Guy, guys, and Guy Fawkes

Factual Questions
1

Guy Fawkes is notorious for his involvement in the so-called Gunpowder Plot to blow up the English Parliament in the 17th century. My question regards the pronunciation of this man’s first name. I had always refered to the man as /gi:/ or “gee” (with a hard G; rhymes with “ski”), after the French pronunciation of the name. However, I’ve since learned that most people pronounce the man’s name exactly the way the word “guy” is said in modern English (/gai/, with a hard G; rhymes with “sky”). But that got me thinking – the English word “guy” to denote a generic person or man comes, in fact, from Guy Fawkes; prior to him it was not part of the lexicon. So obviously, back in 1605 when Fawkes was arrested for treason, the populace wouldn’t have had this rather convenient word upon which to base their pronunciation of his name.

Now, in noting that “Guy” is quite a popular French name, I would like to pose the following questions:

  1. How and when did the name “Guy” enter the English language? Is it an English name, did it enter through French, or does it have some other history?

  2. Irrespective of “Guy”'s origin, could its current popularity in French be explained by past French support for Guy Fawkes? England and France have not always been the chummiest of nations, so one might assume that it became fashionable for the French in the 17th century to name one’s children after enemies to the English throne.

  3. If “Guy” is French in origin (or at least entered English through French, as I suspect), is it true that in Guy Fawkes’s day, his name would have been pronounced as it is in French? Perhaps at the time, the name was a relatively new borrowing and its pronunciation had not yet been anglicized. Then again, if it was an older borrowing, then the Great Vowel Shift probably would have taken care of the transition from /i:/ to /ai/ well before Fawkes’s time.

2

Just to note that his name in full was Guido, pronounced perhaps in the Italian manner as Gwee-do but could well have become anglicized as Gwy-do. The English of the time were unabashed at changing the pronunciation of foreign names to their own taste, thus the French name Jacques was often pronounced Jakes or even Jay-kwes. Thus I should imagine that Guy would have been /gai/.

Other examples of anglicization of foreign names:

Don Juan Don John (later Juan, pronounced Juw-an as per Byron’s poem.)

Louis (as in the French kings) always Lewis

3

It’s even more complicated than you suspect.

What little evidence there is suggests that Fawkes spelt his own name as ‘Guido Fawkes’. This page reproduces his signature.

http://www.pro.gov.uk/virtualmuseum/icons/guy.htm

The assumption is that Fawkes, having spent time in Spain, adopted a Spanish spelling or at least a Spanish-sounding spelling.

This page discusses its origins and variants.

Whatever its origins, ‘Guy’ was an unusual English Christian name by 1605. However, that this became the normal spelling of his name after he became famous/infamous is not surprising because foreign names and pronunciations were almost always Anglicised in popular use. My guess would be that most English contemporaries would have pronounced it as /gai/, which would help explain why this has become the conventional English pronunciation.