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To go back to real-world Spanish for a sec, I want to make sure I understand how it worked. I'm kinda new at this Romance history stuff. :) The word was /dEUs/ in CL; that went to /dEos/ in later spoken Latin, due to the /U/+/o/ merger (actually a height merger that also merged /I/ and /e/). Then, in Peninsular Latin, /E/ -> /ie/ and you get /dieos/, which from the general rules one would expect to have passed unchanged into modern Spanish. But I imagine that any trivocalic sequence is pretty unstable, and in this case there was a tendency to "cut the corner" of the tongue's /i/->/e/->/o/ journey. It eventually became a straight line diagonal from /i/ to /o/, bypassing /e/, and so you get modern /dios/. There are other examples of /ie/ -> /i/ during the Medieval period, but usually they're conditioned by a following palatal consonant, as with /sEl:a/ -> /sieLa/ -> /siLa/ "chair". Right? -Marcos