Baia.

Comments

1. Giacomo Ponzetto says

   July 4, 2021 at 5:47 pm

   In Catalan you get from Eulàlia to Laia. Originally as a nickname, unsurprisingly since Catalan nicknames traditionally form by apheresis. Nowadays as the much more common form of the name: Spain has 14 thousand Eulalias, with an average age of 63.5, and 36 thousand Laias, with an average age of 16.4.

   I have no idea how Galician got from L to B. But then Baia doesn’t seem to be a current form of the name. Hardly any Spaniards officially bear it (less than 20, and possibly none). The represented alternatives are Olaya, Olalla and Olaia, which get 3 thousand Spaniards each with an average age somewhere in the early 20s.
2. David Eddyshaw says

   July 4, 2021 at 5:55 pm

   Spode’s Achilles’ heel!
3. languagehat says

   July 4, 2021 at 6:02 pm

   Giacomo Ponzetto: Thanks! It seems odd, then, that Galician Wikipedia has the article under Baia.
4. Y says

   July 4, 2021 at 6:05 pm

   The entry about the name says, “A variante máis común en Galicia (por ser patroa en máis parroquias) é Baia, sendo a variante culta Eulalia. Existen ademais as variantes Olalla (moi frecuente hoxe en día), Olaia, Oalla, Alla, Balla e Oballa.”

   So it looks like the first /l/ is lenited away, and you’re left with something like [oaja] > [oβ̞aja] > [β̞aja]. The approximant is an allophone of /b/, represented by that letter.
5. languagehat says

   July 4, 2021 at 6:10 pm

   Ah, makes complete sense — thanks very much!
6. Yuval says

   July 4, 2021 at 11:19 pm

   Is that also how we have Basque / Euskara?
7. Y says

   July 5, 2021 at 12:41 am

   They may be unrelated. Basque comes from a Latin name for a local tribe, the Vascones. For Euskera, this study says:

   The suffix -(k)ara / -(k)era applied to euskera/euskara, the basque word for basque language, which in the case of erdara/erdera «non basque language» appears without the -k-, comes, according to the author of this work, from the feminine romanic forms aira > -era, both an evolution of the latin suffix -arius, -a, -um.

   Considering on the one hand the XVI century form enusquera, by Esteban de Garibay from Mondragon, which would habe been pronounced ê-ûskera, as a nasal vowel, and on the other hand some parallel forms like jazkera, «Way of dressing» from jantzi «to dress» and euskera, «way of holding» from eutsi, to hold, a form that would never have had nasality. The author proposes *enau(t)si, «to say» as a basis for the forms euskera/euskara. This participle would have given verb flexions such as diñost/diost, with a Biscayan variant diñaust «he says it to me» meaning originally «to say».

   (N.B. “habe”. This is the English abstract.)
8. Y says

   July 5, 2021 at 2:07 am

   There was also an Aquitanian tribe, the Ausci. Their name has been suggested as te source for the present-day language name, but that doesn’t explain the -n- in Garibay’s form.
   Whether their name is related to that of the Vascones, I don’t know, and I think nobody else does.
9. languagehat says

   July 5, 2021 at 7:23 am

   That Irigoyen quote is really interesting, thanks!
10. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    July 5, 2021 at 7:56 am

    How do you get from “Mary” to “Polly”?
11. J Pystynen says

    July 5, 2021 at 8:11 am

    The initial step from Mary /mɑri/ to Molly /mɑli/ is straightforward at least.

    My guess probably would’ve been for Baia to come from the clipping of a more Koine-ish Εβλαλια, which even is indeed the same mechanism (rounded vowel yields /w/ > /v/).
12. Alex K. says

    July 5, 2021 at 9:07 am

    Also see Santa Vaia, a Galician toponym and synonym for December (the feast of Saint Eulalia of Mérida is on December 10). And this from the “Glosario da poesía medieval profana galego-portuguesa”:

    Santa Vaia top. ‘prob. topónimo do norte portugués, derivado do lat. Sancta Eulalia, con resultados fonéticos variados (Santa Vaia, Santa Ovaia, Santalha…)’

    They quote from an old cantiga:

    pois me vou de Santa Vaia,
    morarei cabo da Maia,
    en Doir’, entr’o Port’e Gaia.

