Michael Idov (“a Latvian American novelist and screenwriter”) has a NY Times piece (archived) on a subject that has often exercised me: the terrible names English-speaking authors come up with for foreign protagonists.
[…] Spy stories remain one of the most popular windows onto the way the world works.
Too bad the glass in that window is pretty wavy. Let me illustrate. The Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera “Madama Butterfly,” which gets rightful flak for its bumbling Orientalism, is almost as hilariously clueless about the United States. The villain’s name is Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton — the modern-day equivalent would be something like “Ronald Reagan Microsoft.” Americans may not be used to this kind of naïveté about their own culture, but it’s exactly the level of thought many Western writers of spy novels and films bring to their attempts at naming Eastern European and Baltic characters.
The 1984 novel “The Hunt for Red October” is a classic for a reason, and Tom Clancy’s geopolitical research is rock solid, but trust me when I tell you that no Lithuanian has ever been named Marko Ramius. The word “ramus” means “peaceful,” which fits the character, but the only remotely common name in which it shows up is Ramintas. Arkady Renko, the protagonist of Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park” and its sequels, sounds as if he lost the first half of a Ukrainian surname (Titarenko? Limarenko?) in a gruesome accident. His journalist lover is often referred to as Tatiana Petrovna, a case of patronymic misuse that makes it sound as though he’s dating his schoolteacher.
Then there are lesser sins — names that aren’t wrong, per se, just odd. The parents of Dominika Egorova, the main character in Jason Matthews’s “Red Sparrow” trilogy, have certainly made a bold choice for their daughter’s name. (In Russia the film’s dubbers changed it to the more traditional “Veronika.”) In 2002’s “The Bourne Identity,” Bourne’s Russian alias is Foma Kiniaev. Foma is a more traditional name than Dominika — so traditional, in fact, that it is mostly associated with 19th-century peasants. Imagine, in a serious spy film, a foreign agent producing a passport in the name of, say, Jebediah Hoggs. (The Cyrillic characters in the same passport transliterate to “Ashch’f Lshtshfum,” but that’s for the film’s prop master to live down.)
He has a simple remedy: “Consult native speakers. Every time.” The thing is, I don’t think his examples are very good. Pinkerton is a perfectly normal English surname — I have no idea why he thinks it’s comparable to Microsoft — and Americans in the 19th century were very fond of naming their kids after founding fathers (I myself have an ancestor named George Washington Dodson). It may well be that Ренько/Renko is not an actual Russian/Ukrainian surname, but I’ve seen far sillier ones in English novels. (I don’t know whether the same is true of Ramius; Lithuanian-speakers should feel free to wade in.) I wish I could locate some of the truly absurd cases I’ve seen, but it’s definitely a real problem, and I wish authors would, as Idov suggests, consult native speakers.
A tv show that was very popular in the 1970’s featured a character named Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, who was commonly referred to by his nickname, but not because his legal name seemed implausible. Wikipedia turns up lots of once-notable others with the same pattern, like Benjamin Franklin Shively, who represented Indiana in the U.S. Senate as of 110 years ago, or, for a more villainous example, Benjamin Franklin Cox, Jr., a Klansman convicted of being an accessory to a high-profile racially-charged murder that occurred in Alabama in 1981. That said, I would have paired the B___ F____ beginning with a more common or low-profile surname. The name of federal judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz (1905-2001) apparently struck some people as incongruous because of the seeming ethnic mismatch, but I do not think Pres. Lincoln (or for that matter Ben Franklin) would have objected and of course in a U.S. context no one thinks Hebrew-origin first names are mismatched to WASP surnames.
It’s an excellent topic.
Mr. Biswas, in V.S. Naipaul’s novel, periodically tries his hand at fiction writing. His handsome hero is named “John Lubbard”.
Slightly better, Stadt Mahagonny.
Mr. Biswas, in V.S. Naipaul’s novel, periodically tries his hand at fiction writing. His handsome hero is named “John Lubbard”.
Great example!
Descendant of both George Washington Calvert and Benjamin Franklin Iv(e)y here.
A reverse example: I’m reading Aksyonov’s Остров Крым, translated by Michael Henry Heim as The Island of Crimea, and in ch. 5 he introduces a couple of film producers from Manhattan named Лейб Стокс (Leib Stokes) and Фрэнсис Букневски (Francis Buknevski). Heim decided the latter must be a Polish name and rendered it Bukniewski (though that does not seem to be an actual Polish surname); he gave up on “Leib” altogether and changed it to the more plausible Irving.
Pinkertons reportedly knew who the original safecracker Yegg was,
though who am I to judge?
Also… a Lithuanian named Marko? Wouldn’t that be, like, indeclinable? Or some decidedly non-nominative case form?
Dominika is fairly common in Poland, because Catholicism.
The real Irving Stokes (I mean, I assume its his birth name and not a stage name …): https://boldjourney.com/meet-irving-stokes/
One of my great-great-grandfathers was Andrew Jackson SURNAME, thus named in 1826 so maybe a bit ahead of the curve. I would suspect that the five most common such first/middle-name combos in a U.S. context are (alphabetically by middle name) B. Franklin, A. Jackson, T. Jefferson, A. Lincoln, and G. Washington, although I don’t have a good intuition about the internal rankings of that group. Woody Guthrie was of course more formally Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, but I don’t think that one was as common – Roosevelt became common as a first name but I dunno about as part of a similar combo. I doubt Ronald Reagan SURNAME ever got much traction, but starting in the 1990’s Reagan, freestanding, became an increasingly common girls’ name in the U.S., peaking at #97 for year-of-birth 2012. (OTOH “Ronald” for boys continued a slow-but-steady decline during the later 20th century from being very popular indeed at mid-century, but when you look at the smooth trendline you can’t pick out Reagan’s years in office which seem to have neither hastened nor slowed the downward slope.)
