Why names like Jeanne d’Arc in original french become Joan of Arc in English?
In: Culture
The real question your are asking is “why do we translate names from one language to another?”
The answer is that all words common to multiple languages are subject to regional variations, names are not special or different from other words in that respect. Regional differences happen because of major differences in the available phonemes in any given language. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme)
For example, the spanish language has a different set of sounds that are pronounced than english or french. Our mouths physically develop muscles that allow us to form the sounds of our own language, making some sounds more comfortable to say that others.
Jeanne in French is spelled Joan using English spelling. As English is a germanic language a lot of spelling rules are different so even though they are pronounced very similar the word is spelled very different. Arc is a place name. Family surnames is a quite new invention to distinguish people and before this was a common practice they used some sort of description to help specify who you were talking about. For example the name of the father, the job title or a descriptive word for the person. In this case as Jeanne d’Arc was traveling far from her home she was known by her home town, Arc. The prefix d’ in French is used to mean from. So the English translation of d’Arc is “of Arc”.
It’s basically just her name translated into English. That was very common in Europe: For example, the Prussian king “Friedrich-Wilhelm” is called “Frederick-William” in English, “Frédéric-Guillaume” in French and “Federico Guillermo” in Spanish. Similarly, “Henry” of England is “Heinrich” in German and “Enrique” in Spanish.
>Why names like Jeanne d’Arc in original french become Joan of Arc in English?
Sometimes honorific names get translated *literally* from one language to another.
Names change spelling depending on language. For example, the name Michael (in English) and Michel (in French) both derive from מיכאל (in Hebrew, pronounced something along the lines of “Mikha’el”). The equivalent for the French “Jeanne” is the English “Joan.”
The last part of this particular name is also literally translated; “d’Arc” literally means “of Arc.” Hence, Jeanne d’Arc becomes “Joan of Arc.”
These names don’t always get translated though, or if they do the honorific is translated into another language. For example, Rene Descartes last name essentially translates to “of maps” in English, but we don’t ever refer to him as Rene of Maps, but just as Rene Descartes. Instead, if Descartes is referred to by his honorific title, it’s in Latin as Renatus Cartesius.
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