I’ve been asked for help in tracing the etymology of the Spanish word chedrón by Antonio from Canada.

The Spanish-speaking grandmothor of one of Antonio’s acquaintances used to use the word chedrón to refer to the colour of certain things. The problem is that she used the word quite inconsistently to refer to different shades of red, brown, pink, etc.

Antonino tried looking for chedrón, cheddrón, shedrón, chedron, cheddron, and shedron in the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española (DRAE) and the closest spelling he found was cedrón, but that refers to a plant (not a colour) and the plant is green anyway.

On the PROZ website there was a discussion about how to translate the word into English and the answer was “cedar red”.

A Google search for the word and variant spellings revealed some pictures of objects which, for the most part, are darker shades of red or brown.

Antonio hasn’t found an authoritative spelling or definition for the word chedrón, but the Google searches seem to indicate that the word is actually used at least by some Spanish speakers, even if inconsistently.

The question is, do any Romance languages have a word that sounds anything like chedrón to signify a colour as described above? If no Romance languages have a similar word, do any other languages?

He’s not so much concerned about what chedrón looks like, but where the word comes from and how it is spelt in whichever language Spanish borrowed it from.

This is a guest post from James P in Chile:

Two things have made me think about “vocabulary worlds” recently: reading past papers for the DELE exam and picking up a José Donoso novel (Coronación) from the library.

The vocab section of the DELE exam is going to be rather a matter of chance as significant proportions of the vocab that is used on a daily basis in Latin America – at least in Chile and on Colombian radio which are my two main sources of spoken LA Spanish – are bound to be different from the vocab used in Spain. That is certainly true of British and US English (“I like your bangs”, “Do you have any spackle?). This, rather than my joking references before, is the more substantial problem with the DELE vocab test, at least for those of us who take it as speakers of LA Spanish: even when the words might be understood by a cultured Chilean or Guatemalan, they are not used much over here as compared to Spain and so we are much less likely to have heard them, even if our total vocabulary is larger than a learner in Madrid or Seville.

José Donoso, in common with a number of other Chilean writers of the second half of the 20th Century, spent a number of years living outside of Chile (in his case in Mexico, Spain and the USA). His diction (choice of vocab) is very unusual (one of my Chilean friends says that he makes up words!). Every author has a range of words they use commonly, but for me it seems that Donoso overlaps much less with my vocab than for example García Márquez, or Roberto Ampuero. Before I get round to Coronacíon I’m reading Pérez-Reverte’s El pintor de Batallas, which also has a different vocab world, one that is new enough for me to learn new words (such as estrambótico and un chasquido), but not so alien I want to give up (which is what happened last time with Donoso when I tried to read Casa de campo about a year ago).

Can others give examples of this phenomena of different “vocab worlds”, either with specific authors or with national forms of a language which is spoken in different countries?

Today we have a guest post from James P. in Chile.

I am preparing for the advanced DELE exam (just as it will be useful to have a piece of paper to say I can speak Spanish … such is life). I won’t go into how odd it is (muy suyo), but one thing that is very noticeable is that the “vocab” section is very strongly focused on Peninsular Spanish, which makes it almost impossible for all the other Spanish learners. This puts it’s standing as a world level qualification somewhat in question (even native speakers here can’t pass that section).

Let me illustrate with Chilean Spanish. If someone responds to your question about how the party was by saying “bacán won; la pasamo la raja. Había harta mina ¿cachai? Puro carreteando tóo el rato, won.” Is that good or bad? Do you have any idea what they just said to you?

Anyway, it set me thinking about languages with two (or more) “centers” (there is a proper term for this and I can’t remember it at the moment). English is the same: standard UK English is not “better” than standard USA English: there are two norms.

Are there other examples of languages with two or more “standard norms”?