    The narrator goes away from Santa Vaia somewhere in Galicia down south to the Douro valley (my conjecture), between (O)porto and Vila Nova de Gaia. Which makes sense because Porto’s historical center is on the northern side of the Douro and Gaia (now part of Porto) is on the southern side.
13. CuConnacht says

    July 5, 2021 at 2:06 pm

    Molly to Polly makes as much sense as Meg to Peg.
14. languagehat says

    July 5, 2021 at 2:11 pm

    And William to Bill, and Robert to Bob…
15. Y says

    July 5, 2021 at 2:23 pm

    It’s just a hypocoristic rhyme, not an obscure sound change: see Dolly (< Dolores) to Polly, and (says internet) Josie (< Josephine) to Posie.

    (And that got me finding the vast and wild rabbit hole that is The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources. Maybe worth a post, Hat?)
16. languagehat says

    July 5, 2021 at 2:26 pm

    I posted it back in 2015, and you made the lone comment!
17. languagehat says

    July 5, 2021 at 2:27 pm

    I initially assumed you meant the Medieval Names Archive, which for some reason aroused considerably more interest.
18. languagehat says

    July 5, 2021 at 2:29 pm

    Ah, and I see the 2015 post was made because of Sara’s comment at the end of that thread.
19. Brett says

    July 5, 2021 at 6:19 pm

    @Y: That “habe” looks like a typo influenced by interference from a different language. I wouldn’t have commented on it, except that just as I was reading that, I got a request to referee a physics paper by a pair of Russian authors. The paper is a confusing mess, for all the reasons that usually happens; however, in this case, there is the additional problem that the running text abruptly switches back to Russian in several places. (Clearly, proofreading of the manuscript was minimal to nonexistent.)

    @Athel Cornish-Bowden, CuConnacht, languagehat & Y: I noticed, since the last extensive discussion I remember of nicknames with initial sound substitutions, that the best known such changes in English (William to Will to Bill, Richard to Rick to Dick, Edward to Ed to Ted, Mary to Molly to Polly, Margaret to Meg to Peg) have something notable in common. They all change the initial sound, which is a sustainable consonant (or a vowel in Ed), to a stop. I don’t know what significance, if any, this fact has, but it seems interesting to me at least.
20. Keith Ivey says

    July 5, 2021 at 6:53 pm

    Brett, there’s also N in Ned, Nell, and Nancy, which is not a stop, but maybe that’s because the names start with vowels. Maybe it’s a version of the Michael Jackson sound change.
21. John Cowan says

    July 7, 2021 at 11:47 pm

    There is also Richard > Rick > Hick > hick, Robert > Rob > Hob, Roger > Rog > Hodge (the name of Dr. Johnson’s cat). The OED reports Hick in 1565. I wonder if this has to do with (still non-standard) [ʁ] in French being heard as English [h].
22. Brett says

    July 8, 2021 at 12:10 am

    @Keith Ivey: Of course, you are right; there are also names that go from an initial vowel to N. I meant to say something about that, but I forgot what I was going to say and then forgot that I had forgotten. I guess that means that with a name like Ed[ward], there are two paradigms it can follow for a nickname with an initial consonant. I guess the question is why there is not the same alternation in the girls’ names. (I think Gan exists as a derivative of Ann[e], but it is rare.) Maybe it is just highly atypical to have more than one nickname with just a clipping and an altered onset, and the N versions happened to win out for Elanor and Ann.

    And, naturally, I also forgot to include Robert to Rob to Bob.

    @John Cowan: Obviously, those nicknames with H are no longer commonplace, but they do provide interesting further historical data.
23. January First-of-May says

    July 8, 2021 at 12:56 am

    I think Gan exists as a derivative of Ann[e], but it is rare.

