Talk:Chiapas

Wrong etymology

The Spanish entry etymology reads "Named after Cheops, a king of Egypt." That etymology is wrong. The name comes from Nahuatl. --95.20.35.147 11:09, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

I've just removed it. --95.20.35.147 11:21, 1 August 2015 (UTC)

Still the wrong etymology

The etymologies now claim that it comes from an "ancient" "Nahuatl" "city name" meaning "place where the chia grows".

(a) Absolutely nothing about the suffix -pan involves the concept of growth. It just means "on", "over", or "place of..."
(b) Seems like it comes from the first Spanish encomienda in the area (modern Chiapa de Corzo), which was at/near an ancient and medieval city. That city, however, wasn't full of Nahuatl speakers and had a separate local name (Napinaica). The Spanish seem to have used the Nahuatl name of the local people (Chiapanec), although that was based on some other locative, whether a name for their current area or some past homeland before they moved in.
(c) These guys explicitly say that the suffix wasn't -pan but -apan, which we don't have at the moment but the Online Nahuatl Dictionary agrees is an actual thing meaning "river of..." or "on the river named..." Presumably (but not necessarily) that would've been an Aztec name for at least this part of the Grijalva River.

Certainly some of this needs cleaning up, followed by cleaning up the similar mess at the Wiki entry/entries on all this. — LlywelynII 13:26, 30 November 2022 (UTC)