pronunciation - Words starting with a 'gw' sound: how many exist? Where do they come from?

There seems to be only a few words starting with the 'gw' sound, though the only ones I can think of are proper nouns, for example, Gwyneth. Are there any non-name words starting with a 'gw'? Is there any relationship between a real 'gw' and a 'gu' pronounced as 'gw' (say, iguana)?

Answer

In the particular cases you mention, they're not related, though they potentially could be, sort of. I'll try and explain:

• the /gw/ of "Gwyneth" (and a few other names) comes from Welsh, which appears to have an alternation between /w/ and /gw/ at the start of words (so "Winnie" and "Gwinnie" are essentially variants of the same name); such variation occurs in other languages including Spanish, so e.g. "huevo" and "guevo" ("egg") are variants of the same word;


• the /gw/ of "iguana" is the result of a process in various Romance languages whereby a high vowel is automatically diphthongised with a following vowel-- this process occurs fairly automatically in French and Spanish. To to a Spanish speaker, the /gw/ of "iguana" isn't a special combination as such-- it's just the result of an automatic process that occurs any time "u" and "a" occur one before the other.

By these two routes, the combination has accidentally entered English in these words. However, arguably the processes are related: arguably a contributing factor to the [g] sound in the first case is diphthongisation of the [u] vowel.