Warranty/Guarantee, Warden/Guardian, reWard/reGuard
Have you ever wondered why English has some very similar pairs of words, but with one having a ‘gu’ where the other has a ‘w’?
The origin of this phenomenon turns out to be quite interesting, and requires understand a little bit of the history of the French language, and its influence on English:
French evolved from the dialects of Latin spoken in Roman France. These dialect had several borrowings from local Germanic languages like Frankish.
In most dialects of French, Germanic words starting with a ‘w’ shifted to start with a ‘gu’.
However the Normans, who were descended from settled Norsemen, spoke a French dialect with a stronger Germanic influence: Norman.
Norman either retained the Germanic ‘w’ sound, or reversed the shift to turn the ‘gu’ back into a ‘w’.
In 1066, the Normans invaded England, and the Norman language had a profound shift on Old English, turning it into Middle English, which was full of Norman borrowings.
Long after Normans had been absorbed into English culture, English continued to take in French loan words. But now, they came from the dominant central dialects of French.
So sometimes we got the same word from the Normans, and then Later from other French dialects, with a slightly different spelling and phonology.
If the Norman word started with a ‘w’, the other French word started with a ‘gu’.
These are interesting examples of linguistic doublets: pairs or groups of words within a language that are related but have taken different routes to reach their current form.
Some similar examples include wile vs guile, and wallop vs gallop.