Is that French nappa the origin of Napa Valley's name? All those vineyards, laid out like a big quilt...
Not according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Nap...nty,_California
The word napa is of Native American derivation and has been variously translated as "grizzly bear," "house," "motherland" or "fish." Of the many explanations of the name's origin, the most plausible seems to be that it is derived from the Patwin word napo meaning house.
"Orange" came from an Arabic "naranj" too...
I've often been interested in missing nuns, so thank you for putting this so neatly!
As I mentioned, Horowitz has a nice long list of words that you might not have guessed originally had a nun. So I'm sure I'll be back to this subject in the future!
Illegal and friends assimilated the n away in Latin already; the m of impossible and similar words is a partial example of the same thing. Native English words don't do this: we say unmake, not *ummake, though samwich for sandwich is frequent enough in speech.
You have a point - when I talk about a development in English, it often occured in an earlier language - like Latin. I'll try to be more specific in the future...
Commenting by HaloScan
