Origin and use of the word deporte as a translation of sport: an ideological conflict

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explain the origin and use of the term deporte as the Spanish translation for the word sport. The data published so far on the introduction in Spain of the anglicism ‘sport’ and the recovery of the Castilian word deporte to refer to activities such as horse racing, fencing, football, among others, should be reinterpreted thanks to documentation from new documentary sources. Thus, certain errors made in previous studies in reference to the first documentation of the word deporte in Spanish as a translation of the word ‘sport’ are corrected. To this end, unpublished sources are provided that allow us to maintain a more analytical interpretation of these words in Spanish in the field of the history of contemporary sports. It is considered that Federico Huesca is the architect of the recovery of the word deporte in the English sense in his Diccionario hípico y del sport from 1881 and not Mariano de Cávia, as has been noted in previous studies. This documentation is accompanied by a discussion on the educational and cultural models existing between England and Spain, where two antagonistic positions appear to deal with the so-called «Spanish problem», recovered and renewed as of the crisis of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.