I find it interesting how many given names are actually variants of other popular names. For example Diego being from James (they don’t even start with the same letter!) or Cheryl being a familiar form of the name Cara. Not to mention the countless forms of Helen (Ella, Eileen, Ellen, etc) that we think of as being different names.
And how the hell do you get Jack from John? How did that work out?
FIRST!
Hey, he mentioned James/Diego, so someone would come up with this.
The James/Diego thing, some people claim it’s incorrect and that Diego actually comes from Didacus. Those who claim they’re related are following the line Sant Iacobus - Santiacobus - Santiago (James) on one hand and Sant Iacobus - Santiacobus - San Diaco - San Diego on the other. Which one is true, or if even both are, don’t ask me. What I don’t remember right now is how do we end up with James/Jaime/Jaume from Jacob (the French Jacques is a lot more clearly connected).
Interesting. Yeah the whole thing seems kinda hard to believe, I mean the two names are nothing alike at all!
Having personally witnessed just how much names can change in merely one translation I have no trouble believing it. Our RPG tabletop group often “translates” names from the English games we play into Finnish and that one process can twist them a lot - put a bunch of these Chinese telephones in a row and I’m sure the chain’s ends do not resemble each other at all.
Sure it’s not the same but the basic idea of taking a foreign name and interpreting it creatively so it fits the local speech is. One other RL example I can think of is when Finland adopted euro as our currency. A few months from that the workers at the factory I was working at the time were calling them “jyyrä” instead of “euro”. And that’s just a few months while names are ancient.
FWIW, “Jacob” is actually “Ya’akov” in Hebrew. I’m not really sure how you go from that to James either, but the S at the end may have something to do with is needing that to decline properly as a Greek noun.
I don’t know how much it applies to people’s first names, but a lot of place names that had pronunciations that were slightly off or about 100 years, and finally got corrected in the last decade or so, like Peking–>Beijing, or Bombay–>Mumbai happened because of the limits of a typical typeset for English.
Basically, anthropologists or explorers would settle in a place that wasn’t well known to Europeans, and they’d bring a small typeset to print pamphlets to send back home, documenting their experiences. The typeset had letters geared to frequencies in English, which didn’t help much in transliterating foreign words. Sometimes using several foreign names or places names frequently would make them run out of letters. If the Chinese dialect of Beijing had lots of words that began with B, but few that began with P, but the typeset didn’t have as many Bs as Ps, the anthropologists would use a capital P instead of a B (B is the voiced version of P), and might make a note of this in the introduction to the pamphlet, or in a footnote the first time the word was used, but the spellings got entrenched, and so did the slightly off pronunciations.
Similar things may have happened with names of famous people at times, although I don’t know of an example.
I’m still waiting for a decent explanation of how ‘Margaret’ becomes ‘Peggy’.
That sounds like an urban legend. “Peking” came from one particular transliteration of the Chinese sounds (Wade-Giles) and was living in the UK when he published his work, so it’s doubtful typesetting had anything to do with it. The Chinese Communists switched to the pinyan in the late 70s, hence “Beijing.” All mainland Chinese names and words are now in pinyan.
In both cases, the choices were made after scholars determined the best way to transliterate the sounds, not because of a lack of type.
I think that’s an example of a “rhyming nickname,” a nickname that rhymes with a shortening that’s closer to the original.
For example, Edward>Ed>Ted, Richard>Rick>Dick, Margaret>Meggy>Peggy.
Margaret >> Meggy >> Peggy. The original Greek form of Margaret means Pearl but I’m too lazy to look up what it was spelled like now. I think it was like Margarethe or something like that?
For Cheryl it would be Cara (feminine of “Carus” which means dear) >> Cherie (French vowel shift) >> Cheryl (Cherie + -yl feminine suffix). Linguistics is quite a bit like algebra actually.
My grandmother’s name was Mary with the then popular nickname Molly.
And Mary>Molly>Polly and Martha>Matty>Patty
Ya’akov=>Iacobos=>Iacobus=>Jacobus=>Jacomus=>James.
Just like any other derivation, it’s just a matter of shifting between languages, shedding syllables, and changing pronunciation and spelling in the process. (‘Jacomus’ isn’t speculation, BTW, it’s an attested variant.)
(Also, Jack comes from John via the diminutive ‘Jankin’, which shed the last syllable and the n.)