Language /
Unique names of cities/town/villages in Poland [58]
According to an online Spanish to English translator
aliso means "alder" in English and so I was misinformed by my Mexican friend who'd told me that it meant "little creek" as we mountain biked through the smelly rivulet. I do have a couple examples of unique town names in my area though. Just inland from me is a city that used to be called El Toro which got its name back in the days of Spanish domininion because a bull fell into the new settlement's well and bellowed loudly for three days before finally dying. Back in the 1990's the residents of El Toro voted to change the city's name to Lake Forest. Next to Lake Forest is a city that was founded rather recently but in keeping with the general spirit of town names in Southern California its founders decided to give it a Spanish name, but these founders were not fluent in Spanish and so they named it Mission Viejo, despite the fact that it was not "old", which is what
viejo means, nor did it contain a mission (the nearest one being the celebrated Mission San Juan de Capistrano, of the yearly returning swallows, which is quite a few miles away). Moreover the word
mission is of the feminine gender in Spanish and so for the city's name to be correct it would have to have been named Mission Vieja, but the founders apparently never bothered to confer with anyone who actually knew Spanish and so we have the city of Mission Viejo.
