2770: Guadalajara, Guadalupe, and Whisky Jul 21, 2024

Spanish does not have [w] as the first sound of a word, and in spelling Spanish only uses W in foreign words, predominantly from English, but there are older loanwords that look differently. In the middle of a word, the sound exists, such as in ‘agua’ [ˈa.ɣ̞wa] (water) but occurs with U after a consonant, so around Iberia, namely around former Andalusia, there are places:

Guadalajara, Guadalupe, Guadix, Guadalcanal, Guadalquivir, Guadalperal Dolmen, some referring to cities, some waterways, but all come from the Arabic وَادِي (wadi) or … وَادِي الْ (wadi al…) which in Arabic standardly refers to a seasonal river that dries up each year, but in Muslim Spain just denoted a river. Since Spanish words don’t naturally begin with [w] the [g] was added for phonetic ease. Of course, unlike with English loan words, Arabic’s are in another writing system which makes wholesale borrowing like Modern Spanish ‘whisky’ (from ‘whiskey’) overall a harder feat too.

In a few even rarer cases the spelling is UA- like in ‘ualabí’ (wallaby), but this very foreign looking and is really used for when enunciating each vowel, like transliterating the city name, Ouagadougou (Uagadugú).