My favorite “presidential” name is that of Chester Arthur Burnett (1910-1976), better known by his stage name Howlin’ Wolf. He was born in Jim Crow Mississippi at a time when blacks were almost entirely excluded from voting and the whites who did vote there voted overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates (90.1% in the 1908 presidential election, leaving the nationally-successful GOP candidate to divvy up the remaining 9.9% in Mississippi with the Populist and the Socialist). But if a black family passive-aggressively named their baby boy for a not-particularly distinguished Republican president not well thought of by the local whites, they were just being patriotic or whatever and could get away with it. See also his fellow Mississippi-born bluesman McKinley Morganfield a/k/a Muddy Waters.
One of Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse stories features a Japanese character called Yukio Lee. At no point is it suggested that he is not simply Japanese, as opposed to part-Korean or Chinese or something (neither of which would make any sense in the context of the story, anyway.)
I never quite recovered my respect for Dexter after reading this. (It was already somewhat battered by the hit-or-miss classical references liberally mixed in to show how Intellectual Morse is. And seriously, nobody at all at Oxford when he was an undergraduate knew what his actual given name was? How would that work, exactly?)
It was from this very site that I learnt that the remarkable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hanna_Watkins
was named after
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hanna
Who, in turn, was yet another gringo Alonzo (as in Church.)
A less secular/patriotic example of the Benj. Frank. SURNAME pattern is the reasonably common “Francis Xavier SURNAME,” perhaps most stereotypically with “Irish-sounding” surnames but also found with other surnames of other appropriate ethnicities.
I think sometimes writers do name characters Francis Xavier SURNAME as a somewhat lazy way of making it impossible for the reader/viewer to miss that this is supposed to be an Ethnic-Catholic Character.
Not just English-speaking authors, I can assure you. The examples from Norwegian are too many to remember or keep track. It’s such that I’ve remarked it to my wife on the rare occasions when it’s flawless even to my amateur’s eye. So I’ll lead us slightly off topic again:
Arild Rypdal, author of a popular series of spy thrillers in the nineties, built entire books on the premise that Iranians were Arabs and spoke Arabic.
Andreas Bull-Hansen, in his internationally successful Jomsviking series, employs an unusual naming convention where Norse names are projected to their forms in the modern national languages of the respective characters, leaving the impression that the languages, and Icelandic especially, were already diverged. He also seems to consider a patronymic as a surname. Tormodsson-guttene “the Tormodsson boys” rather than Tormodssønnene “the Tormod-sons”, if I remember correctly.
Instead of Marko, you would expect in Lithuanian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Morkus (including handy declension chart giving you seven different case endings).
One of my ancestors was born in New England around 1820, and was given the name Confucius! (We are, as far as I know, as lily-white as the pure driven snow [or however that expression goes]; not an Asian in our family until the 1970s.)
To make it even odder, his middle name was some obscure Latin (as in ancient Roman) name I’ve never heard: “Isaurius” or some such. “Confucius Isaurius Balch” — now that’s a name that’ll turn a few heads!
I’m pretty sure no Arabs, mad or sane, have been named Abdul Alhazred. But we could probably do attempts at Arabic names for a while.
Robert B. Parker’s Chicano gangster Chollo is probably an error for “Cholo”.
Not exactly foreign, but there’s a novel called The Physician, by Noah Gordon, whose hero is a physician named Rob J. Cole who lived in England. In the 11th century. (Apparently there are two sequels about a Dr. Rob J. Cole in later centuries.)
I had trouble believing Nero Wolfe was Montenegrin, but I’m willing to learn if that was plausible.
@J. W.: The very mildly funny thing about Hawkeye’s name is that it combines Benjamin Franklin with Franklin Pierce. (For some of you following abroad, the latter was our president from 1853 to 1857).
OK, Confucius Isaurius Balch is the best name I’ve heard in many a long year. It should definitely be snapped up by a novelist.
In antiquity, Isauria was a district of Asia Minor.
My favourite name of an actual composer is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912). On his father’s side, he was of African descent.
Mr. Balch’s middle name was apparently Iciliana (unless of course I found the wrong Confucius I. Balch).
The very capable Emperor Leo III was called “Leo the Isaurian”, Λέων ὁ Ἴσαυρος, at least by those who didn’t call him ὁ Σαρακηνόφρων.
Talking of Africans,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay_(Nigeria)
was the son-in-law of the remarkable pioneering African linguist, explorer, missionary and eventually, Anglican bishop, Samuel Ajayi Crowther.
He was presumably named after the ghastly* British Whig.
* Yup, ghastly.
He meant well; he really did.
Oh! “Abou Ben Adhem”.
Idov should have consulted a native speaker for his English examples. Maybe he thought an editor would have intervened?
German supermarket Lidl has food specials for different ethnicities on different weeks. My theory is that the authenticity of the food is proportional to the authenticity of the own-brand name. For “American-style” foodstuffs the name is McEnnedy.
One factor favouring nonsense names in general is to reduce the danger of getting sued for libel (fiction) or passing-off (retail). Which at the opposite extreme may also give a boost to extravagantly famous historical names.
Charles Dickens was the master when it came to creating more-or-less plausible yet actually impossible English surnames.
