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.
Or This site.
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.