Wasn’t actually today, but it’s an interesting etymology. Old Arabian speaks “majus” because they lack a hard G sound, similar to Japanese lacking L sound
Also, for anyone interested, that means that the Magi who came to Jesus’ birth with gifts were Zoroastrian priests
I didn’t try to imply that we should start with arabic, or that that is the source of the current spelling, I left that arabic bit there because of the wiki page being Majus. I did try to be clear in the title: “derives from magush, the old persian name(…)”.
Ah, my bad there, I though you were implying that the reason why the English word has a soft G is because Arabic doesn’t have a hard G sound. Those are actually independent developments. Arabic actually used to have a standard hard G sound (and in Egypt it still does!), but it shifted to the J sound at some point (wanna say vaguely Middle Ages?).