5939 Spanish mothers in the last 100 years or so did… (and most of them in the last 30 years, average age is 14).
That was actually part of the discussion above. Did “Diego” come from “Santiago”, the “t” morphing into the “d” and the “san” falling off?
Oh, and Yago, 6207, average age 11. Both Iago and Yago are much more common in Galicia (NW corner) than in the rest of Spain.
jayjay, the San doesn’t so much fall off as separate again. The idea is that Santiago came from Sant merging with Iago, and then it resplit. The treatment for male saints in Spanish and Galego is San, but it used to be Sant (it’s still Sant in Catalan).
Really? Hunh. I’ve never encountered a Jaime in America who wasn’t Hispanic. But, as you said, people get creative with names.
For what it’s worth, Jamie seems to be becoming an exclusively female name, at least in this country.
And if the question was why did his mother name him James, I can’t know the specific reason since I haven’t met the lady, but the usual reasons for Hispanics to pick a foreign name are:
- liking the foreign name,
- naming the child after a relative who has or had that name,
- naming the child after an unrelated foreigner you want to honor (this is the reason given for “why does Letizia Ortiz spell her firstname with that confusing z?”, she was named after an Italian)
- the local variant of the name has connotations they dislike and they think the foreign one will “work better”,
- the local variant is exhausted in the family. Your husband is Miguel. Your father is Miguel. Your father in law is Miguel. Your firstborn is Miguel. You name your second son Michael and proceed to complain when people try to spell it Maikel or pronounce it Michel.
Do Spanish people take names from other parts of the country? Do people from Madrid take Catalan names or Basque ones?
Yes.
Unless you’re George R. R. Martin. 
This is a great thread! So the “Di” part of Diego coming from Santiago, from Santo Yago, makes sense, and the “Y” becoming “J” also makes sense to me, but how did the “G” in Yago become the “M” in James?
The interesting thing is that Wikipedia show the pronunciation of Joan as ʒuˈaŋ for Joan Caepdevila, but ʒuˈam for Joan Miro, even though they list both as from Catalan.
That’s a cool word. I had to look it up, and found it’s actually hypocoristic … relating to a nickname, usually a diminutive form of the real name used to show intimacy
It didn’t.
- Ia-co-bus
2a. Ia-co-bus…2b. Ia-co-mus
3a. Ia-go-(v)…3b. Ia-(c)-m’s
4a. Ia-go…4b. Ja-mes
Edit: I don’t actually know how the -co- syllable dropped out of James. I’m guessing that the vowel was reduced to nothing because of the inital-syllable stress in English and that it resulted in the difficult cluster /km/ which assimilated to /m/ through some intermediate steps.
I thought it didn’t look right, but was too lazy to look it up. Thanks for the correction; ignorance fought!
Typo on the second one, and I wouldn’t use /u/ there, it’s /o/ (it’s not the same vowel as in Spanish Juan).
Santiago doesn’t come from Santo Yago. It comes from Sant Iago.
Expanding on the /o/ vs /u/ thing for Joan, my previous aye to AK84 was on his explanation.
Huh. I would have guessed that the Di of Diego came from the same way we get the English J sound. Say a kind of harsh D and a fast ee sound, and it sounds a lot like a J.