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Comment by eyko | Hacker News Reader

Another interesting one: James and Jacob are the same name (from the Hebrew Yaʿqob), and in spanish it's either found as "Jaime", "Jacobo" or "Santiago" which comes from "Saint Iago" (Iago being an old spanish conversion of the Latin "Iacobus" which came to other romance languages as Yago, Iaco, Jacob, Yacobo, Jacobo etc).

The "J" consonant leads to many interesting things because of how many pronounciations it has. It can be an english "J" or the softer latin "J" (identical to an I) or an in between Y which could be between an english J and SH. In current spanish, however, the J is pronounced as the "voiceless velar fricative"[1] (a very strong H?), so whilst the name started sounding like "Iacobo", it's now a very firm HHakobo.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative

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I belive San Diego could also be translated back to Saint James or any of those other variants but there's some other odd step or two in between that I can't remember right now.

Ah it turns out that may not be true, though widely believed for the last couple of centuries:

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Diego#Spanish

The one that shocked me the most was the number of different names that I associated with different countries that all turned out just to be variations on John.

Ivan, Ian, Euan, Hans, Sean, Jens, Juan, Yiannis, Giovanni, Evan, Ifan, Janko, Ivanko and many more

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_(given_name)#In_other_l...

The hebrew ‘jacob’ is pronounced with a v rather than b sound at the end as well. It’s more like Yaqov than Yaqob. It uses the same letter ‘bet’ but with a dot in the middle its a b sound, without the dot in the middle its a v sound, and in modern use they don’t add the dots in at all and assume everyone knows how to pronounce things.

TIL! So many (most?) christian names have hebrew origins so it's just great to see how much hebrew pronounciation has been completely violated to create words that sometimes barely resemble the original.

> softer latin "J" (identical to an I)

That's a fun one here in the US. My employer has an office in Romania, so many of my coworkers have names that start with an I for the voiced palatal approximant sound. These names would start with a J in English, have the I in Romanian, and are pronounced (more or less) like an English "y" sound. For example, Julian -> Iulian, approximately pronounced Yoo-lee-an. For extra complication for those in the States, many default fonts show minimal differences between a capital I and a lower-case L, so some people read it as Loo-Lee-An.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_palatal_approximant

And then don't get me started on us Americans trying to understand the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-comma

Some people translate their names accordingly when entering the English speaking world.

E.g. people from the Czech Republic or Slovakia named Ján, Juraj, Michal might become John, George, Michael.

Slovak and Czech sometimes use back-translated exonyms for place names. E.g. Lawrence is Vavrinec. Thus "St. Lawrence River" is called "Rieka svätého Vavrinca".

https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rieka_sv%C3%A4t%C3%A9ho_Vavrin...

btw if you ever run into someone who uses the hebrew version of Jacob.... I'd go with Ya'Qov , the hard B sound at the end and the softer V sound are the same letter in hebrew but I've basically never encountered anyone who uses the hard sound

should also add Ya'Qov and Ya'a'Quov, are fairly interchangeable

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