Why did some Hebrew words beginning with Yod become transliterated into Latin as "hi?"

Question

This is something I noticed when reading some different older English bibles. Often times, it seems there was originally & traditionally a digraph (I guess) ⟨Hi⟩ where now the more proper letter ⟨J⟩ is used:

• Hierusalem (Jerusalem)
• Hiob (Job)
• Hieremias (Jeremiah)
• Hiacobos (Jacob), etc.

On one of these occasions, I saw that the Greek transliteration was probably pronounced as /hi/, so I assume it would have been a similar case for greek, but that would spawn the question of if that was pronounced /j/ and why it was there, and that is off-topic, so I am only explicitly mentioning it also for that reason of that's on my mind too.

Answer 1

Greek had the /h/ phoneme only at the beginning of a word, and it was marked with a diacritic (rough breathing sign) rather than with a letter. Koine Greek lost the /h/ phoneme and early manuscripts (such as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus) didn't mark rough breathing, or had it added by a later scribe (according to their respective Wikipedia pages), and so they don't offer evidence on how it was pronounced. Latin, which did have represent /h/ with a letter, would translate the rough breathing as "h".

Since readers unschooled in Hebrew had to guess for themselves whether the Greek word began with a rough breathing mark, both Ierousalem and Hierousalem, Ieremias and Hieremias existed in Greek.

Alexander Sperber wrote an article with a list of Greek transliterations (Septuagint and Origen) and Latin transliterations (Jerome) of Hebrew words. Since the Greek words don't mark breathing, only the Latin is helpful here. Jerome uses i/j for this letter; he never uses "hi" to translate words beginning with Hebrew yod (his full list is on p. 124). Jerome, who learned Hebrew, certainly would have had no doubt as to the correct pronunciation.

Apparently, the rough breathing interpretation won out, because that was what was borrowed into Latin. It certainly helped that hieros meant "sacred" in Greek (that point made here), which would have been meaningful to Christians who considered Jerusalem a holy city, but also could have been a simple hypercorrection. Notably, names such as Iesous are never (to my knowledge, at least) spelled Hiesous, which might support the theory of a hieros misunderstanding, but if names such as Hiakobus are indeed attested, I can only explain this as having been made by analogy to words such as Hierousalem.

So the "hi" spelling in Latin Hierusalem, Hieremias, etc. would have necessarily come through Greek, and not directly from Hebrew.

Answer 2

This may have to do with the evolution of the pronunciation of certain letters.

J. A. Picton (?) writes the following in Notes and Queries 7:4 (1887) p. 22, referring to the word "jubilee":

Our modern pronunciation is entirely out of accord with the ancient. It will be seen above that in our early English versions the initial letter is i, representing the Hebrew yod. This marks a transition taking place in the pronunciation of j, which, being merely an initial i or y, was intermingled in the old dictionaries with the vowel i. It is not easy to determine the precise period when the semivowel j, with the sound of initial y, hardened into the palatal j. In Italian a change in the spelling took place. Lat. justus, jubilœus, became givusto, giubeleo. In English we contented ourselves with altering the pronunciation, which, however, gave rise to some inconveniences. Hallelujah is a poser to many rustic musical amateurs. I suppose, however, that we shall never get back to the Hebrew yobel or the old English iubely.