THE CLEARLY ABORIGINAL NAME ‘Malihuel’ has always had overtones of mystery and beauty in a region where all other towns bear Creole or foreign names, as if Malihuel had been the only one to emerge out of the land, rather than be imposed upon it from above. And yet the precise origin and even potential significance of this place name have given rise to the most wide-ranging disputes and conjectures without—so far—the veil of the mystery having been lifted [ … ]
The oldest documentary reference to the place name ‘Malihuel’ comes in a concession of land belonging to Gerónimo Luis Cabrera and occupied by the Choncancharagua tribe, running “inland across the Pampas as far as Malihuel” and “thence from Malihuel ten leagues north to India Vieja” [ … ]
The thesis regarding the Araucano origins of the toponym has been supported by most authors to have studied the topic, albeit with differing interpretations of the details.
a) Some have adopted the view attributed to Félix de Azara, for whom MALIHUEL may mean ‘Malin’s place’, from the suffix ‘hue’, meaning a place or region, and ‘Mali’ or ‘Malin’, the name of a supposed chief who may in the remote past have established his village hereabouts [ … ]
b) Another Araucanist thesis suggests that the first element of the word might have been ‘Meli’, or ‘four’, the ‘e’ of which may have switched to an ‘a’—by no means a repellent idea; the precise pronunciation of the ‘a’ in Araucano may have had a sound intermediate between the two vowels, as it can have in other languages, such as English. From this have emerged explanations that place the geographical above the historical: Melinhuinkul, or ‘four hillocks’; Melico, or ‘four watering holes’; and even Melicohue, ‘four lagoons’.(1) The four hillocks incidentally, are conspicuous by their absence from the surrounding area; and, even in the most extreme of droughts, there is no record that the one lagoon has ever broken into four.
c) In my search for a word that, by corruption in its assimilation into the phonetics of Castilian, has lead to the elusive word ‘Mali’, I came across one in the dictionary of J M de Rosas(2) that did not figure in most of the dictionaries I had previously consulted: namely, the word ‘Malin’, which properly means ‘stone’, ‘pebble’ or ‘flint’; esp. cutting-or sharp-edged, such as an arrowhead, say. Hence MALINHUE, meaning a ‘place or region of flint’, from which MALIHUEL may have derived for obvious phonetic reasons. [ … ]
Without the slightest spirit of scientific rigour, but merely as a wry wink at the sometimes tortuous paths that lead to our destination by means of chance, it is worth noting that this meaning of the original name of the place, first revealed by myself here, Pedernal, or ‘place of flint’, seems in some way to herald or prefigure the name of the man who would become the town’s founder, Colonel Urbano Pedernera. [ … ] In Gagliardi, B, MALIHUEL: etimología de un topónimo santafesino. Cámara de Diputados de la Prov. de Santa Fe, Offprint of Homenaje al IV Centenario de la Fund. de Santa Fe, 1973.
1993 POSTSCRIPT:(3) Twenty years on, I am compelled to denounce my own thesis, which had met with widespread approval due perhaps more to my colleagues’ intellectual sloth and negligence than to any intrinsic merit of its own. It is understandable that an ‘n’ may have vanished in its passage through so many mouths, but that the final ‘l’ should have appeared by the grace of the Holy Ghost is unacceptable from any point of view that claims scientific status. Perhaps blinded by the naive parochialism of the times, I never paid heed to the term HUELE or HUELDE, which P J Venom’s dictionary of 1966 provides as meaning ‘ill-fated’ or ‘unfortunate’. We inevitably return, then, to the idea of the prefix meli-, meaning ‘four’, which, coupled with ‘huele’ would give MELIHUELE–MELIHUEL–MALIHUEL: meaning ‘four unfortunate wretches’, where ‘four’ has a generic rather than a strictly numerical value of scarcity or poverty, as in the Spanish expressions ‘four crazy cats’, ‘four poor devils’, etc. Of all the hypotheses put forward, this one is not only the most linguistically viable, but also the only one that can be verified empirically. I am still searching for the flints of my earlier hypothesis; however, the prophetic nature of the word with which the legitimate occupants of these lands for ever branded the moral standards of those who would later usurp them brooks no reply. In conclusion, I am now in a position to state the definitive etymology of the place name, ‘Malihuel’: MELIHUELE–MALIHUEL: ‘four crazy cats’, ‘four poor devils’—a paltry collection of pathetic and/or contemptible individuals.
1) P Hux Meinnado: La Capital newspaper. Rosario, 25/05/1970. Quoting Stieben Enrique: Toponimia Araucana. p. 104. La Pampa. 1966.
2) Rosas, Juan Manuel de: Gramática y Diccionario de la lengua Pampa. Suarez Caviglia & Stieben. Ediciones Albatros. 1947.
3) Author’s note: This postscript does not feature in any of the editions of Prof. Gagliardi’s noted study and, therefore, makes its appearance in printed form for the first time here. It appears in an addendum in his own handwriting at the end of the revised version, which, shortly before his regrettable passing, he was about to send to press.