    I wonder whether Hanna(h) ~ Ann(e) were perceived as variants of the same name historically.
24. languagehat says

    July 8, 2021 at 7:46 am

    Roger > Rog > Hodge (the name of Dr. Johnson’s cat)

    And also > Dodge (the source of my surname, as well as Lewis Carroll’s).
25. Alex K. says

    July 10, 2021 at 7:46 am

    By the way, the first sentence of this post made me think of Stevenson’s Olalla, and it wasn’t a wasted thought: as A Reader’s Guide points out, there are at least two quotations from the novella in The Recognitions. I wonder how Stevenson meant Olalla to be pronounced. “I had seen her—Olalla! And the stone crags answered, Olalla! and the dumb, unfathomable azure answered, Olalla!” But what is the reader supposed to hear?
26. Alon Lischinsky says

    July 11, 2021 at 4:37 am

    @Alex K.: Olalla (or, in the current orthography, Olaia) is the Basque form of Eulalia. I don’t know how Stevenson would have pronounced it, but the original is roughly /oˈla.ja/
27. Alex K. says

    July 11, 2021 at 6:36 am

    @Alon Lischinsky: This form is also thought to be Galician, Asturian and/or Leonese in origin, although it made it as far south as Andalusia. The problem is, yeísmo was not nearly as widespread in Stevenson’s time as it is now, and even less so during the Peninsular Wars. Moreover, it spread among urban residents first while lleísmo persisted among rural speakers. Stevenson’s Olalla would have pronounced her name with an /ʎ/, most likely. A more interesting question is how the author intended it to sound in English. I’d also love to know if Stevenson was familiar with Poe’s Eulalie.
28. Alon Lischinsky says

    July 12, 2021 at 7:31 am

    @Alex: Stevenson’s Olalla would certainly not have used /ʎ/ if she were Basque, and not even /ʝ/. The second consonant in that name is /j/

    Were she Leonese~Asturian~Galician (or high-valley Aragonese), there’s a fair chance her speech still made distinction between /ʝ/ and /ʎ/, but that would be increasingly unlikely anywhere else. Yeísmo had been consolidating for at least three centuries by then
29. sarah says

    September 29, 2025 at 9:13 am

    Brett
    > They all change the initial sound, which is a sustainable consonant (or a vowel in Ed), to a stop. I don’t know what significance, if any, this fact has, but it seems interesting to me at least.

    Keith Ivey
    > Brett, there’s also N in Ned, Nell, and Nancy, which is not a stop, but maybe that’s because the names start with vowels. Maybe it’s a version of the Michael Jackson sound change.

    Indeed, these are two different patterns! The N names are all due to rebracketing (“mine Annis” –> “my Nancy”, etc). The stops are a different pattern (or group of patterns??) of fortition, not sure if anyone’s got more to say on that but I remember it being pointed out in my intro linguistics class.

    ===

    January First-of-May
    > I wonder whether Hanna(h) ~ Ann(e) were perceived as variants of the same name historically.

    The H is original, of course. But English inherited H-less version from Latin, and the H-version… from Hebrew and/or Greek in the Bible, maybe?? Scanning the list from that last link, I’m not seeing any Hanna(h)s before the 17th century, and a lot of the 18th century ones seem related to Great Awakenings. (Wait there’s a 14th century Jewish woman in the Netherlands, Hanna van Recklinghausen!) Anyways, I’m not sure “Hanna(h)” was in use in English at the time when H-nicknames were a thing, but it’s still possible they were recognized as variants once “Hannah” did become commonly used in English.
30. sarah says

    September 29, 2025 at 9:28 am

    > the H-version… from Hebrew and/or Greek in the Bible, maybe??

    Looking up “Anne” in the wonderful Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources linked upthread — I see one citation of “Hanna” from 1584! Pretty close in time to Rick > Hick mentioned in a different comment upthread!

    But on my guess of the source of “Hanna(h)” as an English name — I think it’s telling that the earliest citation of “Hanna” in the DMNES is from the Geneva Bible. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the increasing number/prominence of Jews in Britain since the 17th century was also a factor in the rising popularity of the name in subsequent centuries.
31. David Eddyshaw says

    September 29, 2025 at 9:52 am

    I suspect that it has more to do with the Protestant habit of translating from Hebrew directly rather than via the Vulgate, combined with the Reformed thing of paying much more attention to the “Old Testament” than is common in some other Christian traditions.

    Lots of Brits have had distinctively Jewish-looking names without actually being Jewish since the Reformation. I was at a wedding of some totally gentile relatives called Jacob and Rebecca a couple of years ago, and both my siblings have given names that would certainly be regarded as Jewish-coded in most non-Anglophone contexts (and actually have been taken as such, on occasion.)

