What's The Difference Between "casa" And "hogar"? - How To Spanish

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LaDragonaria / A native English speaker who is dedicated to helping people learn Spanish language, grammar, and culture. Send in your asks and I will help you understand Spanish: beginner, intermediate, or advanced. Welcome to a blog of Spanish language shenanigans, where I'll teach you How to Spanish! [Started in May 2013] Home Ask Submit Archive querida--luna:What's the difference between "casa" and "hogar"?

It’s the difference between “house” and “home”

In a more general sense, la casa is a building designed to live in, and el hogar is a place you feel at home. What follows next is a series of linguistic tangents that may be helpful, but are all over the place.

la casa in its origin referred to something like “hut” or “cabin”, similar to a tent, made of branches and wooden stakes

el hogar literally means “hearth” and “fire”, related to el fuego “fire”; to explain this a bit more, H and F are linked in some words related to Latin and Spanish, and was probably considered a place where someone could live on a more permanent basis and cook, instead of staying around campfires, a place where someone felt “at home”

That’s why a lot of family goddesses like Hestia/Vesta are also goddesses of “the hearth”, because that’s a more emotional or spiritual connection to a place. We have the same kind of connection when we hear “house” and “home”, like a “house” is a building, but we can have a “home” in a building, or in a group of people, or a “homeland”

Back to H and F in Spanish, which is a whole thing and there are lots of theories related to whether certain words got affected by the H/F thing because of aspirated consonants or whether it was due to Basque-speakers… It’s a whole linguistic thing and I could go on forever. It’s much easier to just point out some common examples of it at work:

It’s why hacer “to do/make” is linked to satisfacer “to satisfy”, and they both share grammatical similarities in conjugation… hago/satisfago, hice/satisfice, hecho/satisfecho. You also have el hongo “mushroom” which is related to “fungus”, and el humo related to “fume” (also fumar “to smoke”). Originally, el hijo “son” was written as fijo …you can see these similarities more in Italian

There’s also el hocico “snout” (usually noses of animals) which I believe is related to las fauces “maw, jaw, mouth”. Extending outwards also have some relation with ahogar which is related to the ideas of “to drown” but also “to suffocate”… that “focate” is the same; sofocar as a verb also exists. The idea must have been “to cover the mouth/nose”… the fauces was meant as “throat” or “maw” so the idea of “covering/going around the mouth/throat” was present in the ideas of drowning and suffocation in general so that’s why they’re linked that way

The same H/F link exists in the words hondo/a “deep”, profundo/a “profound/deep”, and el fondo “the bottom”

la hoja “leaf” is related to the idea of “foliage” [lit. “leafness” or “much leaf” if you want to be real literal about it]

You also see it existing with el hilo “thread, string” and el filamento “filament”,

A “liver” in Spanish is el hígado which literally meant something like “fig-shaped”; in French you’d see it as foie (as in “foie gras”); and el higo “fig” is sometimes written as el figo in older Spanish, and la higuera “fig tree” is sometimes la figuera

Note: It’s important to note that not every F/H is related. For example, some of the F sounds came from Greek like la fobia which is “phobia”. The PH sound is a totally different language so it’s not considered linked.

What is interesting is that many languages have a distinction between “house” and “home”, and often “home” is related to “fire” in some way.

In that sense, el hogar is related to el fuego “fire”, since fogar would have meant “the place where fire is kept”. The root etymology here extends to other related words… el fogón “stove/burner”, el fogonero, la fogonera “stoker / someone who stoked fires on coal burning ships/trains”, el fogonazo “flash/burst of flame”, la hoguera “bonfire/campfire”, even extending to la hogaza “loaf of bread” which is related to “focaccia” which comes from Italian

As far as today, the two words la casa and el hogar don’t share very different meanings, given that many people now live in buildings with heat readily available, but I think la casa was originally meant to be more temporary as “hut” or “cabin”, while el hogar is more permanent and specifically related to a hearth.

Today, la casa is the most general term for “house”, while el hogar feels more like a mindset. That’s probably why casarse “to get married” is more literally “to share a house together”. I’m not sure if that meaning had more to do with cohabitation, or sharing property.

Colloquially, la casa is more common and el hogar is more particular. You say quedarse en casa “to stay at home”, ir a casa “to go home”, estar en casa “to feel at home”, volver a casa “to go back home”

Seeing hogar would feel weird. It would be like if you said “I’m returning to my domicile”. You rarely see el hogar used in colloquial senses, except to say things like “abode”, used in the sense of “a home” as an emotional connection to a place, or when you’re talking about a literal “hearth”

Somewhat related words casero/a and hogareño/a both mean “household”, though they show up in related but slightly different contexts.

I’m used to seeing things like el padre hogareño / la madre hogareña “stay at home dad/mom”, but then you see la cocina casera “home cooking” or saying something is casero/a means “home-made”, or el trabajo casero / los deberes caseros “household chores”.

I think they’re kind of interchangeable, though I do believe hogareño/a can be used as “homey” or “cozy” the way you’d see acogedor(a), while you sometimes see el casero / la casera as “landlord / landlady”

Aside from some tendencies to refer to certain things as one or the other adjective, they’re pretty interchangeable.

Posted on Nov 9, 2017 with 265 notes #Spanish #language #languages #Latin #linguistics #asks