Talk:Manzana (unit)

It's more usually a city block

"Manzana" more usually means a city block in cities laid out on a rectangular grid nowadays (and possibly historically, cities in Spanish America were legally required to be laid out on a grid). See es:Manzana (urbanismo). The area of a manzana in this sense is not rigidly defined. Here is a detailed reference (in Spanish). Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 16:55, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

It's not related to "apple"

I have removed the translation "apple". While "manzana" in Spanish also means "apple", this is a homonym, there is no evidence that the words are related etymologically. The word is attested from the mid-17th-century. It has been suggested that words related to the French maçon (mason) or maison (house) are possible origins. E.g., mazonero, mazonado, mazonería; maçonnement, maçoniere, maçoune, maçonne, maçonneis.

Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 17:01, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

An article with a problem

This edit majorly changed this article: before, it started as

A manzana is a unit of area used in Argentina and in many Central American countries, originally defined as 10,000 square varas in Spanish customary units.

The article now starts with

Manzana, according to the Diccionario de la lengua española, the Spanish Royal Academy's Spanish language dictionary (the authoritative source for the Spanish language), in addition to its unrelated meaning as 'apple', is the

"urban space, built-up or intended to be built up, usually quadrilateral in shape, delimited by streets on all sides".

There is no mention of the term as being a unit of area.

followed by the old article, and so this article is split in two: one half says that the word manzana means a city block, the other says it's a well-defined unit of area. Problems with this:

• The whole "This is the truth. And now, here's the rest of the article that completely contradicts the truth given before" form – if true, the article should've been heavily rewritten, instead of having a paragraph stuck at its start that discredits the rest of the article.
• The heavy emphasis on the Diccionario de la lengua española. What it says is taken as gospel, with no room for the possibility that the dictionary might incomplete. The dictionary itself is (according to our article on it) prescriptivist, not descriptivist: if the editors of the dictionary, for whatever reason, don't consider the meaning of an area of about 0.7 hectares valid, then it's not included. We have an essay on dictionaries as sources.
• The Spanish Wikipedia has an article on the same unit, defining it exactly the same way, as a square of 100 varas per side, about 0.7 hectares.
• Other sources describing it as a unit of area of about that much. This sizes.com article doesn't appear that reliable at first glance, but it does cite the 1966 edition of the World Weights and Measures: Handbook for Statisticians manual by the Statistical Office of the United Nations, far predating Wikipedia and thus ruling out citogenesis by us. I found a digitized version here.
  • Page 37 of that book, under the section on British Honduras, a manzana is defined as 83.5 metric ares, i.e. 8350 m².
  • (Page 49, Chile, defines a "fanegada or cuadra cuadrada" as "10 000 sq. vara", 64 ares. Page 108, Peru, also defines a fanegada as 64.596 ares.)
  • Page 50, under Costa Rica: 1 manzana = 69.890 ares (6989 m²).
  • Page 59, El Salvador: 1 manzana = 69.98 ares = 6998 m².
  • Page 70, Honduras: 1 manzana = 69.7225 ares = 6972.25 m².
  • Page 100, Nicaragua: 1 manzana = 69.874 ares = 6987.4 m² – contradicting the article's current number of 7042.25 m², but the difference is not big.
  • I acknowledge that this source is almost 60 years old. The trend in the world has been towards increasing metrication, so the manzana probably sees less use now than it did in 1966 – however, this is concrete evidence that the term did mean a unit of area.

It seems to be that, no matter what the DLE specifies as the truth, a manzana indeed is a unit of area of about 0.7 hectares, in addition to it meaning a city block, in addition to it being a homophone and homograph with the word for 'apple'. I don't pretend to be a speaker of Spanish, but I am confident enough in this source to remove that dictionary definition. oatco (talk) 00:13, 27 November 2022 (UTC)