    My own name seems to have got gentilicated way back in Britain, possibly because it happened to resemble a local Celtic name, which got identified with it. (In the form of it I go by in Real Life, it’s still regarded as stereotypically Welsh.)
32. David Marjanović says

    September 29, 2025 at 11:06 am

    I see one citation of “Hanna” from 1584!

    Might that be a Johanna?

    In the form of it I go by in Real Life, it’s still regarded as stereotypically Welsh.

    I think all 2 or 3 saints of that name are Welsh. Where I’m from, people don’t know any of these saints exist, so the biblical king is their only association other than America/Hollywood.

    (My name was picked to be as international as possible. And one distant relative did allegedly say it was impossibly Jewish.)
33. J.W. Brewer says

    September 29, 2025 at 11:38 am

    Once upon a time David was a popular name for Georgian royalty. King David IV (+1125) is also recognized as a saint, but apparently the news of his sanctity has not yet made it to David M. I don’t know if the Hebrew name happened to resemble a pre-existing local Kartvelian name (parallel to the Welsh situation) or not. The name alternatively may have been introduced to Georgian Christian society in imitation of St. David Gareji, one of the most prominent of the so-called “Assyrian Fathers” who arrived in the 6th century and helped build up the Georgian Church. St. DG’s L1 was probably Syriac, and David I suppose might have been a monastic name rather than his birth name.

    I have no idea what David E. means by “distinctively Jewish-looking.” W/r/t names that in Anglophone societies have been predominantly borne by gentiles for the last three or four hundred years that would seem to be sort of an Etymological-Fallacy view. One of my daughters has an “Old Testament” first name that was also borne by two of her gentile great-great-great-grandmothers who may well as girls in the 1830’s never have met a Jewish person, since they were from fairly rural places and the still-very-small U.S. Jewish population was not at all evenly distributed geographically.

    Now I am idly curious about why “Hannah” came into the LXX without a rough breathing mark, leading to “Anna” in Latin. The verse of the Vulgate immediately after the one in which “Anna” is introduced mentions the duo filii Heli, who get an “h” reflecting rough breathing in the LXX.
34. ulr says

    September 29, 2025 at 11:47 am

    Anna in Latin already has no h- in the Aeneid (it’s the name of Dido’s sister). On the other hand, related male Punic names retain the h- in Latin: Hanno, Hannibal.
35. languagehat says

    September 29, 2025 at 12:13 pm

    I have no idea what David E. means by “distinctively Jewish-looking.”

    Seriously? You’ve never heard/seen a name and thought “that sounds Jewish”?
36. J.W. Brewer says

    September 29, 2025 at 1:38 pm

    @hat. Sure, but not at the sound or sight of e.g. the name Rebecca, which was one of the examples given. (The other example given was “Jacob*,” the single most common first name for male Gentile-Americans born from 1999 through 2012 inclusive.)

    Now Rivka (from the same ultimate etymon as Rebecca), by contrast, is distinctively Jewish.** At least in an American context. And of course etymology can be overtaken by usage in the other direction, as well. Sidney and Irving, for example, were not distinctively Jewish-looking names until they eventually evolved into such due to patterns of actual usage, and then they were, although with notable exceptions ranging from the jazzman Sidney Bechet to the ice hockey player Sidney Crosby to the actor Irving (“Ving”) Rhames.

    *For older cohorts where the name was less common, “Jacob” might have some ethnic marking but I would say you would need another bit or two of evidence suggesting Jewishness to form a meaningful pattern rather than drawing a strong inference from the name in isolation.

    **There’s also “Rebekah,” which looks visually more “Old Testament” than Rebecca, but I don’t think has had notably different demographics within the U.S. as to who it was given to. One of my great-aunts had that as her middle name and it may be relevant that the ladies’ auxiliary to the Odd Fellows was and I suppose still is the Daughters of Rebekah; that great-grandfather was supposedly a big deal in the Odd Fellows.
37. J.W. Brewer says

    September 29, 2025 at 2:51 pm

    I had forgotten that in Arabic “Hanna” is a boys’ name (I think mostly in Christian families?), deriving from the Syriac equivalent of “John.” I was up in Connecticut this morning and saw a wacky “modern” (in the looks-to-have-been-built-around-1959 sense) building that turns out to have been designed by the architect Victor Hanna Bisharat (1920-1996) who was born in the British-controlled Transjordan but spent most/all of his adult career in the U.S.
38. David Eddyshaw says

    September 29, 2025 at 2:59 pm

    the single most common first name for male Gentile-Americans born from 1999 through 2012 inclusive

    Well, yes: you’re exemplifying my actual point. How many gentile Jacobs and Rebeccas were there before the Reformation*? And how many in non-Anglophone countries at present?

