Talk:rubio

Semantic shift towards blond hair in Spanish

Something I've wondered about for a very long time ... do we know what semantic shift was involved in Spanish? Did the word once include red-haired people too? I could see how the word for red, being shorter than the word for yellow, might be a convenient term to use for light hair colors in general, and then, because blond hair is more common than red hair, it eventually came to mean blond hair exclusively. (Just as how in English we don't say "orange-haired", and we need a longer phrase like "dyed crimson red" when a cardinal red color is meant.) That seems the most likely theory to me. But it's also occurred to me that it might have referred to skin tone originally, since people with blond hair tend to have redder skin tones than those with darker shades of hair. Old literature might help here, just as some Shakespeare plays have "translations" into modern English to show when a word that seems transparent actually had a different meaning 500 years ago. —Soap— 09:32, 25 March 2023 (UTC)