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From: rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: where did the 'B' come from?  (Bill and William)
Message-ID: <639@ptsfa.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 12-May-85 03:12:34 EDT
Article-I.D.: ptsfa.639
Posted: Sun May 12 03:12:34 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 14-May-85 23:51:41 EDT
References: <419@cvl.UUCP> <1886@ut-sally.UUCP>
Reply-To: rob@ptsfa.UUCP (Rob Bernardo)
Organization: Pacific Bell, San Francisco
Lines: 47
Summary: Spanish Guillermo from Germanic William

In article <1886@ut-sally.UUCP> riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss riddle) writes:
>It gets a lot more complicated if you look at the Romance languages.  If
>anybody out there can give the exact relationship with all intermediate
>stages between [William] and the Spanish "Guillermo," for instance, I'd be
>interested.

The original name was an Old High Germane name "Willahelm", which entered the
Romance languages as Latinized "Guilielmus".

The change of Germanic "w" to Early Romance "gu" (pronounced "gw")
is common in Germanic-to-Romance borrowings, cf.  English "war"
and  Spanish "guerra" (the 'u' used to be pronounced), from Germanic "werra";
Engish "ward" and (via French) "guard".

As for Spanish, the change from "Guilielmus" to "Guillermo" follows
all the normal sound changes Spanish incurred as it developed from Latin.
	1. The use of the accusative ending "um" in place of the nominative
	   "us". The final "m" was reduced to mere nasalization of the 
	   preceding "u" vowel. The final "u" being short and unstressed
	   merged with "o". This happened to most Latin nouns ending in "us".
	2. The change of a second "l" to "r" and vice versa is common in
	   many disparate language families. In Spanish, many words with
	   two of these sounds underwent a transposition of them, or a shift
	   of one to the other.
		 milagro from Latin miraculum
		 peligro from Latin periculum
		 pelegrino from Latin peregrinus
	3. The change of the sound "gw" to "g" before front vowels ("i" and "e")
	   occurs most everywhere in the development of Spanish words
	   from Latin (although the "u" is still present in the SPELLING).
        4. The change of the sound "ly" (spelled as "li" in the Latinized form)
           to the palatal lateral sound (spelled as "ll" in Spanish) occurs most
           everywhere in the development of Spanish words from Latin.
-- 


Rob Bernardo, San Francisco, California
{nsc,ucbvax,decwrl,amd,fortune,zehntel}!dual!ptsfa!rob

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