    * Need I remind you that, here at the Hattery, “recently” means “since 1453”? We are not intellectual mayflies, with our timescales set by what we have recently heard on the wireless.
39. David Marjanović says

    September 29, 2025 at 4:06 pm

    Ah, yes, the Georgian kinds – no, I didn’t know about the two saints.

    it’s the name of Dido’s sister

    We must have skipped that part of the Aeneid in school (as we did, of course, with most of the rest).

    And how many in non-Anglophone countries at present?

    English is in the unusual situation of having separate James and Jacob available, so that’s hard to compare. But any forms of Rebecca are very rare outside Anglophone places.
40. Brett says

    September 29, 2025 at 4:54 pm

    I occasionally refer to the patron saint of Wales as “Saint Taffy.”
41. Jerry Friedman says

    September 29, 2025 at 4:55 pm

    English is in the unusual situation of having separate James and Jacob available

    Though not unique. Italian has Iacobo and Giacomo. Spanish has Jacobo, Diego, and Jaime, and Santiago is usually thought of as a variant too, I believe.
42. J.W. Brewer says

    September 29, 2025 at 5:07 pm

    David (E.) was writing in English, so you would think the opinions of non-Anglophones are not dispositive of whether a lexeme is “Jewish-looking” unless specified. I dare say that very few Japanese girls are named リベカ (“rebeka”), but the Japanese may well think it’s a gaijin-looking name rather than specifically Jewish. Although apparently there was a Japanese rock band named Rebecca (okay, geminated, so レベッカ) that experienced considerable commercial success on the domestic market there in the 1980’s. And things may be drifting elsewhere: this story claims that Rebeca (w/ only one “c”) was as of a few years ago the 19th-most-popular name for newborn girls in Romania (not a place historically famed for philo-Semitism, one must regrettably admit): https://stirileprotv.ro/stiri/actualitate/cele-mai-populare-nume-de-copii-in-romania-ce-preferinte-au-parintii-cand-vine-vorba-de-bebelusii-lor.html

    The Reformation was quite a while ago now. Deprecating the cromulent Englishness of names only domesticated then seems not much different than asserting that Richard and Henry aren’t *really* English names because they were not common in England before 1066. In a U.S. context, certain Old-Testament-based names that might have been factionally-marked (i.e. for Puritans as against other Anglophone Protestants) as of 400 years ago became mainstream and lost that connotation.

    Separately and somewhat hilariously one of the more popular “Old Testament” names for girls in the U.S. until quite recently has been Susan and its variants. Except the scriptural Susanna appears in one of those add-ons to the Book of Daniel deemed non-canonical by Puritans, so you would have thought they might have avoided the name for that very reason. See also Judith, I suppose.
43. David Eddyshaw says

    September 29, 2025 at 5:23 pm

    I occasionally refer to the patron saint of Wales as “Saint Taffy.”

    To confuse the English, the saint is actually Dewi; “Taffy” presumably represents Dafydd*, who, besides being me, is also the Biblical king.

    You can never have too many Davids, amirite?

    * We discussed the curious former English habit of representing Welsh voiced stops (and fricatives) as voiceless before. Turns up in Shakespeare. I think we decided it dates from a period when Welsh already rendered them like modern English, but English hadn’t caught up yet and still had them as fully voiced initially.

