Thank you to my son who shared this one with me! He’s off to college soon and that’s expensive, so if you’ve ever considered financially supporting Now I Know, that’s a good excuse for me to nudge you. 🙂 — Dan

The Yucatán Peninsula, circled above, is a peninsula (imagine that) in Mexico, dividing the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean Sea. It’s home to the Mexican state of Yucatán (here’s a map), which has more than 2.3 million residents. And if you ask them where they live, they may respond that they don’t know what you’re saying.

But it isn’t their fault.

People have lived in the Yucatán for longer than we have records. In 2020, researchers explored a cave in the region that filled with seawater as the ice caps melted 10,000 years ago. And during that 2020 expedition, as National Geographic reported, the research team found human remains dating back until before that great thaw. There’s archeological evidence, therefore, that people lived on the Yucatán ten millennia ago. And much more recently, the Mayans created a civilization there, building now-famous structures like El Castillo in Chichen Itza.

So when Spanish conquistadors arrived in the area in the early 1500s, they weren’t met with empty lands. Unfortunately, the conquistadors also weren’t there to make friends — the Spanish conquest of Yucatán resulted in many bloody wars between the Spanish and the Mayans. But at some point along the way, the two sides did actually talk to one another. Or, at least, they tried to, but mostly failed. Their interests did not fit nicely with one another — the Spanish wanted to take over the land (and the gold they assumed was there) and the Mayans didn’t want that — but there was another problem: a language barrier.

In 1517, conquistador Francisco Hernández de Córdoba launched the first notable expedition to the Yucatán, and it didn’t go well for him. His group of 100 or so would-be settlers came into conflict with local Mayans, and many — including de Córdoba himself — died from wounds suffered from the battle. But before the fighting broke out, de Córdoba and the Mayans had a conversation of sorts, according to legend. (Most history from that period is legend; I can’t claim this story is a hard-and-fast fact, but researchers agree, it’s the most likely explanation for what came to be.) And de Córdoba asked the Mayans where they were.

The Mayans responded with something in their own language — they didn’t speak Spanish. It’s unknown what they actually said, but transliterated, it’s likely one of the following words or phrases (via Wikipedia): "mathan cauyi athán", "tectecán", "ma'anaatik ka t'ann" or "ci u t'ann.” Say those aloud and you’ll kind of, sort of hear the word “Yucatán” in there. And that’s what de Córdoba probably heard. As History.com explains, “Because de Córdoba thought their answer sounded like the word Yucatán, he gave that name to the region.”

That’s all fine and good — if the Mayans were answering de Córdoba’s question the way he thought they were. But they almost certainly weren’t. The phrases above aren’t the name of the place the conquistadors had “discovered.” Those phrases mean, roughly, “I don’t understand.” The Mayans were telling de Córdoba that they didn’t speak Spanish and therefore couldn’t understand his question, and he didn’t know that. So he — accidentally — gave the area a corrupted version of the Maya word for “huh?”

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Today’s Bonus fact: Mayan civilization was considered advanced for its time, even by the conquistadors. But we know very little about them, relative to that level of advancement, in large part because of the conquistadors. The Mayans produced books like many other civilizations but almost all of them are gone. The Spanish destroyed the books they came across in the 1500s, mostly out of fear. One bishop at the time (via Wikipedia) explained: “We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.” Only four Mayan books, totaling about 200 pages, still exist.

From the Archives: How Turkey Got Its Name: Why is a bird native to Mexico named for a country in Europe?

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And thanks! — Dan