Alonso

This article is about the surname. For other uses, see Alonso (disambiguation).
Alonso
GenderMale
Origin
MeaningNoble-ready
Other names
See alsoAlonzo, Alfonso

Alonso is a Spanish name of Germanic origin that is a Castilian variant of Adalfuns.[1] The original Visigothic name Alfonso suffered the phonetic change of the phoneme /f/ into the mute /h/ in the Early Middle Ages (around 9th Century),[2] what eventually suppressed the sound /f/ from the name, deriving in the modern form Alonso. Due to the demographic particularities of the Iberian peninsula during the Middle Ages, this phonetic change was not uniform across the territory and the original form Alfonso also survived in different areas. Therefore, today both forms of the name coexist in Spanish speaking countries.

  1. ^ Grégoire, L. (1874). Diccionario enciclopédico de historia, biografía, mitología y geografía (in Spanish). Garnier Hermanos. p. 61. Retrieved 20 September 2018.
  2. ^ Lloyd, Paul M. (1987). From Latin to Spanish: Historical phonology and morphology of the Spanish language. American Philosophical Society. ISBN 978-0-87169-173-6.