It just confounds me that ジョン (John) turns into ヨン (Yon) when the name is lengthened to Jonathan. Is there an actual linguistic reason as to why the Jo becomes a Yo?
If anyone is curious for the context behind this, I was looking at the manga for Shin Megami Tensei IV and one of the characters is named Jonathan... Which is spelled like Yonatan in Japanese.
That's weird, because from what I can tell it's usually spelled ジョナサン. But it seems like the biblical name Jonathan came from was Yonatan or Yehonatan. (Also John is actually short for Johannes, not Jonathan that's why there's an h.) My guess is since it's a manga it's not actually Jonathan, translaters often change names like that for some reason (unless it's shown in the manga spelled in English).
That's weird, because from what I can tell it's usually spelled ジョナサン. But it seems like the biblical name Jonathan came from was Yonatan or Yehonatan. (Also John is actually short for Johannes, not Jonathan that's why there's an h.) My guess is since it's a manga it's not actually Jonathan, translaters often change name like that for some reason (unless it's shown in the manga spelled in English).
The game does have strong biblical themes, so it would actually make a lot of sense if the Japanese manga writers and game developers opted for ヨナタン to match the overall theme of the manga / game. (The "Yonatan" spelling is universal across the video games its manga adaptations.)
I also looked at the wiki and it seems like the developers also chose Yo- to allude to another character whose name starts with Yo-. This forum was way more interesting than I thought it would be.
