Jacob or James?

I knew that the French were involved in this somewhere.

from Wiki -
"James came into English language from the Old French variation James[1] of the late Latin name Iacomus. This was a dialect variant of Iacobus, from the New Testament Greek Ἰάκωβος (Iákōbos), from Hebrew יעקב (Yaʻaqov) (Jacob). The development Iacobus > Iacomus is likely a result of nasalization of the o and assimilation to the following b (i.e., intermediate *Iacombus) followed by simplification of the cluster mb through loss of the b. Diminutives include: Jim, Jimmy, Jimmie, Jamie, Jimbo, and others."

 

No offense, but I think you mean "bifurcated" SquRob.

 

So when Mary, the mother of Yes - u -ah, called the half brother, she yelled I - co - boss. No matter how sad it is that the translators betrayed the phonetic (transliterated) names, we have all those commentaries of Jesus and James, so we are stuck with them. But that does not justify never whittling away at all the mistakes in our modern translations. But first thing first, the translations need to be footnoted with corrections, i.e. James * (*probably pronounced Icoboss) or whatever the native tongue actually sounds like.

Clinging as they do, for market reasons, to tradition over accuracy, certainly has no merit.

 

The name Ya'acov in Hebrew is Iakobos in Greek, James in English, Santiago in Spanish, Jacques in French, Jakobus in German.

In some languages (notably in Hebrew) the sounds for "b" and "v" are similar.
Hebrew has no letter or sound for "J".

The Hebrew and Greek versions of the name look quite similar but when the Greek Iakobos was translated into Latin it had turned into Iacobus and later Iacomus.

When the French language developed from Latin, Iacomus was shortened to Gemmes.

The English James is derived from that French version.

In England, Jacob was mainly regarded as a Jewish name during the Middle Ages, though the variant James was used among Christians.

Rob