I don't speak Italian at all, but I was a bit surprised that the word "flame" in Italian is "fiamma" (IPA: /ˈfjam.ma/
) (to compare with flamme
in French, flamma
in Latin and llama
in Spanish). My superficial idea is that it went through the following evolution process:
flamma
-> fllamma
-> fiamma
I guess that Spanish has influenced the ll
to be pronounced as j
.
Question: Does this guess make sense? If not, how did fiamma
evolve from flamma
?