Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Johann Sebastian Bach. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
In Russian it's a patronymic. Nikita Sergeyovich Khrushchev: Nikita, son of Sergei.
The Chinese make up one-fifth of the world's population and they have middle names. So do the Koreans and Vietnamese.
I think the reason it's so common in English (and maybe also German) is that for a long time anglophones deliberately reduced themselves to a pitifully small set of traditional names to choose from, so within a family there were likely to be several people with identical names. Germany has laws about what you can name your children. Somebody tried to name her son Schroeder after the character in "Peanuts" and the government wouldn't let her do it because that's a last name. We do it all the time in America: Jackson Brown, Taylor Hicks, Jefferson Davis, Washington Irving.
Oh, don't forget Attila THE Hun.
No. J is a fricative like German CH or Russian KH, and S is (almost) always voiceless. There's an accent ague over the U so it's pronounced more-or-less khay-SOOSS. In America we usually soften that first letter to an English H so we make it hay-SOOSS. (Except in California where most of us speak some Spanish.) Jesús is a rather common given name in Spanish-speaking countries, the way Mohammed is among Muslim people.
"Iesus" is a romanization of Greek Iesous, which itself is a Hellenization of Hebrew Yehoshua, which means "Yhwh (God) rescues." In the Roman era the Jews were speaking Aramaic and only using Hebrew in the liturgy, so in speech Yehoshua had been streamlined to Yeshua, which influenced the Greek form.