Disputatio:Iamaica

The original indigenous name for Jamaican was closer to SHamaica. Do Latin name reflect the modern European names or the indegious names? The first European name was Xamaica, a Spanish interpretation. Early modern Spanish pronunciation of X was SH.

This particular fricative was a vernacular development, not a latin one. Eventually j/zh/ came into use, but this was much later. We frown on the use of j/zh/ here, so ia or ie can either mean /ja/ or /gia/, /je/ or /gie/, and context usually serves, phonetic spelling can always be inserted (with a link to ipa!) if the pronuniation is not widely known. As for your specific question, we defer to the common latin name in use if there was one. As Jamaica was settled by europeans while latin was still widely used in geographical documents and diary entries, I'd imagine there is an attested latin name for it already. If not, we usually tend to imitate the european model, with some exception.--Ioshus Rocchio 04:21, 14 Maii 2006 (UTC)