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Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!
You asked for information about alternate spellings of the patronymic "Yan~ez". Here's what we've found.
Robert K. Spaulding [1] comments briefly on early Spanish orthography. At the beginning of the section he says that the new sounds that evolved out of Vulgar Latin presented spelling problems which were solved by 'scribes of the tenth to twelfth and even thirteenth centuries' in a variety of ways. Their systems survived until the time of Alphonso the Learned, whose scholars did much to standardize Spanish orthography. His later comments on variant orthographies can presumably be taken as valid for at least the 12th and probably the 13th c. Concerning the sound now represented by <n~>, he says that in Castile the competition was between <ni> and <nn>. This agrees exactly with your own observation and may justify <Yaniez> as a variant of <Yannez>.
Spaulding also says that in documents from Navarre, Aragon, and eastern Spain generally the early representation was <ng> or <gn>. Elsewhere we've learned that three sources of the sound in modern Spanish are Latin <nn> (anno > an~o), Latin <gn> (pugno > pun~o), and Latin <ni> as in <Hispania> or <senior> (<Espan~a>, <sen~or>). It appears that modern <n~>, which is simply a scribal abbreviation for <nn>, is from the first type; <gn> is from the second; and <ni> is from the last. Evidently <nn> won out over <ni> in Castile, and the Castilian orthography won out over all of the others.
We could not find a citation of <Yaniez> in use in period, but we find find some indirect support for this spelling. R. P. Diez Melcon [2] analyzes patronymics by their patterns of formation. It includes a section on patronymics in <-ez>; we found these relevent examples:
Nuniez (1208), from Nunnius
Moinez (1131), from Munnius
Yuaynes (1239), from Yuanno
The upshot is that while we don't have an example of <Yaniez> or anything exactly parallel, we have a clear statement (plus your own evidence) that <ni> is a genuine Castilian variant of <nn>, and we have some surname evidence showing its use. We also have evidence (in <Yuaynes>) for other variant orthographies for this sound in essentially the same name. It seems reasonable to suggest that <Yaniez>/<Yanyez> and <Yainez> may well be legitimate variant spellings of the patronymic in early 13th c. Castile, say, but that on the evidence available to us they would have been much less common than <Yannez> and its abbreviation <Yan~ez>.
Talan Gwynek provided the research for this letter.
I hope this letter has been helpful.
For the Academy,
Arval Benicoeur
References
[1] Robert K. Spaulding, How Spanish Grew_(Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press,
1943)
[2] R. P. Gonzalo Diez Melcon, "Apellidos Castellano-Leoneses: Siglos
IX-XIII, ambos inclusive" (Universidad de Granada, 1957).