@Jerry Friedman: Yes, Iciliana — thank you! I couldn’t find that webpage when I looked. His gravestone says “Confucius I. Balch”.
I just remembered the novel and movie Shōgun. The Daimyō was called “Toranaga”. Come on, “Tiger-Long”?? I might (just barely) believe it if it were his “first” name （名）. But as a family name? Highly unlikely.
I gather the TV series is supposed to be very good. The novel is just plain awful, if you know anything at all about Sengoku period Japan. I imagine it might be enjoyable enough if you didn’t. I suppose there is some fun in working out who the various characters are supposed to be based on (Toranaga = Ieyasu etc.)
There’s a reasonably good historical novel about the actual William Adams: Richard Baker’s The Needlewatcher.
@Jerry Friedman: “unless of course I found the wrong Confucius I. Balch” — Haha, didn’t catch this at first. Yes, there are a couple of Yankees named Confucius on my block alone. And a Mencius a few miles down the road!
@David Eddyshaw
Yes, the book was terrible — I couldn’t finish it, I guess because I know too much about Japan. And Clavell’s lame attempts at humor, such as “if this foreign devil doesn’t want a girl [for sex], maybe he wants a duck”. Or words to that effect. Just silly.
I get unreasonably mad at Downton Abbey‘s “Kemal Pamuk,” the Ottoman diplomat who Lady Mary sexed to death early in season/series 1. Not only set at a time when Muslim Ottomans would not have had European-style last names, clearly Julian Fellowes had only ever heard of exactly two Turkish people: Kemal Atatürk and Orhan Pamuk. It’s like a Black American character named “Oprah X” had visited the manor.
There are the famous MLB players Bobson Dugnutt, Sleve Dichael, Dwigt Rortugal, etc.
Also, how can I not mention Bobson Dugnutt of MLBPA Baseball ‘94?
Sniped by Will!
I get unreasonably mad at Downton Abbey‘s “Kemal Pamuk,” the Ottoman diplomat who Lady Mary sexed to death early in season/series 1.
That takes me back! Yes, I didn’t know whether to be more annoyed or amused by that.
Speaking of Pres. Chester Arthur — and who isn’t? — I learned not long ago of his grandson, Chester “Gavin” Arthur III, bohemian, bisexual sexologist, astrologer, and all-around proto-hippie.
It struck me that “Idov” wasn’t a very Latvian-sounding surname. He is described elsewhere as a “Latvian-born American raised in Riga under Soviet occupation.” The label “Latvian-American” is perhaps unhelpfully ambiguous as to whether it applies to immigrants from Latvia who are not ethnic Latvians. The “under Soviet occupation” is a nicely nationalistic touch (denying the ontological legitimacy of the so-called Latvian SSR) but he has a social media post in which he sounds understandably grumpy about the fact that his parents were (if I’m reading it aright) denied Latvian citizenship after the occupation ended in the early ’90’s on the grounds that they were occupiers, even though (unlike many/most such folks) they had become fluent in Latvian.
I always wondered what the S in Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S. (“The Thinking Machine”) stood for. Were his middle names “Saint”, “Francis”, and “Xavier”?
As in Oliver St John Grogarty? (Rechristened by Joyce as Malachy St Jesus Mulligan.)
Years and years ago I translated some abominable scripts for a comics writer, all supposedly set in the US. Among other things, I was forced to tell him that “Melanin” was not a good name for one of the female characters.
(On the other hand, I see hilariously implausible “Italian” names in American movies and TV shows all the time, although of course none are coming to mind right now.)
Presumably there was a time when Pinkerton was instantly recognisable as a company name – it turns up without any kind of clarification in Agatha Christie books from decades later – but it’s still more like being called ‘Sainsbury’ or ‘Disney’ than ‘Microsoft’.
Anyway, the name comes from the original short story, written by an American. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Butterfly_(short_story)
There was some discussion in Denmark around the time of the acceptance of the new Baltic states into the EU, whether the “ethnic” Russians were being treated in a way that was not compatible with compliance to EU principles. (“Ethnic” in scare quotes since I don’t think I’d be able to tell the difference by sight, and as JWB says, in many cases language was not sufficient either. But I’m informed that the Soviet Union had a documented policy of displacing lots of citizens from the Russian SSR there, which naturally led to resentment. [And we shouldn’t talk, it was not easy being of German descent in Denmark post-WWII]).
It takes about 2 seconds of Googling to establish that Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton was a name that real 19th century Americans had.
For example:
https://de.findagrave.com/memorial/105804163/benjamin_franklin-pinkerton
Or
https://www.brethrenarchive.org/people/b-f-pinkerton/
Idov doesn’t have a good ear for American names apparently. Maybe as a Latvian immigrant he should have consulted some “native” Americans? (I am being facetious, but it is a bit ironic, one has to admit).
I always felt the name “Soprano” was a little too pat to be real, clearly meant to signify “Italian” but also easy for American viewers to pronounce and remember. Turns out it is a real Italian surname. That said, the name is heavily marked in Italy as Sicilian, and Tony’s family is supposed to be from Avellino in Campania so one could still niggle over it if so inclined.
The other funny thing about Idov’s article is that “Idov” seems to be a very uncommon name in the Russian speaking world. It’s not the author’s birth name (he was born Silberman Зильберман) but his mother’s maiden name. I couldn’t find any other examples of real “Idovs” other than the author’s mother. An American author who named a random character “Idov” would possibly get flack from native Russian speakers.
It does appear to be a plausible Bulgarian last name however.
