothic.^[3] The alder also has pre-Roman names elsewhere: Portuguese amieiro in the west of the Peninsula, and Catalan vern in the east, a word shared with Occitan.^[3] Following Jud, he takes the word for a pre-Roman one, like its only sure relative, Basque haltz or altza; the root ⟨alis-⟩ appears in pre-Roman place names of Gaul and in the ancient name of the river Eslonza in León.^[3] Hubschmid saw in it a pre-Celtic Indo-European word related to Latin alnus (“alder”), and Corominas compares Ancient Macedonian ἄλιζα (áliza, “white poplar”) and similar words in Baltic and Slavic, which point to an early Indo-European people of the Peninsula rather than to the Celts.^[3] His shorter dictionary calls the word probably pre-Roman, apparently from a pre-Celtic Indo-European language.^[4] García de Diego starts from a Celtic *alisia.^[6]

Earliest recorded meaning

Juan Ruiz's Libro de buen amor (1330–1343, in a copy of about 1415) is the first record of the word in a Spanish text: por pecado del mundo, que es sonbra de aliso “for the sake of the world, which is but the shade of an alder”.^[7][3][2] The sense is the tree.^[2][8] A Latin charter of 947 from Ardón, León, already has the plural alisis “alder groves”, and the word is a place name in a Sahagún document of 976.^[2][3][9]

Semantic evolution

The word has kept its sense, the alder of riverbanks: Gabriel Alonso de Herrera (1513) says alders grow near water, and Montemayor's Diana (1559) seeks the shade of alders for the afternoon heat.^[7][2] In the Americas Fernández de Oviedo found that most trees around Quito were alisos, and the name passed to the native species: Alnus ferruginea in Argentina and Alnus mexicana in Mexico.^[7][10][11]

Terreros (1786) notes that in Asturias and León the tree was called humero for the smoke of its wood.^[12] The Academy's dictionaries from 1817 to 1869 equated it with abedul “birch”, and gave a full description of the alder only in 1884.^[13][14][15] Corominas notes that in Cercedilla the name also applies to the rowan, a quite different tree.^[3]

Timeline

• 947 – the Latin plural alisis in a charter from Ardón, León.^[2]
• 976 – Aliso as a place name in a Sahagún document.^[3][9]
• 1330–1343 – Juan Ruiz uses aliso in the Libro de buen amor.^[7][4]
• c. 1443 – Rodríguez del Padrón has a lone alder by a spring.^[2]
• 1535–1557 – Fernández de Oviedo describes the alders of Quito.^[7]
• 1770 – the Academy defines the tree and a plant of the same name.^[16]
• 1786 – Terreros records the Asturian and Leonese name humero.^[12]
• 1884 – the Academy describes it as a tree of the birch family.^[15]

Meanings

Noun

1. alder: a tree of the birch family, about ten metres tall, with a rounded crown, slightly sticky leaves and small reddish fruits, common along rivers.^[5][1][17]
2. Alder wood, used for musical instruments and other objects.^[5][18]
3. aliso negro: the alder buckthorn (arraclán).^[5]

Word family

• aliseda
• alisal

Related words

• Basque haltz
• Latin alnus

Usage notes

A different word spelt aliso, a name of the horehound (marrubio), is from Latin alysson, from Ancient Greek ἄλυσσον (álysson), a plant thought to cure madness.^[5][19][20] Corominas notes that Laguna used it as a learned word and that it must be kept apart from the tree name.^[3]

References

1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g Real Academia Española (2021–), Tesoro de los diccionarios históricos de la lengua española (TDHLE): Diccionario histórico (1933–1936), its unpublished slips, Diccionario histórico (1960–1996), DHECan, DHECR, DHEVen, https://www.rae.es/tdhle, p. s.v. aliso
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 1, 175
4. ^ a b c Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. aliso
5. ^ a b c d e f Real Academia Española; Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2014–), Diccionario de la lengua española, 23rd ed., online version 23.8, https://dle.rae.es, p. s.v. aliso
6. ^ García de Diego, Vicente (1985), Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico, 2nd ed., Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (1st ed. 1954)
7. ^ a b c d e Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. aliso
8. ^ Alonso Pedraz, Martín (1986), Diccionario medieval español: desde las Glosas Emilianenses y Silenses (s. X) hasta el siglo XV, 2 vols., Salamanca: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca
9. ^ a b Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. aliso
10. ^ Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies
11. ^ Santamaría, Francisco J. (1942), Diccionario general de americanismos, 3 vols., México: Pedro Robredo
12. ^ a b Terreros y Pando, Esteban de (1786–1793), Diccionario castellano con las voces de ciencias y artes y sus correspondientes de las tres lenguas francesa, latina e italiana, 4 vols., Madrid: Viuda de Ibarra
13. ^ Real Academia Española (1817), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 5th ed., Madrid: Imprenta Real
14. ^ Real Academia Española (1843), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 9th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Francisco María Fernández
15. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies)
16. ^ Real Academia Española (1770), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 2nd ed., vol. I: A–B, Madrid: Joachín Ibarra
17. ^ Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos
18. ^ Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial
19. ^ Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
20. ^ Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010), Etymological Dictionary of Greek, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10, Leiden; Boston: Brill