Re: Does Melvin come from Maethelwine
in reply to a message by EncyclopediaBrown
English/Scots Mæðelwine to Melvin certainly follows the pattern of Latinisation in the late Imperial/Frankish period. |ð| and |þ| would become |d/t| or be syncopated altogether (since it's a difficult and unusual phoneme that does not occur in the Latin and early Romance languages of the period, nor in the Southern Germanic languages, and isn't consistently found in all Greek dialects, some of which have |f| instead - it's no coincidence that it occurs in both the English and Welsh languages however, the latter with different orthography). Latin "v", representing allophones of |u| including a phoneme close to |w| in classical Latin, split into the familiar |v| and |u| from the 2nd Century, and spread North into the Germanic languages (excluding English and a few Swedish dialects). Melvin isn't so much a shortening, as a plausible Latin pronunciation.
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This was really informative, and I'm glad to learn this information. Thanks thegriffon!