If we approach the topic of bad naming practices in fiction broadly, fantasy opens up a wide range of discussion. I was spoiled by exposure to Tolkien at an early age, where any echo of a real-world language is carefully considered and meaningful. The typical modern fantasy? Not so much: vaguely Celtic-ish names, perhaps with a random apostrophe thrown in, seems to typical level of craftsmanship.
A redditor has explained that Bobson Dugnutt and friends were not random nonsense names but rather carefully crafted nonsense names.
@Lars: there is/was an older stratum of ethnic Russians in Latvia whose ancestors were already Latvian citizens before 1939-40 (in many cases they had been post-1918 refugees from the Bolsheviks) and at least officially their post-1991 Latvian citizenship was never in question. It’s the same as the distinction between ethnic Turks who were citizens of Cyprus as of 1974, on the one hand, and those who relocated to the Turkish-controlled part of the island from Turkey proper post-1974 without the permission of the ethnic-Greek “official” Cypriot government recognized by the EU. The latter (and their born-on-island children) are not deemed Cypriot citizens by the “official” government. If I understand it correctly, which I well may not, the “official” EU position is that the “official” Cypriot position on these folks is perfectly legally valid but they are nonetheless irked that the “official” Cypriot government won’t compromise it away as part of a broader compromise solution.
(Somewhere in there the old Baltic German families who had lived in Latvia for many centuries left and/or were driven out but as best as I can tell not very many of their descendants have a genuine interest in returning.)
the old Baltic German families who had lived in Latvia for many centuries
Well, to be precise they lived in Livland (Livonia) and Kurland (Curonia, Courland).
“Not so much: vaguely Celtic-ish names, perhaps with a random apostrophe thrown in, seems to typical level of craftsmanship.”
There’s an amusing fictional discussion of random apostrophes in fantasy-world names in the novel Reamde by Neal Stephenson. An argument is made (as I remember it) that the apostrophes either have to go, or be explained as indicating an omission (like the one in ‘didn’t’) or a phoneme such as a glottal stop.
On another subject, I tried to get the Gemini AI system to give me a list of improbable names for English characters in novels by Americans. Not much luck yet, but it came up with the incredible ‘Sir Leigh Teabing’ in The Da Vinci Code (a book the title of which tells you not to read it if you know that Leonardo da Vinci is correctly referred to as ‘Leonardo’ for short) and the plausible statement that American novelists use the outdated names Nigel and Neville as shorthand for Britishness; in fact anyone called either of those names (like Nigel Farage) will be in their 60s or older.
I was spoiled by exposure to Tolkien at an early age, where any echo of a real-world language is carefully considered and meaningful.
See the passage quoted from Tom Shippey in this 2022 post:
Nigel outdated among the young? A grievous onomastic loss. Do we still have Trevors in the younger England-born cohorts? The titular character in “Making Plans for Nigel” seems to be a teenager, but alas the song was released way back in ’79 and the young man who wrote it (Colin Moulding*) just turned 70 this month.
*More fully Colin Ivor Moulding, the internet tells me. “Ivor” is likewise a very non-U.S.-but-Anglophone given name that could be used for that sort of signal, if it’s still current. Of the two purportedly American Ivors, one was an immigrant and the other was born Kenneth but adopted Ivor as a stage name, and presumably a not-intended-to-sound-mainstream one since his reported enthusiasms included microtonality and Esperanto.
Now I want to know if there are works on microtonality in Esperanto.
@Jen in Edinburgh
I think it still is, but maybe that’s just me. Pinkerton plays a central role in at least one Lucky Luke album if memory serves, and they’re infamous for strikebreaking.
But I think it’s barely even like Disney, or at least not like Disney is now many decades removed from his death. Something like Gates or Swift is more analogous, even if it’s not called Gates Corporation.
Of course the Pinkerton agency was famous in the 1890s when the story was written, but Pinkerton was certainly felt to be an ordinary surname that happened to be well known because a particular Pinkerton had founded an agency, so yes, more like Gates or Swift. I don’t think we need to assume that John Luther Long was intending an allusion to the detective.
@hat, per the wiki article on that Ivor, he wrote song lyrics in Esperanto for compositions that I assume were microtonal and/or “xenharmonic,” to use his own coinage. A quick and non-exhaustive dig into youtube didn’t turn up any of this Esperanto singing – it may be that those interested in his legacy and posting their own recordings of his stuff stick to the instrumentals because they are enthusiasts for the xenharmonic approach without any corresponding interest in Esperanto.
Per the dataset from the 1990 Census, “Pinkerton” is/was the 4386th most common surname in the U.S., well behind Gates (#511) and “Swift” (#1397) but ahead of Disney (#8400) or Sainsbury (not in the dataset and thus not one of the 88,799 most common surnames in the U.S.).
I did not know until checking the wikipedia article that the album title _Pinkerton_ by the Nineties band Weezer (whose core fanbase is I think mostly a bit younger than me) was chosen to allude to M. Butterfly, nor did I know that its release was preceded by an unsucccessful attempt by Pinkertons, Inc. to enjoin it for alleged trademark infringement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(album)
@Jen and @Vanya: Thanks. I’d lazily assumed that “Pinkerton” was just a name that Puccini or his librettists thought was recognizably American.
The tendency of people to make the same mistake they’re criticizing is known in alt.usage.english as Skitt’s Law, after a late Latvian-American poster, oddly enough. I was also reminded of him by the above discussions of Russian Latvians, since once in a.u.e. I mentioned the chess champion Mikhail Tal as the most famous Latvian, and Skitt immediately responded, “Tal was Russian.”
