Talk:James

Monarchs

The List of British monarchs has ten people named James on it, yet this page lists only two. Given that the numbering of kings named James is a major issue in British history, this ranks as one of the worst of the disambiguation pages. I am a democrat and don't care, but maybe some royalist will want to fix this up. Ortolan88

Fixed now, and I got sucked into some more fixing of the page myself. Ortolan88

What the hell is that stuff about shiny toy guns? DOes it mean anything or is it just somebody vandalising and including his friends/himself?

I was told by a friend (and a STG fan), that it's something to do with the band, unless someone wants to clarify. Le.Kwyjibo 16:06, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Diego linked to James

Why is diego linked to James ?

• Diego is a contraction of Santiago.

  not according to Diego

  "[Sp. Diego, the Christian name James, being that of the patron saint of Spain; see also Don Diego s.v. DON.] --OED" someone's wrong.. --Kunzite 11:17, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

I put in an (admittedly poor - I got wordy and only addressed Castillian Spanish) edit about this (in favor of the Santo Iago -> Santiago -> Diego connection). Someone (properly) undid it but (improperly) replaced it with wild claims of an obscure Latin root. I undid that and went a subtler route, simply adding the name back into Spanish without talking about the root, and removing another reference to the Santiago root (it was under either Galician or Portuguese I think), since that is subject to dispute (here, anyway). It's not much of one, though. The fact that Portugese has a bunch of intergrading forms - Tiago, Diogo, Diego - pretty much clinches it. The "Didiacus" etymology is so implausible (at least as the primary derivation; it could easily have had an imfluence, e.g. toward "D") as to demand authoritative source citations (note the plural) that demonstrate why we should abandon Ockham's Razor all of a sudden.

This actually raises a meta issue: If enough Spanish speakers believe that Diego is a variant of Sant' Iago, they use and treat it as such (and I know for a fact they do from personal experience, anecdotal as that is - I present that not as evidence, only as a clue as to my stance/conviction on this), and bearers of the name who even care about such a thing will consider it a variant of James/Yakub/etc., thereby effectively making it one. Cf. "Jack" - originally a short form of "Jacob", it is now also (more like almost exclusively, in English anyway) considered a short form of "John", and is properly listed at both names' Wikipedia articles as diminutive forms of the name. Maybe Didacus did in fact devolve to Diego. But VERY clearly so did Santiago. This is not particularly unusual. Some Maldonados in Spain are were actually originally MacDonalds. The incoming foreign name rapidly assimilated to a "similar" (to locals' ears and tongues) name from the region. My own surname, from the genealogical research & heraldry research I've done shows families and individuals converging on this name (and its more common but more recent McCandless spelling) from radically different sources (Cuindilis/Cuindlaes, dating to the 6th c. CE, and also yielding Irish names like Conlisk and Quinlish, on the one hand, and the anglicized name Cavendish on the other (which may have helped shift the name more toward the A and the D), which because of U/V confusion was sometimes rendered as Caundish, Mac Caundysh and even (in reference to the same 12th c. CE armigerous individual!) as Caundlyshe, It was further confused with the again different name [Mac]Candish (no L, different Gaelic root, yet still eventually yielding "McCandlish" families); AND there were Chandler/Candler/Candles families deriving from occupational names that also, due to proximity to a name the locals were more familiar with, became McCandlishes, too. The point being: Whatever the "one true ultimate origin" of the very first occurrence of "Diego" (probably a confluence of several different names and variant local phonemic shifts), it is rather difficult to get around the fact that there have been several variants of Diego and at least one was obviously also a variant of Santiago. Whether we're seeing divergence away from Santiago or convergence toward it is ultimately kind of a moot point. Today it is a variant of James/Jacob. (By way of analogy, see also the American English variant - not too common, but well-attested - "Jaime" or "Jaimie"; in both spellings it is pronounced the same as "Jamie", "Jamey", etc., but the former spelling is obviously imported directly from Spanish Jaime which isn't pronounced anything like that. Is American "Jaime" an anglicization of Spanish "Jaime" or a hispanification of English "Jamie"? Or (as I suspect) is this a nonsensically limiting question, like "have you stopped beating your spouse?" asked of someone whose marital life is unknown. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:36, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Yacub Tiberian Hebrew

If somebody knowledgeable of the language add the name Jacob in Tiberian Hebrew it would be great. It should end with a /b/ instead of a /v/ and as such be similar to Arabic and Aramaic. Or is it spelled the same and differs only in pronunciation? In this case both pronunciations should be indicated. --Alif 00:28, 16 September 2005 (UTC)

Female equivalents

Listed are Jamie, Jamesina, Jamey, Jayme, Jaymie, Jaimie, Jaimita, Gemina. Unless these names get there own pages, maybe we should add them to this page - with a list of people with these name etc. (this is often the case with other pages about names) - Matthew238 07:18, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Variants

Wikipedia doesn't need one-liners about every possible variant of a name saying "Jamie/Seamus/Yacup" is a variant of James. That's why we have this page. So I removed a bunch of redlinks (and blue-links to unrelated articles) to discourage creating such articles and to make this page more readable. Please don't readd links without justification. NickelShoe (Talk) 17:50, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Chime

Never heard of in Dutch......

