I was recently talking to a french friend of mine, and somehow we got on the subject of how a lot of words that start with a g in French start with a w in English (though the *g *word usually exists as well, like guarantee).
garde - warden (guard)
garantie - warranty (guarantee)
gaufre - waffle
guerre - war
Can anyone offer any insight on how the g’s and w’s got switched.
At least 3 of those have Germanic origins (garde - warden, gaufre - waffle, guerre - war), and the Germanic originals had “w”, so it changed into “g” in French and other Romance languages. Similarly, the name Guillaume = William is cognate with German Wilhelm. Perhaps, while Norman French had the /w/ sound, other French dialects and other Romance languages did not, and had to change.
(And the Romance languages borrowed the Germanic “war” and its cognates,. even though Latin had a word for war, because Latin “bellum” (war) became the same as Latin “bellus” (beautiful) in the descendants of Latin – one of the pair had to go).