For another amusing example of badly made-up names, there’s a play with Danish characters named Claudius, Polonius, Laertes, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern.
I’ve always thought of the name “Ivor” as Welsh (which it is), but if WP is to be believed, Welsh got it from Norse. Though there seems to be some question that Norse borrowed it from Celtic …
I expect that it’s really from the Konkomba ubɔr “chief.”
MacIvor* is a very Lewis surname (in spite of the poem about the train to Glasgow**), and Lewis is still quite Norse in its placenames at least.
*Usually pronounced MacEEEvor there as in Gaelic, although Mr MacIver in the poem obviously rhymes with driver.
**Where was the train coming *from*? ‘Donald MacBrayne’ is a pretty west coast name, but apparently he lived close enough to Donibristle*** (Dalgety Bay) to go to tea there…
*** Apparently Donibristle is where the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen were killed. This I did not know.
Way back in 1966 the Who recorded a song with the perhaps-not-quite-immortal couplet “My name is Ivor / I’m an engine driver.” I first heard that song circa 1979 and it must have been my first exposure to the name although I didn’t at the time know whether it was a first name or last name or how it was spelled and was not even confident it wasn’t a mumbled-and-not-quite-rhyming “Ivan.”
Those of us of a certain age and provenance immediately recognize Ivor as a Welsh name because of Ivor the Engine.
JWB: The song is “A Quick One While He’s Away,” and there’s a fantastic live performance recorded in 68.
@David L.: Yes, that’s the performance that was excerpted in the _The Kids Are Alright_ rockumentary viewed by lots of American suburban 14-year-olds like me when it was released in ’79.
God, they were great. What a climax that song has! And Keith!!
I was curious about the Absent-Nigel Problem referenced above so I found the list of the 100 names most commonly given to newborn boys in England in 2024 and tried to identify any such names that did not appear in the list of the 1000 most commonly given to newborn boys in the US in 2024, after disqualifying spelling variants* and anything that looked to my eye as a transparent nickname of a “proper” name on the other list. Results:
Strongest candidate may be #83 Rupert, which was last in the U.S. top 1000 for year-of-birth 1952 and was never anywhere close to the top 100 here. #20 Albie struck me as a potentially good candidate – it seemed so exotic that I wasn’t even sure it was a variant of Albert rather than I dunno maybe Alban. But wikipedia advises me of the existence of more American Albies than I would have supposed.
#43 Reggie doesn’t yet feel marked-as-foreign because Reginald only fell out of the U.S. top 1000 in 2021 (and was a top 250 name for some decades including my own generational cohort), with Reggie-as-such in the top 1000 until 1991.
#86 Toby likewise is impressionistically common enough in the U.S. at least as a nickname (not always for Tobias – sometimes more ad hoc than that) that it doesn’t feel marked-as-foreign.
I’m not sure if even Rupert is as good as Nigel/Trevor when it comes to the relevant signal. There were FWIW a bunch of other names in the England top 100 that sounded quite unusual to me but turn out to have crept into popularity in the U.S. recently without me having noticed. That said, naming your character Rupert may indeed successfully signal UK-ness to the American reader.
*There are some spelling variants, even if not currently in the England top 100, that are pretty strong signals of non-U.S.-ness, e.g. Martyn for Martin, but that’s a somewhat separate topic IMHO.
We have had this discussion before (in accordance with the First Law of the Hattery.) I remember that my impression that “Derek” was another “Nigel” name was refuted by US Hatters producing several well-known American Dereks.
@David E.: that’s why I threw caution to the winds and tried to find actual empirical data to work with …
Peak Derek in the U.S. was among boys born in the 1980’s, when it bounced around in a narrow range between 50th-most-popular and 57th-ditto. In my own cohort it was top 200, but not top 100. It has slid since the Eighties, but not all the way down – #258 in 2024 after dipping as low as #309 (in 2020).
I would go below the first 100 and look for names that appear to be “wrong sex” or just “odd”. For Ireland Enda and Lasarion (both male) and Gobnait or Assumpta/ Concepta (female) come to mind, maybe also Deirdre and Fiona (these names are relatively common in England, but probably marked). I doubt any of these names is particularly common in the U.S. We already talked about Ian in another thread.
The original Star Trek series featured Ensign Chekov and Officer Uhura, apparently because they wanted the multinational crew to have authentic-sounding names with positive connotations to the U.S. audience, and they didn’t know many qualifying Russian names or Swahili words.
(more complete explanation of “Uhura” at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyota_Uhura)
Well, a colleague’s last name is Robson, so Bobson as a last name seems plausible, and every last name can be repurposed as a first name in America, so it’s only a matter of statistics till the first first-named Bobson appears…
I’m impressed.
Oh, that reminds me of the black-and-white TV series that turned Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe into Sir Ivanhoe of Rotherwood. *facepalm*
How about Darren, though? (And Darrin. And Darrel and Daryl.)
That one’s become common in German-speaking places in the last 30 years.
“Fiona” actually suggests Scotland to me, though “Deirdre” certainly goes with Ireland.
I knew an Irish “Concepta” once. She bore it bravely.
The given name “Morag”* is quintessentially Scottish. My favourite bearer of that name finds that unCaledonians are determined to call her “Morgan”: not a bad name, mind, so long as you make clear that you are named after that excellent positive female role model, Morgan le Fay.
There are, of course, plenty of Welsh given names pretty much unheard-of anywhere else, including many that are quite common here; but that’s probably cheating.
* As a surname, Israeli, of course, including at least one famous academic. I wonder if there has ever been a Morag Morag?
Is this true?
