tejón

Forms

tejón m (plural tejones)^[1] Old Spanish wrote texón (Calila e Dimna, Nebrija) and taxón (Alfonso de Palencia).^[2][3] A related type with the ending -ugo is tasugo (perhaps 1251), tessugo (Juan Manuel, c. 1325), taxugo and texugo (glossaries of c. 1400); today tasugo is the commonest form in Burgos, Ávila and Soria, beside tesugo and tajugo, tejugo in Aragon, and taxón or tajón in the Valle de Echo.^[2][4]

Etymology

It is inherited from Old Spanish texón, inherited from Late Latin taxo (“badger”), a Late Latin word of Germanic origin.^[2][4][5][1] The Latin word is recorded only from the 4th century, in Polemius Silvius and in glosses, also as taxus;^[2] Corominas takes it as a loan from West Germanic into Vulgar Latin, to judge by its spread in Romance.^[2] The Germanic word is Old High German dahs and German Dachs, from Proto-Germanic *þahsuz;^[2][6][1] Wiktionary gives the immediate source as Frankish *þahs.^[2][6][1] Gothic does not record the word; there it would have been *þahsus.^[2]

The Proto-Germanic word was traditionally derived from Proto-Indo-European *tetḱ- (“to weave, build”), for the badger's digging of its sett, which would make it a cognate of Latin texō; later scholarship derives it instead from a western European substrate word, comparing Proto-Celtic *taskos.^[1][7]

The same Late Latin word is Catalan teixó, Old French taisson and Italian tasso.^[8][9][2] The form tasugo, with Portuguese texugo, may come from a Gothic diminutive *þahsuks, as Gamillscheg proposed;^[2][4] Corominas finds this likely though not certain, and rejects Rohlfs's and Brüch's view that it is the Latin word with a Castilian suffix -ugo, a suffix even rarer in Spanish than in Germanic.^[2][4]

Earliest recorded meaning

The first record is in Calila e Dimna (1251, known from a copy of about 1400), in the title of a tale Del orebz et del ximio et del texón et de la culebra “Of the goldsmith, the ape, the badger and the snake”.^[2][4][10]

Semantic evolution

The word has always named the badger.^[2] Nebrija glossed texón as “a well-known animal”, Latin meles.^[2][3] The Celestina lists badger fat among the ointments of its go-between, and a treatise on the plague of 1506 prescribes badger's blood.^[10] The Ferrara Bible of 1553 has thasso, probably a Jewish Italianism.^[2]

In the New World Fernández de Oviedo compared the fur of an American animal to the badger's (1526), and tejones are reported in Mexico in 1564.^[10][11] In Mexico the name passed to the raccoon, the coati and other carnivores that resemble one another, and in Ecuador and Bolivia it means the coati.^[12][13][1] The Academy's 1884 dictionary still described the animal by comparison with the fox; the 1899 edition gave its measurements and said it was common in Spain.^[14][15]

Timeline

• 1251 – first record, as texón, in Calila e Dimna.^[2][4][10]
• c. 1325 – the variant tessugo in Juan Manuel.^[2][4]
• c. 1495 – Nebrija: texón, Latin meles.^[3]
• c. 1499–1502 – the Celestina lists badger fat among Celestina's ointments.^[10]
• 1506 – the first CDH hit without a later witness, in a treatise on the plague.^[10]
• 1549 – first record from the Americas in Boyd-Bowman, in Santo Domingo.^[11]
• 1553 – the Ferrara Bible has thasso.^[2]
• 1884 – the Academy derives it from Latin taxonus and German Dachs.^[14]

Meanings

Noun

1. The European badger (Meles meles), a burrowing carnivore with short legs, a long snout and a white head with black stripes.^[5][1]
2. The American badger (Taxidea taxus) and related species.^[16][1]
3. (Mexico) The coati or the raccoon.^[12][1]
4. (Ecuador, Bolivia) The coati.^[13]
5. The fur or skin of the badger.^[17]

Word family

• tejonera

Related words

• tasugo
• Catalan teixó
• German Dachs

Usage notes

A separate word tejón “a piece of unminted gold”, the same as tejo, is formed from tejo with the augmentative suffix -ón.^{[5][1][14][16]} The same formation from teja gives tejón “a large roof tile”, recorded in 1878, and in the Canaries, from 1670, a kind of tile.^[18][19]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Corominas, Joan; Pascual, José A. (1980–1991), Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico, 6 vols., Madrid: Gredos, p. 5, 451
3. ^ 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. tejón
4. ^ a b c d e f g Corominas, Joan (1973), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. tejón
5. ^ a b c 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. tejón
6. ^ a b Köbler, Gerhard (2014), Germanisches Wörterbuch, 5th ed., online, koeblergerhard.de/wikiling
7. ^ Gómez de Silva, Guido (1988), Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua española, México: Fondo de Cultura Económica / El Colegio de México, p. 676
8. ^ Coromines, Joan (1980–2001), Diccionari etimològic i complementari de la llengua catalana, 10 vols., Barcelona: Curial / La Caixa (online ed., Institut d'Estudis Catalans 2024), p. 8, 378
9. ^ Wikcionario (Spanish Wiktionary), es.wiktionary.org
10. ^ a b c d e f Real Academia Española (2013–), Corpus del Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (CDH), version 3.1, https://apps.rae.es/CNDHE, p. s.v. tejón
11. ^ a b 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. tejón
12. ^ a b Santamaría, Francisco J. (1959), Diccionario de mejicanismos, México: Porrúa, p. 1023
13. ^ a b Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (2010), Diccionario de americanismos, Lima: Santillana; online at https://www.asale.org/damer, p. s.v. tejón
14. ^ a b c Real Academia Española (1884), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 12th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de D. Gregorio Hernando (the first Academy edition with etymologies), p. 1013
15. ^ Real Academia Española (1899), Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 13th ed., Madrid: Imprenta de los Sres. Hernando y Compañía, p. 949
16. ^ a b Moliner, María (2007), Diccionario de uso del español, 3rd ed., Madrid: Gredos, p. s.v. tejón
17. ^ Battaner Arias, Paz (dir.) (2017), Diccionario general de la lengua española VOX, Barcelona: Larousse Editorial, p. s.v. tejón
18. ^ Real Academia Española (2013–), Diccionario histórico de la lengua española (DHLE), https://www.rae.es/dhle, p. s.v. tejón
19. ^ 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. tejón