What is the English equivalent to the Spanish name Diego? I assume it’s some classic name, and there is an English version (like Jorge to George).
If memory from HS Spanish serves, it’s Douglas (Doug).
I had heard that Diego was a modified form of Iago, (James).
[url=http://www.behindthename.com/nmc/spa.html]This site* tends to support that idea, pointing toward Santiago (St. James), but it admits that the origin (and hence the translation), is murky.
It’s the Spanish (one of them) for James – the version drawn straight from Greek and Latin, as opposed to Jaime, which derives from (IIRC) English.
To get there requires a lot of derivation, but Yakov (Hebrew) > Iakovos (Greek) > Jacobus (Latin) > Iago, dropping the ending (old Italian and Spanish). Now consider that Spain’s patron saint is St. James (Sant’Iago > Santiago > San Diego). Then drop the Saint.
This is a common form of consonantal transfer, related to metathesis and having its own name in linguistics (and I’m sure somebody will be along with the missing piece of vocabulary).
A large piece of napery (linen cloth), worn tied at the waist to cover the abdomen, was in Early Modern English a napron. This letter transference gave us “an apron.” In the reverse form, a fruit from India called a naranga gave us Spanish an Portuguese naranja. When English imported the fruit, it was a narange or, more commonly, a norange > an orange (influenced by the House of Oranje, with a quite different origin, in the Netherlands).
Gracias!
(I’m due in 2 weeks and still trying to find the perfect name)
Does he look like a sabretooth tiger in the ultrasounds?
I was told that the city of San Diego is named after the Mission San Diego de Alcala and I was under the impression that San Diego de Alcala was referred to as Saint Didacus.
Saint Didacus was one of my school’s rivals in CYO.