Talk:El Camino Real

Actual translation[edit]

Babelfish translates 'el camino real' as 'the dirt road' but no reverse-translation of 'dirt' or 'dirty' will produce real, and translating 'real' by itself or in other phrases leaves the word as 'real' . Any idea why it's ignorant of this term?

El camino real is "the royal road". Simply refers to the legal ownership or jurisdiction of any given road. "King's highway" is "carretera del rey" in Spanish. The latter was a latter-day embellishment. Perhaps the above-mentioned Babelfish is making a tongue-in-cheek translation or DISembellishment. Tmangray 17:37, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

A major contribution of 10 Jan 2018 (@User:ILoveCaracas) says tht in the Spanish Colonial period all roads usable by carts were so termed. I’m reminded of the English term “King’s Highway” (?British - I don’t know about Scotland; they did things differently in Wales!) - which I think meant tht any assault committed on the road so designated was answerable in the King’s Court: not just the local Manorial Court or whatever.

I wonder if in the Spanish Colonial context roads so termed were maintained by the state rather than locally. Anyway, the phrase is obsolete, except where it continues in use in the name of a specific road (Camino Real de Tierra Adentro etc). I’d think it would appear only in period texts.

And I wouldn’t think such roads would normally have been paved, outside towns / cities, until more recently. So babelfish, doing its best to communicate to a *present-day* reader what kind of thing a *period* source means when it uses the phrase, might very reasonably say “dirt road”: not a path, but not at all the sort of thing a reader would normally think of as a road.

- SquisherDa (talk) 09:57, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The meaning (not the translation) is "the government road". It's not ownership ("owning" a higbway or the land it was built on is centuries later), it's "who built/maintains the road". Not that maintenance was systematic or coordinated. deisenbe (talk) 14:25, 5 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ah yes:

TRAIL FAQ
WHAT IS A CAMINO REAL?
A camino real is a road sanctioned by the Spanish Crown and maintained at Royal expense. As Spain extended its empire in North and South America beginning in the Fifteenth Century, a network of roads was established throughout this vast region in order to maintain control over the extensive colonial lands.

@http://www.caminorealcarta.org/thetrail/

This source makes it clear, too, tht el Camino was a route (though not using the term) - in places comprising multiple ‘braids’ bypassing seasonal (etc) hazards - not a road. It’s also clear tht the cartway was not generally paved / sealed.

- SquisherDa (talk) 11:34, 6 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure that's a reliable source. deisenbe (talk) 13:09, 6 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah - I should have mentioned that I hadn’t checked / thought about that. I feel comfortable treating what it says on these points as reliable for our immediate purposes; but I wouldn’t plan on quoting it in the article (unless checking confirmed it was). :-)

- SquisherDa (talk) 19:26, 6 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]