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).

2453: Secunda Aug 29, 2021

One of the best ways that Biblical Hebrew phonology is understood is from the Secunda, of the Hexapla. This is part of a 6-level interlinear translation into Greek of which the Secunda is a Greek-alphabet transliteration of the Hebrew text, written in about AD 3rd century. Obviously this has its own issues for basing one's understanding of the sounds of Biblical Hebrew, but it does lend some insight. Certain sounds represented in the Greek lettering are significantly different to the modern or modern liturgical varieties of Hebrew, each having their own differences anyway. This is especially useful to glean from local place names, but again, is limited insofar as any writing system will be when used by foreigners for a language with no major similarity.