Thursday, March 31, 2005

Joseph, Jacob, Joshua, Jessica …

Names beginning with the sound “J” have been hugely popular in the United States. Ironically, a great many of these J names originally began with the “Y” sound, but were spelled with a "J" in languages where J is pronounced like our Y. When English adopted these names, suppose they had been spelled with an initial Y. Would they ever have become so popular? Yosef, Yakob, Yoshua, Yishica, Ian, ... But not, I think, Yames..

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