    Santiago

    “Iago” in Welsh, too. As with this bod, for example (first one I found on searching “Iago ap”; there are modern ones about too.)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iago_ab_Idwal
44. J.W. Brewer says

    September 29, 2025 at 5:29 pm

    FWIW it certainly must be admitted that there have been people out there who think that the name “Rebecca” even in an Anglophone or American context is “Jewish-looking.” Thus, when the 1937 movie adaption of _Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm_ starring Shirley Temple (which deviated from the book’s plot in multiple respects) was released in Germany in 1938 it was retitled, with Shirley’s character becoming Camilla.*
    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_auf_Welle_303

    *Shirley’s voice replaced in the dubbed German version by that of Carmen Lahrmann, of whom wikipedia says “Der Versuch der Nationalsozialisten, sie als deutsche Shirley Temple aufzubauen, scheiterte jedoch.”
45. David Eddyshaw says

    September 29, 2025 at 5:46 pm

    “Der Versuch der Nationalsozialisten, sie als deutsche Shirley Temple aufzubauen, scheiterte jedoch.”

    A glimpse into a horrifying parallel universe. Nazi Shirley Temple.
46. Lameen says

    September 29, 2025 at 5:50 pm

    in Arabic “Hanna” is a boys’ name

    As far as I know, Ḥannā is exclusively a Christian boys’ name, but Hanā’ is a religion-neutral girls’ name. The Biblical Anne/Hannah is apparently Ḥannah in Arabic, but I have yet to encounter it in real life.

    Not to be confused with Algerian ḥannūn / ḥannūna “darling”, or ḥnūna, a kind of sweet bread, or ḥinnā’, henna.
47. J.W. Brewer says

    September 29, 2025 at 6:05 pm

    Hanna (with some variation in romanization of the original Ge’ez spelling) as a female name can be found among Eritrean & Ethiopian Christians, although it may generally allude not to the OT lady but to the extra-canonical NT-adjacent lady usually called St. Anne in English.
48. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    September 30, 2025 at 8:02 am

    Cf Ibsker, one of the characteristic round churches of Bornholm. (1335: Beati Jacobi).

    There are 5048 men in Denmark (in 2025) with the first name Ib. Almost 37k called Jacob or Jakob without necessarily signalling a connection to the Jewish faith. (Unlike Jacobe as a girl’s name).
49. languagehat says

    September 30, 2025 at 8:32 am

    More on Ib and Ibsker from 2016.
50. Jerry Friedman says

    September 30, 2025 at 9:29 am

    Behind the Name gives “Jeppe” as another Danish version. On the other hand, it’s not convinced that Diego is related rather than being from Didacus, from Greek didache ‘teaching’.

    It gives Dutch the record with “Jacob, Jacobus, Jakob, Sjaak, Cobus, Coos, Jaap, Kobus, Koos, Sjakie”, but I don’t know how many of those are as distant as James and Jacob and how many are more like James and Jimmy.
51. David Eddyshaw says

    September 30, 2025 at 9:32 am

    “Hamish” is the best form of “Jacob.”
52. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    September 30, 2025 at 10:08 am

    Jeppe has form, one of Holberg’s comedies is Jeppe på Bjerget. But the saints all seem to have become Ib. Including the one in Compostela, whither people did go in pilgrimage so the name was known. (TIL he was supposed to be the Apostle, brother of Sankt Hans. Except that usually refers to the Baptist, and Jesus’ cousin gets the full Johannes as the author of his Gospel).
53. Rodger C says

    September 30, 2025 at 11:16 am

    The oddest-seeming use of “David” I’ve encountered is the cartoon character, David the Gnome. Obviously the Japanese animators saw no incongruity in giving a Germanic folklore figure (invented by T. B. v. Hohenheim, but now escaped into the wild) a Hebrew name.
54. Brett says

    September 30, 2025 at 2:00 pm

    The appearance of the name David in “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” is pretty odd, although in a very different way.
55. J.W. Brewer says

    September 30, 2025 at 4:02 pm

    Not sure if Rodger C is thinking of this animated David https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_David_the_Gnome, who was initially produced under Spanish auspices as “David, el gnomo.” David is married to Lisa the Gnome. One takes it they were looking for “international-sounding” (or “American-sounding”) names for the characters even if they were speaking Spanish. When the series premiered on Spanish tv back in 1985, “Lisa” was the single-most-common name for American young ladies ranging from their mid-teens through early twenties, but Lisa the Gnome was, in story, 399 years old, making her name rather anachronistic unless there’s something I don’t know about gnomic onomastics.
56. Hans says

