Etymology and Demography of Sonoma County, California

Etymology is the study or the science of words, their history, their origins, their sources, the time periods in which they made it into a specific language or a set of languages and under which circumstances as well as the evolvement and transformation of their meanings. Demography, on the other hand, is the study or science of the very important statistical information about communities, populations, societies or nations. Demography is that part of human history which deals most specifically with mathematical accounts of births, adoptions, deaths, diseases, immigration and emigration, marriages, divorces, and so on.

Due to the obvious fact that it is human population which uses language to name objects, activities, situations and everything else and because each individual society take on or formulates words based on its life experiences, philosophies, traditions and cultures, I contend that etymology and demography go hand in hand.

It is my intention to introduce you to the etymology of California and Sonoma within the context of the demographical markers of the territory which we know today as Sonoma County of Northern California. Let us begin with the larger entity - California. The etymology of "california" has two very distinct theoretical presumptions, both of which stem from the Spanish language spoken by the region's occupying military and missionary forces of Mexico and Spain. One presumption maintains that California was named by Herman Contes, a Spanish conqueror of Mexico, after a queen named Caliphia who reigned over a legendary island mentioned in ancient Greek Mythology. The second and the more credible presumption asserts that California was named by early Spanish settlers who reacted to the region's intense heat and called it Caliente Fornalla which means "hot furnace" in Spanish and it later, no one knows exactly when, it transformed to Calenforna and then to California.

The first known reference to a place called California was made in romance novel called "La Sergas de Esplandian" that was written and published in 1510 by a Spanish author named Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo.

The etymological explanation of the name of Sonoma County is based on translations from the tribal languages of the Coast Miwok and the Pomo Indians. Those languages are very similar and their word "sonoma" means "valley of the moon" or "many moons" in English. According to ancient legends of these native Indian tribes, this territory is where the moon chose its permanent nesting. The first known records where Sonoma was mentioned in writing were within the pages of log books of baptisms and they date back to 1816. The first translated version, "Valley of the Moon," appeared in a correspondence written by General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo to the Ligislature of the State of California in 1850. Jack London, the famous American writer, brought the English translation of Sonoma to public awareness when he first published his well received novel "The Valley of the Moon" in 1913.

Another school of etymologists came up with a different theory based on the fact that there are two very commonly occurring suffixes in the native languages of the Sonoma County and they are: "tso" which means "earth" and "noma" which means "village.' Put the two together and you end up with "tsonoma" and its English translation, "earth village."

Well, there you have it; the etymology and demography of Sonoma County as part of the State of California in a nutshell.