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I'd agree. And there are a number of origins, as Rippert, Riprant etc. are compound names in which the p is actually part of the second element, not the first. The Ri- part is commonly a truncation of Ric- "king", but may also be the umlaut of Ru- in names such as Rippert (in which the original u is pushed to an i by the following e through a linguistic process called leveling). Ru- in turn is a reduced from of Hruod- (Hroth in Norse or Hreth in English) "glory, fame", as in Rupert. Of course, being truncated forms, other first elements are possible (e.g. Rim-, Hrim-, Rid- or Rum-). The p is the first letter of a number of name elements which originally began with b, such as pert (from berht "bright"), prant (from brand, literally "torch", but a poetic word for sword), pald (bold) etc., but which were altered by speakers in Romance areas (such as Lombard Italy) or by Latinisation.

This message was edited 4/18/2016, 4:48 PM