paul is a name that in its many variants illustrates one of the most hilarious things about european languages.

there's paul, pablo, and pavel/pavla

they all are from the same origin, yet the U, V and B are mixed up.

when you look at all of the different languages, including the cyrillic ones, you can see that the U, V and B are mixed up, in some languages the B is pronounced as V, in some, the B is pronounced as F if the next consonant is unvoiced also (eg, AVTO in russian and bulgarian, written АВТО).

the weirdest thing about it is that it seems like this mess originates from attempting to pronounce latin *script* in a non-latin tongue. like the spoken form was not how it traveled to some places.

similar kinds of transcription and pronunciation errors can be seen as the source of the phonetic rules and spelling rules between languages. many latin languages use a V where we use B in english, and use a B where we use a U in english. eg Pablo = paul.