    September 30, 2025 at 4:47 pm

    If Gnomes are like Tolkien’s dwarves, they have outside names they use with non-dwarves (non-gnomes), to whom they never would divulge their real names. So Lisa and David may be names just assumed momentarily for use with humans, chosen for not standing out.
57. J.W. Brewer says

    October 1, 2025 at 8:31 am

    An odd discrepancy I noted in keeping versus losing the initial /h/ in Old Testament names as translated. In the LXX, Habbakuk loses the /h/ and becomes ᾿Αμβακοὺμ,* while Hosea keeps the /h/ and becomes ῾Ωσηὲ. But in the Vulgate Hosea is merely Osee. Habbakuk is Abacuc in versions of the Vulgate I can readily google up, but Habacuc in the Douay-Rheims (where Osee is still Osee), which may or may not suggest a tradition known to the D-R translators of pronouncing the Vulgate’s Abacuc h-fully. ETA: and “Habacuc” in the so-called Nova Vulgata on the Vatican’s website, where Osee remains h-less, making the NV’s deviations from the LXX fully symmetric.

    *Whence Амваку́м in Church Slavonic which got eroded to Аввакум in modern Russian although the internet tells me that Амбаку́м is extant as a “literary” variant.
58. ulr says

    October 1, 2025 at 9:48 am

    The Rahlfs/Hanhart edition of the LXX (based on the 4th/5th century uncials B, S and A) gives Hebrew names without any accents or breathing marks (which I think even for Greek words only became a regular feature of manuscripts in the Middle Ages).
    The Weber/Gryson edition of the Vulgate is h-less for both names (on the other hand, you find -h- in unexpected places, such as Danihel or Hieremias
59. J.W. Brewer says

    October 1, 2025 at 9:50 am

    @ulr: thanks, interesting. I guess the question is to what extent the breathing marks that eventually became part of the MS tradition reflect a stable inherited tradition of how things were pronounced versus being more random than that, and/or peeking over at the Hebrew tradition for clarification.
60. Jerry Friedman says

    October 1, 2025 at 10:04 am

    In Hebrew, Hosea has a heh but Habakkuk has a chet.

    Now where did those Church Slavonic m’s come from? It was nice of Russian to give one of them back.
61. J.W. Brewer says

    October 1, 2025 at 10:16 am

    @Jerry F.: the Slavonic м is transparently from the Greek spelling, so the question is where the Greek got it. I assume the answer is that Greek was at the time using orthographic μβ like Modern Greek μπ, to represent the sound /b/ because β had already shifted to representing the /v/ sound, but I don’t know the history of Greek spelling conventions well enough to be sure.

    ETA: wiki article on Koine Greek phonology suggests that the /b/ to /v/ shift didn’t really happen much before A.D. 400, and the LXX is obviously significantly older than that but it’s also possible that spellings for uncalqued proper names were not originally stable?
62. Rodger C says

    October 1, 2025 at 10:52 am

    Maybe it’s because /bb/ didn’t exist in Hellenistic Greek but /mb/ did?
63. Jerry Friedman says

    October 1, 2025 at 10:56 am

    I wondered about that Greek spelling, though I know less about it that you (J.W. and Rodger) do. But where did the м at the end of Амваку́м come from?
64. David Eddyshaw says

    October 1, 2025 at 10:57 am

    The etymology of the name “Habakkuk” is clear as mud:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habakkuk#Name

    In the circumstances, may not the LXX form be based on an ancient variant just as likely to be original as the form found in the Hebrew text that we have?
65. Rodger C says

    October 1, 2025 at 10:58 am

    Re David the Gnome:

    (1) I wonder why I thought it was Japanese.

    (2) When I hear “David and Lisa” I think of the 1962 film about two neurodivergent (to use an anachronistic classification) teenagers. Hmm.
66. J.W. Brewer says

    October 1, 2025 at 11:34 am

    @Rodger: I’m not familiar enough with the animation style of “el gnomo” to know how similar it might be to the Japanese-origin stuff that has been more high-profile internationally than Spanish-origin stuff, but that could be it.

