Asturianos
ZamoraCastilla y León
Substantivised plural ethnonym: Asturianos, from the Latin gentilic asturianus ('belonging to the Astures', the pre-Roman people of the northwestern peninsula). A pure repopulation toponym: the village name is the gentilic of those who founded it.
Evolution of the name
- Astures pre-Roman ethnonym before the 2nd century BC
- Asturanus → asturianus Latin → Romance 1st — 10th centuries
- Asturianos medieval Castilian from the 10th century
Reflections, to the letter
The village name is exactly the gentilic of those who founded it. In the 10th century, when the Asturian-Leonese kingdom organised the colonisation of the lands south of the Duero, whole families from the Asturian mountains descended to Sanabria to plough lands emptied during a century of war. They named their settlement without metaphor: Asturianos, people from Asturias. Eleven centuries later, the pilgrim entering by the main street walks the same soil those settlers broke with the plough, and the name of the place still says where they came from.
Glossary
- Attested
- A form or word documented in writing in historical sources; opposed to "reconstructed" (forms proposed by comparative inference but not actually documented).
- Ethnonym
- A name designating a people or an ethnic group: Astures, Vaccei, Cantabri, Gallaeci. When an ethnonym becomes fixed as a place name (Asturianos, Galicia, Cantabria), it commemorates the presence or origin of the group.
- Gentilic / demonym
- A word indicating geographical origin of a person (Madrilenian, Leonese, Galician, Riojan…). When applied to a group rather than an individual, it approaches the ethnonym.
- Pre-Roman
- Prior to the Romanisation of the Iberian peninsula (3rd century BC); applied to toponyms, linguistic roots and populations.
- Pressura
- A formal taking of abandoned or ownerless land, practised in the early-medieval Christian kingdoms to resettle frontier regions. Whoever ploughed and cultivated it for a set period acquired rights over it.
- Repopulation
- A medieval process by which the Christian kingdoms of the northern Iberian peninsula resettled territories reconquered from al-Andalus. Generates a whole layer of repopulation toponyms: Asturianos, Bercianos, Castellanos, Gallegos, Navarrete.
- Substantivised plural
- A device by which an adjective or noun in the plural is fixed as a place name without the noun that governed it: asturianos = '[place of the] Asturians', castellanos = '[place of the] Castilians'. Frequent in medieval repopulation.
Sources
- Pascual Riesco Chueca — Toponimia mayor de la provincia de Zamora
- García de Cortázar, J.A. — La sociedad rural en la España medieval
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