Those come from latin lex, rex, so possibly more related to sloppy handwriting getting standardized?
Edit: on the other hand, x used to be read /j/ (e.g. Quixote, Mexico), so also possibly lex —> lej —> ley
Edit: on the other hand, x used to be read /j/ (e.g. Quixote, Mexico), so also possibly lex —> lej —> ley
No, in fact they descend from the accusative forms, lēgem and rēgem. I don’t know much about the precise evolution, but g → y strikes me as a perfectly normal sound change, especially before /e/. Looks like it happened in the other Romance languages too: compare French roi, Portuguese rei, Italian re, etc.
Compare "Dag" (low German)"; Saterland Frisian "Dai"; West Frisian "dei"; "dag" in Old Saxon, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish); Faroese and Icelandic "dagur"; Gothic "dags"
d -> t is one of the major High German consonant shifts. Other examples of the d -> t shift is Vater vs. vader, fader, father (from Middle English "fader", so there the "th" in modern English is also not from the German)
Others prominent changes around the same time included e.g. p -> ff (Schiff vs. ship, schip, ship, skip, skib in other Germanic languages) and /t/ -> /t:s/ etc. - compare Zwei with two, to, två in other Germanic languages.
Very few of those changes made it into English, either Old English at the time, or later - English in that respect tends to be closer to Low German than to current standard German.
(as an English speaker - or a speaker of basically any other Germanic language -, to learn German having a rough idea about the consonant shift is a major help in figuring out German vocabulary - you'll find a lot more German words are "close enough" to be understandable once you recognise the changed sounds)
The softening of the "g" into "y", "j","i" is also a feature in other Germanic languages for many other words. E.g. in modern Norwegian "deg" (the object form of "you" / "thee" which is necessary in Norwegian still) can be pronounced both with a very pronounced g, and with a tiny shift of the tongue to soften it into a i/j. In English we have "dough" where the "g" has disappeared, but was still there in Old English, and where in modern Norwegian you again can choose /dɛɪːɡ/ or /dæɪ̯/. They all, again, share a root in Germanic with the German, where we again have a strong indication the other Germanic languages evolved their current versions from Germanic rather than German in that the German got a "t" from the consonant shift: "Teig" (vs Low German "Deeg")
Is it? Aren't the descendants of the ablative mostly -amante adverbs and e.g. conmigo? The wiki article of Ablative Case doesn't even mention Spanish.
Got any other examples of ablative in Spanish?
In the case of Mexico they were transcribing a word from indigenous people.
In a bunch of Spanish words coming from Latin, it was often from Latin double S. Eg. páxaro, from Vulgar Latin passarum. I can also think of cases of this sound coming from Arabic, eg. modern ojalá was once oxala which is a cognate with "inshallah", note the sh sound.
Sometime around the 1500s this sound changed to /x/ and they changed spellings of a few different sounds whose values had shifted over the centuries. X had merged with a sound they spelled with J, derived from Latin words with J in them.