James (band)

I'm willing to guess the vast majority of people coming to James are looking for James (band). I think, at the least, James (band) should be linked more predominatly on this page (perhaps a For the band, see James (band) at the top of the page), or at the most I suggest moving James (band) to James and James to James (disambiguation). I guess that will displease a number of people though. What do people think? SaltyWater 17:21, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Link at top.. maybe. Move the page? Uhh.. no. I really don't think most people come here from an inactive indy rock band from the UK over one of the most popular names in the Enlgish language.. --Kunzite 02:58, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

No of course they don't, the link at the top is ridiculous. There are so many uses.--Lo2u 00:24, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

You really want the James band to be predominant. Thanks! I think that anyone searching for the band will find it with ease, though.

Hebrew etymology

The last time I looked at the article, it had a lot of information about how the name comes from Biblical Jacob and the similar Hebrew word for "heel", and even referenced the interpretation "one who grabs the heel".

Today I see all of these Biblical references to what is after all a Biblical name, have been conveniently scrubbed clean, and strangely replaced with the much blander, unsourced, and likely erroneous revisionist explanation, "One who follows". And all of this without even one word here on the talk page. Was this done legitimately? ፈቃደ (ውይይት) 17:10, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

It was ALL removed. I went back and re-added the 'bland' part from the history. (I might not have gone far back enough.) Feel free to go back through the history and re-add stuff. --Kunzite 18:08, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Translations

Do the translations really belong in this page? I know there is no precedent, but no other name page that I could find has translations for the name in the article. However, the wikitionary.com entry for given names has translations. I think we should follow suit and keep the translations in wikitionary (since it's more of a linguistic matter, and this is an English wikipedia after all). They take up half the article and don't provide useful information for English speakers. --JRavn ^talk 13:34, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I came to this page specifically to find the foreign language equivalents of the name. Lagringa 09:14, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

The Comment:

"A Certain James Mclackland... GAY

Jim is an old time warrior princess, from the land of castlefields. he often finds himself riding dragons and battling off gypseys!"

Doesn't belong. 70.39.130.33 01:11, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Welsh

I'm very sceptical that 'Siam' is a Welsh name --- the only forms of James in Welsh that I've ever heard of are Iago and Jâms. Gareth 12:35, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Jacob to James?

I thought there would bw something in here about how Jacob became James in English. Anyone? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Armandtanzarian (talk • contribs) 03:12, 11 December 2006 (UTC).

It was here. Someone removed it. I rescued it from history. I thought that I had sourced it to the OED, but it seems to have been chopped out too. --Kunzite 04:57, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

James Jahrsoerfer

"James Jahrsoerfer is a boy who enjoy, not eating but just looking at eggs. He is quite an interessting character." Considering the typos this looks like a load of crap to me with no context whatsoever. Beleted! - Green Gecko

This article is subject to frequent vandalism of that nature. It's best to just revert. --Kunzite 06:40, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Rewrite

I have majorly rewritten the page. It was way too long, hard to skim through, and had information not approrpriate for a dab page. So, here's what I did:

• Moved the etymology, comments, cognates, categories, and interwiki links about the name "James" to James (name)
• Removed anyone that I didn't think would be called "James" in everyday speech. I could have missed a couple, so please look through them. (But, for example, James Garfield is not "James" today)
• Removed all the King Jameses and Saint Jameses, relegating the maintenance of those links to the appropriate dab pages.

Please look over the changes and see if you have any suggestions, additions, removals, etc. I think the page is much more approachable and not as daunting. (I was curious if it was approrpiate to make a category for "People named James" and make sure everyone who WAS on this page is put in that category. But I havent done it, since there doesnt seem to be precedent for this kind of category with names like Michael or Justin or a couple other names I tested) - grubber 00:18, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

James the Just - a historical figure

I would like to see the historical figure :

• James the Just, the brother of Jesus, he was the author of the Epistle of James in the New Testament, the first of the Seventy of Luke 10:1–20 and the first bishop of Jerusalem.

... to be mentioned in the correct place: "Historical and political persons"

Thank You 87.160.238.128 (talk) 07:37, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

French surname?

Why does this page claim that James is a typical French surname? I am French and have never met anyone whose family name is James and is not British or American. Source please? Aresando (talk) 17:02, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

I also checked the list of famous people named James. 0/350 is French. I have edited the page to remove that claim.

PS: before you ask, there is a famous French opera singer named Marianne James. It is a stage name. Aresando (talk) 05:04, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

"James Groening" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect James Groening. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 May 3#James Groening until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. T*U (talk) 07:15, 3 May 2021 (UTC)