canción

Forms

canción f (plural canciones)^[1] Old Spanish texts spell it cancion and cançion.^[2]

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin cantiō (“singing, song”), first recorded in Berceo between 1220 and 1250.^[3][4][5] Wiktionary calls it a semi-learned form: an inherited Old Spanish cançón was remade on the model of the learned nouns in -ción.^[1] The Latin word also meant “incantation, spell”.^[4][6]

The Latin noun is formed from canō (“to sing”) with the suffix -tiō.^[7][1][8] The verb goes back through Proto-Italic *kanō to Proto-Indo-European *keh₂n- (“to sing”).^[1][9]

The same Latin word gave Portuguese canção, Catalan cançó, French chanson and Italian canzone.^[1][10] The Catalan word, like the Spanish, is taken from Latin, and the French one, first chançun in 1080, is inherited.^[11][12]

Earliest recorded meaning

Berceo's poems have the plural canciones for hymns and religious songs: in the Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos (c. 1236, in a late 13th-century copy) the processions bringing a saint's body sing laudes and say canciones.^[13][14] The Libro de Alexandre (1240–1250) has the crowds receive Alexander con diversas cançiones “with various songs”.^[13] About 1300 the charter of Albarracín fines anyone who composes a mala cancion, an insulting song, ten maravedís.^[13]

Semantic evolution

Nebrija (c. 1495) gave Latin cantus, cantio, cantilena and carmen as its equivalents.^[5] Autoridades (1729) defined it as verse made to be sung, which in its day was usually called tono, and also as the poetic form of equal stanzas, which it traced to the Provençal and Tuscan poets.^[15] The Italian-style canción, which Moliner traces to Petrarch, of long stanzas of hendecasyllables and heptasyllables, is still a sense of its own in the dictionaries.^[4][16]

In colloquial use canción also means a tiresome repetition, as in la misma canción, and in the plural an unfounded excuse: no me vengas con canciones.^[4][16] In the Dominican Republic and Chile canción nacional is the national anthem.^[17]

Timeline

• 1220–1250 – first records, in Berceo.^[3][13]
• 1240–1250 – the Libro de Alexandre has cançiones for the songs of a crowd.^[13]
• 1330 – chanzoneta “couplet”, from French, appears beside it.^[3]
• 2nd quarter of the 15th century – first record of the derivative cancionero.^[3]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija gives Latin cantus and cantio.^[5]
• 1729 – Autoridades describes the poetic canción of the Provençal and Tuscan poets.^[15]
• 1792 – the first record from the Americas, in Lima.^[18]

Meanings

Noun

1. A song: a composition that is sung, or written so that it can be set to music.^[4][1]
2. The music to which a song is sung.^[4]
3. (colloquial) Something said over and over in a tiresome way: Ya está otra vez con su canción.^[4][16]
4. (colloquial, usually in the plural) A groundless piece of news or a pretext.^[4]
5. (metrics) A lyric poem in the Italian manner, in long stanzas of hendecasyllables and heptasyllables with a shorter last one.^[4]
6. (metrics) An old poetic composition of various kinds, many of them like the ode.^[4]

Word family

• cancionero

Related words

• cantar
• canto
• chanzoneta
• Latin cantiō
• French chanson

Usage notes

Canción de cuna is a lullaby, and canción de gesta an epic poem, also called cantar de gesta.^[4]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ Diccionario del Español Medieval electrónico (DEMel), data publication 2026 (CC BY-SA), Universität Rostock, p. s.v. canción
3. ^ a b c d Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. canción
4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k 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. canción
5. ^ a b c Lleal, Coloma (dir.), DICCA-XV: Diccionario del castellano del siglo XV en la Corona de Aragón, Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, Grup d'Estudis d'Història de la Llengua (GHCL), https://ghcl.ub.edu/diccaxv, p. s.v. canción
6. ^ Lewis, Charlton T.; Short, Charles (1879), A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
7. ^ Glare, P. G. W., ed. (2012), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
8. ^ Bénaben, Michel (2000), Dictionnaire étymologique de l'espagnol, Paris: Ellipses
9. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
10. ^ Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
11. ^ Alcover, Antoni M.; Moll, Francesc de B. (1930–1962), Diccionari català-valencià-balear, 10 vols., Palma de Mallorca: Moll, p. s.v. cançó
12. ^ Rey, Alain, ed. (1992), Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Paris: Le Robert
13. ^ 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. canción
14. ^ 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, p. 603
15. ^ a b Real Academia Española (1726–1739), Diccionario de la lengua castellana (Diccionario de Autoridades), 6 vols., Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, p. s.v. canción
16. ^ a b c Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. canción
17. ^ Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. canción
18. ^ Boyd-Bowman, Peter (2003), Léxico hispanoamericano 1493–1993, ed. Ray Harris-Northall and John J. Nitti, New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, p. s.v. canción