(Emphasis added.)
Fiona may at present be more common (for newly born girls) in German-speaking lands than it is in Scotland, which underscores that in these days of globalization and mutability whether a name is cromulent for a particular geographical or ethnic origin is a question that may have different answers depending on approximate year of birth.
I suspect impressionistically that “Deirdre” in the U.S. is born disproportionately by women of Irish ancestry but by no means exclusively. It’s easy to find black ladies named Deirdre, for example. For the “I can’t believe you’re not Irish” thing to really work perfectly in the U.S. you may need a name like Dearbhla or Siobhan or probably anything else incorporating a “bh” in the spelling.
@Hat:
News to me. That wasn’t the Morag I had in mind, though she may well be estimable in her own way, and is no doubt dear to her own loved ones.
The name itself is not derived from the loch: they presumably just mean that’s why the monster is called Morag.
Mind you, the actual origin of the Gaelic name seems to be pretty unclear. It’s generally held to be connected with mòr “big”, and often said to be a sort of loan-translation of “Sarah.” Seems dubious to me … (and “big” does not strike me as a particularly cromulent name for a girl*, even in rugged Caledonia, land of salty porridge and tossed cabers.)
* Some Kusaasi women have the somewhat unexciting name “Mpoaka” M Puak “Female.” I mean, there are unimaginative names, and then there are really unimaginative names …
Mind you, I had a colleague called “Ndago” N Daug “Male”, who seemed perfectly happy with his name. And why not, indeed?
Mind you, I had a colleague called “Ndago” N Daug “Male”, who seemed perfectly happy with his name. And why not, indeed?
Charles and Carl might agree with him. Adam and Andrew seem to differ somewhat.
The name itself is not derived from the loch: they presumably just mean that’s why the monster is called Morag.
Ah, that makes more sense.
@JF:
Nero Caesar, too. Though that’s from the family name: the noble Claudii were divided into the Pulchri “Prettyboys” and the Nerones “Studlys.”
Interesting that there seem to be quite a number of boy’s names meanly “Manly”, but not so many girl’s names meaning “Womanly.” In fact, apart from the Kusaal one, I can’t think of any … I’m sure there must be more.
Low Saxon names include Wi(e)bke and Frauke, both simple diminutives of “woman”. They’re not rare regionally.
And then there’s Colleen, but I don’t know Irish coilín “girl” was consciously used as a name or just misunderstood as such.
And of course it goes the other way when a common-in-context female name becomes a generic way of referring to female, albeit typically with a slang/informal vibe.
I just remembered an X-files episode with a bunch of badly invented Norwegian names. It was set in a badly invented Norway, obviously.
(I watched X-files for the ludicrous plots and parodical settings off and on for a season or two, but I think I had to be told about this episode by friends with more stamina than me.)
“A Quick One While He’s Away,”
I forgot how dynamic they were on stage those days. I find it hard to believe they were able to make music with all that flailing and jumping round.
The Ivor I immediately think of is Ivor Davies (Australian musician), except that he performs professionally under the name “Iva Davies”. I think I prefer “Ivor”…
And of course it goes the other way when a common-in-context female name becomes a generic way of referring to female, albeit typically with a slang/informal vibe.
In Australia, that’s “Sheila”, a generic word for a girl or woman that isn’t appreciated by many, er, sheilas. This from Reddit:
I think it’s a generational/location thing, but many people consider it a bit sexist.
Sheila has historically OFTEN been used in the context of viewing women sexually (eg: ‘She’s a nice looking Sheila’ or ‘I took a Sheila home the other night’)
Before I get downvoted note I said OFTEN – not always! I know that’s not how it’s used all the time.
Outside of a sexual context it is OFTEN used in a context that’s dismissive of the woman you’re talking about (eg: ‘Some Sheila at the library was banging on about something’ or ‘Bloody Sheilas’)
Taking into account those two things, many people consider it a derogatory way to refer to women, even if it’s not intended to be.
I think Sheila can be charming Australian slang, and I personally would not be offended by hearing it used.
That being said, I would not like anyone I didn’t know to refer to me as a ‘Sheila’… just like I wouldn’t want anyone to call me a ‘Bird’ or a ‘Broad’.
For anyone interested, the octogenarian survivors of the Who are currently embarked on their nth farewell tour and this is absolutely positively going to be the last one, or so they say. It’s the 43rd anniversary of their original farewell tour.
As a further possible counterexample to David E.’s generalization, “Donna is an English-language feminine first name meaning ‘woman’ in modern Italian, and ‘lady’ or ‘mistress’ in classical Italian.” It has in recent decades fallen from favor in the naming of newborn U.S. girls but was once very popular, being in the top 10 for years of birth 1955 through 1965 and the top 100 from 1926 to 1976. Perhaps it was never as common across the Atlantic.
every last name can be repurposed as a first name in America
Any reasonably short British last name—maybe three syllables or less? And lots of Irish names, but not so many from other ethnicities. I was going to say Marjanovic could not become a first name in America, but https://www.mynamestats.com/First-Names/J/JO/JOKIC/index.html says there are about nineteen Americans given the name Jokic. No Doncices (Doncics?) but maybe all it takes is the right circumstances.
@DE: Another, much rarer name that means “man” is Enos(h).
David M.: Low Saxon names include Wi(e)bke and Frauke, both simple diminutives of “woman”. They’re not rare regionally.
I think the path went through pet names for daughters. Lillemor “little mother” is both a pet name and a female given name in Denmark and Norway.
