Those come from latin lex, rex, so possibly more related to sloppy handwriting getting standardized?

Edit: on the other hand, x used to be read /j/ (e.g. Quixote, Mexico), so also possibly lex —> lej —> ley

> Those come from latin lex, rex

No, in fact they descend from the accusative forms, lēgem and rēgem. I don’t know much about the precise evolution, but g → y strikes me as a perfectly normal sound change, especially before /e/. Looks like it happened in the other Romance languages too: compare French roi, Portuguese rei, Italian re, etc.

And in English as well. German "tag" (as in "guten tag"), to Old English "daeg" (with the g pronounced as a y), to Middle English "day".

In that case, German switched to "t", not English from. High German is the main odd one out of the Germanic languages in this case.

Compare "Dag" (low German)"; Saterland Frisian "Dai"; West Frisian "dei"; "dag" in Old Saxon, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish); Faroese and Icelandic "dagur"; Gothic "dags"

d -> t is one of the major High German consonant shifts. Other examples of the d -> t shift is Vater vs. vader, fader, father (from Middle English "fader", so there the "th" in modern English is also not from the German)

Others prominent changes around the same time included e.g. p -> ff (Schiff vs. ship, schip, ship, skip, skib in other Germanic languages) and /t/ -> /t:s/ etc. - compare Zwei with two, to, två in other Germanic languages.

Very few of those changes made it into English, either Old English at the time, or later - English in that respect tends to be closer to Low German than to current standard German.

(as an English speaker - or a speaker of basically any other Germanic language -, to learn German having a rough idea about the consonant shift is a major help in figuring out German vocabulary - you'll find a lot more German words are "close enough" to be understandable once you recognise the changed sounds)

But the comment you replied to was about the g-y difference at the end of the word, not the d-t at the start.

If focused on that, because the consonant shift is generally what shows us which words come from German vs. Germanic, rather than address the subsequent shift from g.

The softening of the "g" into "y", "j","i" is also a feature in other Germanic languages for many other words. E.g. in modern Norwegian "deg" (the object form of "you" / "thee" which is necessary in Norwegian still) can be pronounced both with a very pronounced g, and with a tiny shift of the tongue to soften it into a i/j. In English we have "dough" where the "g" has disappeared, but was still there in Old English, and where in modern Norwegian you again can choose /dɛɪːɡ/ or /dæɪ̯/. They all, again, share a root in Germanic with the German, where we again have a strong indication the other Germanic languages evolved their current versions from Germanic rather than German in that the German got a "t" from the consonant shift: "Teig" (vs Low German "Deeg")

Jepp, that's precis som på svenska, där “dig” uttalas “dej”. But AIUI you can see from old songs and poems, by which words it was used to rhyme with, that the spelling is how it used to be pronounced not so many centuries ago. (And yes, “dough" heter “deg” på svenska också. Så og på norsk, antar jag?)

correction: spanish is heavily ablative case instead of accusative. original statement is correct in principle since lex, rex are nominative and first in a nominative-genetive form in latin dictionaries. eg. lex, legis. rex, regis.

> spanish is heavily ablative case instead of accusative

Is it? Aren't the descendants of the ablative mostly -amante adverbs and e.g. conmigo? The wiki article of Ablative Case doesn't even mention Spanish.

Got any other examples of ablative in Spanish?

X in Mexico or Quixote used to be pronounced as "sh". I think X is still used for that sound in Portuguese or Basque or Catalan if I'm not mistaken.

In the case of Mexico they were transcribing a word from indigenous people.

In a bunch of Spanish words coming from Latin, it was often from Latin double S. Eg. páxaro, from Vulgar Latin passarum. I can also think of cases of this sound coming from Arabic, eg. modern ojalá was once oxala which is a cognate with "inshallah", note the sh sound.

Sometime around the 1500s this sound changed to /x/ and they changed spellings of a few different sounds whose values had shifted over the centuries. X had merged with a sound they spelled with J, derived from Latin words with J in them.

And the Dutch digraph/ligature "ij" is like "y" with an umlaut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)

> IJ probably developed out of ii, representing a long [iː] sound [...]. In the Middle Ages, the i was written without a dot in handwriting, and the combination ıı was often confused with u. Therefore, the second i was elongated: ıȷ. Later, the dots were added, albeit not in Afrikaans, a language that has its roots in Dutch. In this language y is used instead.

> Alternatively, the letter J may have developed as a swash form of i. In other European languages it was first used for the final i in Roman numerals when there was more than one i in a row, such as iij for "three", to prevent the fraudulent addition of an extra i to change the number. In Dutch, which had a native ii, the "final i in a row elongated" rule was applied as well, leading to ij.

> Another theory is that IJ might have arisen from the lowercase y being split into two strokes in handwriting. At some time in the 15th or 16th century, this combination began to be spelled as a ligature ij. An argument against this theory is that even in handwriting which does not join letters, ij is often written as a single sign.

So indeed maybe the same as the Roman numerals. Interesting, I didn't know this. (Also interesting that no one really knows where this letter came from.)

It doesn’t undergo the phonetic process of umlaut, Don, and as it’s a vowel the two dots are more like a simple diaeresis.

It is used in that way in French too.

It is neither umlaut nor diaeresis, but just an i and a j with each their own dot smushed together into a ligature, which can take either the form of a y with both those dots on top, or a more rounded form that more resembles an i and j joined together.

I guess in other languages than Dutch it could be a y with a diaeresis or umlaut.

Verbal diaeresis?

Great, now I can't move.

I think Old Spanish had i in some of those. Like rei. Or i meaning and.

Old Spanish was probably closer to the real pronunciation and had also more variety, depending on the whim of the scribe. Most of the greatest works ever written in Spanish are prior to the standardisation by the RAE at the end of the 18th century, indeed

I don't know. An /i/ near a vowel in Spanish tends to become /j/. I usually see the consonant y transcribed as [ʝ].

Wikipedia on Spanish phonology notes the difference in pronunciation between viuda and ayuda which is an interesting contrast in two very similar sounding words.

Old Spanish had a lot of phonological differences so I'm not sure you can do a straight comparison.

Old Spanish it's something from 1200. Since Nebrija, the modern spelling was near already there.

Old Spanish lasted until about 1500 afaik. The contrast wasn't just spelling, the spelling differences are due to deeper phonetic changes.

I know; but since Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes the modern phonetic changes were already there.

I own an anotated Lazarillo book for modern Spanish readers, btw. It will describe you every ancient jargon and old sayings as footnotes. And, of course, some of the context.