this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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Could the names Ilya and Julius be related? (thebrainbin.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago by Auster@thebrainbin.org to c/linguistics_humor@sh.itjust.works
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Besides a woman's name, Ilya afaik is also the Russian word for a species of flower. But with the little I know of Russian, trying to approach the pronunciation to what I'd expect it to be, it sounds like the female form of Julius, Julia, if I was to pronounce by Norwegian logic, the language not being geographically too far from the Slav ones.

And it wouldn't be the first name I see that changes for some random reason. For example, to my knowledge, the male name Tiago comes from a long line of mispronunciations starting at Jacob/Jacobus.

So going by that, it makes me think, could those two names, Ilya and Julius, be related? Or would their phonetic similarity be a coincidence?

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

It would be theoretically possible that Proto-Indo-European picked a Proto-Semitic personal name or vice versa; both languages coexisted, and interacted a bit, as shown by the PIE word *táwros "bull" (see Latin "taurus") vs. PS root *ṯawr- "bull" (see Arabic ثَوْر ṯawr).

It could be also a PIE descendant borrowing the name for a PS descendant. Latin for example wasn't shy of borrowing even common words from Punic, like mappa "map" (Hebrew still keeps a side-relative of that as ⟨מַפָּה⟩ mappā, "cloth/map").

I just don't think it's the case for this specific pair of words. Ilya is cognate to Elias, it's clearly a Christian name, while Julia has been in Latin for longer than Christianity.

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