Vibeke is a fairly common female given name in Denmark and Norway. It was used in a few families with German heritage, but I think the first real generation of bearers are around 70 today. My mother’s given name was Wenche, another German diminutive — and a cognate of wench. (She never liked it and changed it around the age of 40.). Here I think the youngest real generation of bearers are around 70 today.
Forgot to note re “Donna” that there’s at least one song by rather stereotypically English musicians that uses that female name as its title, but it’s sort of a parody/pastiche of an American musical style, so maybe a marked-as-American-sounding name was deliberately chosen? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_(10cc_song) That was co-written by Lol Creme and Lol as a nickname (typically but not always for La[w/u]rence?) is very Not-American.
I forgot how dynamic they were on stage those days. I find it hard to believe they were able to make music with all that flailing and jumping round.
That’s one of the main things they were known for back in the day! Case in point.
There were Donnas in Australia. I don’t know how common they were but there was one in my class at school (1960s). Definitely not so common now, although an online search finds plenty of Australian Donnas who are not so old as to have been born in the 1950s-1960s.
Probably my favorite performance of my favorite Who song. (And Keith Moon’s last.) Still flailing and jumping in 1978!
I think that the notably bland Kusaasi given names like “Male” and “Female”, are probably “placeholder” names given while the father was still consulting the diviner about the appropriate name for the newborn. If the consultation proves abortive for some reason, the temporary name sticks.
“Stranger” (and variants thereof) is another fairly common personal name of that kind. I used to know someone called “Sandow” Asaandʋ “Stranger-Man.” I think it can also be one of the several apotropaic names given to children after a series of miscarriages or stillbirths, like “Aruk” (“Pot”) and “Atampuri” (“Rubbish Tip.”)
Stranger-Man was born to play country music.
Re placeholder names, my youngest son was not named until he was two days old because my wife went into labor earlier than expected, we hadn’t “peeked” to see whether to expect a son versus daughter, and we had a daughter name ready to go but had not yet agreed on a son name. Hospitals and I assume other institutions are these days wary of nameless persons because they are harder for the Panopticon to track so for their administrative purposes at least he was Baby Boy Brewer during the interim while we were working out a name. I can’t remember if we had the middle name worked out before discharge from hospital or not but I think so. We did not initially have the middle name worked out for my first son and getting it officially applied to him a few months later turned out to be a paperwork nightmare, although apparently in some other U.S. states it would not have been.
My father has no middle name at all: the more surprising, as his parents and siblings all did.
Seth is common enough anglophone name. Hebrew שֵׁת šēṯ is unheard of, no doubt because it also means (in a very literary register) ‘butt’.
My father has no middle name at all
Nor mine, nor my mother, and my brothers and I are similarly lacking. But I discovered at a fairly late date that my father’s father had a middle name, and my younger brothers have given their children middle names.
I don’t know why the two middle generations were left lacking. Perhaps something to do with the fact that my parents were children of the depression, during which time middle names might have been seen as an extravagance not befitting their humble birth.
You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. As if Adam Sandler didn’t have enough to atone for already.
There was one Colleen in Ireland in 1911.
something to do with the fact that my parents were children of the depression,
My parents also; they both had middle names. I (eldest) got a middle name that was my father’s first; my sister (two years younger) got her mother’s middle name as first, and her mother’s first name as middle. Thereafter none of my younger sibs got middle names.
I think none of their kids got middle names.
And they have to write in the space where middle name is supposed to go “ONO” (one name only).
(Which I had already pointed out here on 7 July 2013… At any rate, that’s what a girlfriend with only one given name told me a very very long time ago)
I ought to have mentioned that my name, Graham, is now, like Nigel and Neville, one with Nineveh and Tyre, at least in England. It’s a repurposed Scottish family name, itself a repurposed English placename (Grantham); it was slightly popular in the 1950s when I was born; I am English with no Scottish connections.
I believe that Graham can be used as a girl’s name in America.
“I just remembered an X-files episode with a bunch of badly invented Norwegian names. It was set in a badly invented Norway, obviously.”
I expect that the badly-invented Norway wasn’t as nice as the real thing. It’s different with the badly-invented Britain that often pops up in films. I rather like the fact that you can see the Houses of Parliament from Tower Bridge, and park next to both of them with no trouble, and that everyone, even quite ordinary people, lives in vast flats, or pretty houses in Notting Hill, or charming country estates where it always snows at Christmas. You can always get a corner table in a good restaurant, naturally. If the film people would just get rid of the torrential rain used for all short scenes set in London (which has quite low rainfall) it would be a perfect place.
That is just hegemonic trinominalism.
Are there many American Alasdairs? (In any spelling.)
Fiona in that form was the invention of a Scottish author. I don’t know if there are many small Fionas about, but I know loads in their 30s and 40s – it’s not an old people’s name yet.
Deirdre is a bit old-fashioned in Scotland, but not markedly Irish in the way that something like Aoife or Saoirse would be. (The ‘original’ Deirdre came from Antrim to Argyll, I think.)
I believe that Graham can be used as a girl’s name in America.
Absolutely anything can be used as a girl’s name in America these days.
Reggie, in the American context, registers to me as African-American of a generation or three back. This likely is influenced by the baseball player Reggie Jackson and the American footballer Reggie White.
Surnames as given names: This definitely is not merely an American phenomenon. The earliest example I know of was Guildford Dudley, husband of Lady Jane Grey. The usual vector in later years was for a surname to be used as a middle name, which position is pretty agnostic about given or surname origins. Often it was the maternal surname. From there it might work its way into use as a given name, perhaps as a traditional name within the family. Nowadays it is pretty much a free-for-all, as in Jackson Pollock or the current baseball player Jackson Holliday: no one bounces off that as being a weird given name.