    I am now vaguely remembering a conversation at a sadly-now-defunct bar on Houston St., maybe a decade ago, with a friend who is also a lawyer in which he mentioned that he was involved in some international dispute involving royalties/licensing about some animated gnomelike series (definitely not smurfs-as-such), which may well have been this one. (Alas, I know from my own experience that no matter how interesting-sounding the subject of the royalties/licensing agreement, resolving who has or hasn’t complied with it and who owes who how much money can still be just as boring as with an agreement with less novel subject matter.)
67. Lameen says

    October 1, 2025 at 1:59 pm

    If that “fragrant plant” etymology for Habakkuk holds up, then the name is ultimately cognate with Spanish albahaca, via Arabic ḥabaq “basil”.
68. David Marjanović says

    October 1, 2025 at 3:56 pm

    Maybe it’s because /bb/ didn’t exist in Hellenistic Greek but /mb/ did?

    That is the reason for (not too far northeastern) German Samstag “Saturday” < sambaztac < Sabbat + “day”.
69. Hans says

    October 2, 2025 at 1:10 am

    And French samedi.
70. Jerry Friedman says

    October 2, 2025 at 10:15 am

    may not the LXX form be based on an ancient variant just as likely to be original as the form found in the Hebrew text that we have?

    I see your point. The coexistence of /k/ and /m/ certainly seems odd, but I’m having a vague memory of other strange variants in Biblical Hebrew.

    Doubtless one of the top priorities in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls is searching for a Septuagint-like version of Habakkuk so the spelling can be checked.

    (The Commentary on Habakkuk that was one of the first known scrolls has a qoph at the end, as you can see on the first line of column VII at http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/habakkuk)
71. J.W. Brewer says

    October 2, 2025 at 10:21 am

    The “samstag” etymology claims influence on Gothic from a Byzantine *σάμβατον, which is I assume from the asterisk not actually attested, with LXX σάββατον instead leading to σάββατο in Modern Greek.
72. PlasticPaddy says

    October 2, 2025 at 11:41 am

    Mark 2.27
    —
    Septuagint
    — καὶ ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς, τὸ σάββατον διὰ τὸν ἄνθρωπον ἐγένετο καὶ οὐχ ὁ ἄνθρωπος διὰ τὸ σάββατον:
    English
    — And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath:
    OCS (from Codex Marianus)
    ꙇ г꙯лше имъ собота ч꙯лка ради бꙑстъ · а не ч꙯лкъ соботꙑ ради ·
    тѣмь же г꙯ъ естъ с꙯нъ ч꙯лчскꙑ соботѣ ⁘
    Gothic (Ulfilas)
    jah qaþ im: sabbato in mans warþ gaskapans, ni manna in sabbato dagis;
    —
    A single b is used in the Slavic loan, and a double b is used in the Gothic loan, but no m is used in either. I think Hans said in another thread that the first o in above Slavic “sobota” is because the borrowing was *sambattho. If I have this correct, that would be additional evidence for the Middle Greek form.
73. David Marjanović says

    October 2, 2025 at 1:59 pm

    Christian terminology got into Slavic – and spread through all of it, and beyond – before the *a > o shift. “Priest” in Finnish is pappi, despite the existence of a perfectly serviceable o. That’s not too surprising; Slavic also spread all the way to Cattaro – Kotor – before that shift.

    *-am- would actually be expected to yield a nasal vowel, ѫ, which is not in this text (and not in Polish either).

    Gothic had an actual voiced [bː], even if it’s otherwise limited to nicknames (there’s an Ibba attested somewhere). High German shifted it to [pː] as soon as it got High and never acquired a new one.
74. Hans says

    October 2, 2025 at 2:28 pm

    @PP: Not quite. Slavic actually loaned both variants and both are attested in Old Church Slavonic, see e.g. the attestations at Vasmer. The forms with Slavic so- go back to sabbaton, as DM describes; sambaton resulted in Slavic forms in with a back nasalized vowel, which became /u/ in modern Russian, resulting in Russian subbota.
    JWB: Vasmer has the Middle Greek variant with /m/ also only with an asterisk, so it doesn’t seem to be attested, but he also quotes modern Greek dialect forms with “-mb-“.
75. David Marjanović says

    October 2, 2025 at 2:51 pm

    Ah. I was wondering about the /u/!
76. PlasticPaddy says

    October 2, 2025 at 2:56 pm

    @Hans
    Thanks and sorry you had to repeat yourself.