Homonyms: potatoes and sumos

We've left behind for the moment the current news that has taught us so many words related to the election of a new pontiff . We've confirmed that unwritten tradition that, in the conclave, whoever enters as pope leaves as cardinal. We Spanish speakers also celebrate the fact that Leo XIV speaks Spanish.

Despite everything, I resist turning the page on these voices that have been in the spotlight these past few weeks and that, in a short time, will return, at least for us, to the shadows of the temples .

Today I'm going to take advantage of them to talk about homonymous words and how much information about them we can extract from the Dictionary of the Spanish Language .

Let's start by noting that, although there is only one pope , in the DLE we find—oh, surprise!—no fewer than three popes . Each of them is marked with a superscript, a number placed in the upper right corner: pope 1, pope 2 , and pope 3 .

These superscripts tell us that, although they seem the same, they are three different words .

We are, therefore, faced with three homonymous and homograph words : they are pronounced and written the same, but they have different origins and different meanings, therefore, historically they are different words .

The Pope¹ is the news protagonist of these weeks, the Roman Supreme Pontiff , whose name comes from late Latin and, in this, from the Greek pápas, which means ' priest ', 'bishop' and 'dad'.

The noun papa (papa) is a little closer to home. It originates from the Quechua word papa and refers to the tuber native to the Americas that has become a staple food for humanity.

Thanks to this homonym, one of the cardinals was able to sarcastically answer a reporter who asked him if he looked like a potato : "A French fry, of course," he replied. On the other hand, the etymology of the word " pope " comes from the Latin pappa , meaning "children's food," and thus it passes into our language.

There are also three supreme words in the Dictionary of the Spanish Language . Supreme, from the Latin summus , is the adjective we apply to something we consider to have no superior (thus we say high priest or supreme pontiff ); also to something very great (and we say with great pleasure or extreme impatience ).

This noun is part of the expression a lo maximo 'at most, if at all':

• I'll be away for two days at most. It has nothing to do with sumo, a term of Japanese origin perfectly adapted to our language to refer to the martial art of hand-to-hand combat between opponents, also called sumo , weighing over 100 kg.

On the other hand, Sumo³ is the name of a family of languages ​​originating in Honduras .

In any case, it is advisable not to confuse any of these three sumos with the word zumo , of Arabic origin, and which can be homophonous (that is, it sounds the same) with sumo for those of us who are seseantes, but which in no case is its homograph, because it has a striking zeta.

In all these specialized terms, the compositional element of Greek origin homo- is present, which means 'equal', and which we can also find, for example, in homogeneous , homologate and homosexuality .

The dictionary helps us learn more about homonyms , to better understand our words , to trace their origins and the networks that are woven between them. Come and see how many homonyms there are in the Spanish language .

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