The word ban connects to guard, and guard connects to vanguard.  Since the Mongols had advanced army and early contact with the west, I thought the word originated from them.  And many languages like Spanish and Japanese have no v sound, so the people originally created and used the word vanguard, I thought, could have mix up the sound of the source language.

When I was small, I couldn't pronounce hya.  I used to say shakuen instead of hyakuen (a hundred yen).  This habit of speech came from the Eddoko (The people of old Tokyo).  My grandfather and mother spoke the Tokyo dialect although they could say hyakuen because they were adults.  And they were the primary influence to my speech.

Then I saw the following descriptions from online dictionaries:

• 1. Earlier forms vandgard and (a)vantgard, derived from old French, avan(t)garde from avant (before) + garde (guard)
• 2. Middle English vauntgard, from Anglo-French vantgarde, avantgarde, from avant- fore- (from avant before, from Late Latin abante) + garde guard - more at advance

Date:  15th century

So I thought maybe vanguard was meant to be banguard spoken by the people whose pronunciation had no v sound.  And as I mentioned in my previous blog, to me, banguard meant guard-guard.  I thought this redundancy was a similar phenomenon as saying Daitokuji Temple or Hachimangu Shrine.   Daitokuji Temple means Daitoku Temple Temple and Hachimangu Shrine means Hachiman Shrine Shrine.  Ji means temple, and gu means shrine.  So we tend to add the same meaning and make it longer for nuance or out of insecurity, ignorance, or maybe laziness.    

So avan(t)garde  to me means front-front-front to express the foremost front like "Far out."  And to me, far and out are redundant, too.  In addition, to my surprise I found the words, "avantgarde pioneer" while searching a web article yesterday.  Wow.  Avantgarde and pioneer together!  That's quadruple redundancy.  I am amused.

With no exception, Japanese use a lot of redundancy.  For example, we often use the word 留守番　(rusuban) when our house was going to be empty, and someone had to stay home to watch it.   留(stay)守(protect)番(guard).  I look at the kanji closely.  They all mean the same thing to me.  If nobody stays home, we can't protect our house, and merely staying home can protect our house in some degree because most small time burglars won't come in if someone is inside.  In effect, we are guarding home by merely staying.   So we simply use a verb form of 番(ban) to mean  "I'm guarding, or staying, or protecting ."

But if Roman created the word abante on their own without any influence from Mongolian or Chinese, then it is coincident to have a similar meaning.  If it is coincident, I wonder how those words were developed in two cultures, and why abante was divided for pronunciation between b and a as ab-ante.