Naming choices: My wife and I agreed that if we had a boy, he would be named after the coolest man in the Middle Ages: William Marshall Hershberger. In the even, we had girls. Sadly, my wife drew the line at Eleanor Aquitaine Hershberger
FWIW Jackson Pollock’s full name was Paul Jackson Pollock. Jackson was not his mother’s maiden name but I don’t know whether or not it was a surname in his family tree a bit further up. So that’s consistent with the migration pattern Richard Hershberger notes but OTOH Jackson is a bad example because it’s a “presidential” name and thus patterns with much earlier things like Washington Irving (born 1783) or Jefferson Davis (born 1808).*
*I think Jefferson Davis was as responsible as Thomas Jefferson for the popularity well into the 20th century of “Jefferson” as a given name for boys among Southern whites but likewise responsible for skunking the name’s popularity among northern whites who had nothing against Thomas.
Featured review:
(There’s a ghost ship, so there’s probably a dead calm… just evidently not in Norwegian.)
Yes! That’s what I was too tired to express.
…huh. I didn’t know that one, and I have no idea what it’s a diminutive of.
Didn’t know that one either, but it’s part of a pattern: Hal, Sal, Lol…
Oh, that illuminates “the tomb of the prophet Shit” in southern Iraq…
*high five*
(Nobody on my dad’s side has one, as usual in those countries. Everybody on my mom’s side has one but literally never uses it, as usual in that country except for the many people who have two and never use them.)
Oh no, but it’s 1) limited to English-speaking countries and 2) much more common in the US than in the rest.
The one exception I can think of is Xavier, which simply wasn’t recognized as a last name. (Saints aren’t supposed to have those! And it’s Basque…!) BTW, this one lost the i in German, maybe because ie already means something else, but the remainder got a spelling-pronunciation anyway: /ˈk͡saːfɐ/.
Graham as a boys’ name in the U.S. has actually been slowly but steadily increasing in relative popularity over the course of my lifetime, with its ranking (129th-most-popular) for year of birth 2024 being its highest to date. I can’t say I’ve ever met a female Graham, and when you dig deeper the 2024 stats have 11 baby-girl Grahams to 2789 baby-boy Grahams, which suggests to me that at least some of the female ones may be miscoded males rather than atypical parental choices. The spelling variants Gram* (perfectly American) and Graeme (markedly Foreign) have never reached the top 1000.
2024 saw 257 US-born boys named Alistair, which was the 905th most popular option, plus outside the top 1000 a further 59 named Alastair and 30 named Alasdair. (The SSA database is wonderful but does not attempt to group spelling variants together.) Also 83 named Alastor, but I don’t know if that’s something other than a spelling variant of the same Scottish thing?
*The legendary doomed musical genius Gram Parsons was formally Ingram Cecil Connor III. Parsons was the surname of his stepfather, which he apparently used de facto from his teens but never formally legally took. His father Ingram Cecil Jr. was commonly known as “Coon Dog,” but some sources say this was not a nickname from his actual childhood in the rural/small-town South but was acquired during his time flying combat missions in the Pacific Theater during 1942-44. (Where he reportedly became both a “genuine war hero” and a “certifiable alcoholic” before being invalided back Stateside on account of malaria.)
Bobson Dugnutt has nothing on the recently called-up Red Sox prospect, Jhostynxon García! (aka “The Password”; I have checked my spelling several times and think I have it…) He’s from Venezuela. I have yet to see an explanation of how that name was derived…
He has a younger brother also in the Red Sox organization, Johanfran García – aka “The Username”.
Surnames as last names used to be a thing in Norway, stereotypically in Northern Norway. I can’t think of any present examples, but the practice is fossilized in patronymic surnames where the first element is a family name: Jentoftsen, Hagerupsen
The vector was indeed surnames used as middle names, or rather whole names given as Christian names at christening, often to honor the child’s godparent. That could be a relative, but it could also be a local dignitary.
Donna is not that unusual in the UK (my godson is married to one). However, I knew a recently-deceased lady of that name who must have been 80+, and it is unusual for someone of that generation.
Those US forms with box-per-letter for first and last name and one box for middle initial: I suppose NMIs just leave it blank, but no system seems foolproof.
Me: Wenche, another German diminutive
David M.: …huh. I didn’t know that one, and I have no idea what it’s a diminutive of.
I should have said that I think it’s Low German in spite of the (Norwegian) spelling. My mother told us it meant “little girl”, but I see that Wiktionary makes it a pet diminutive to various female names starting in Win-. That made me check the connection to Eng. wench, which I’ve always taken for granted. It’s dubious as well.
I had forgotten that they spoke Badly Invented Norwegian in that episode. I think I may be confusing it with a Norwegian episode of some other series. There was one where one of the localpersons (hero or villain, I don’t remember) was named Brundtland, a rare surname that incidentally was shared with Norway’s only international politician at the time.
I have always heard it pronounced with /v/, and that’s also what the pronunciation dictionaries say. The only living person I have ever heard of actually being called this is the writer/director/actor Franz Xaver Kroetz.
Completely unknown to me.
Is it helpful to mention that “dead calm” is good English for a situation of no wind at all?
Stephen Baxter (at the best of times not the most literate of SF authors), in his underwhelming novel Ultima, has alternate-universe Romans: unwisely, he has them speaking what he supposes to be Latin.
He actually credits someone in his introduction for helping with the Latin: either this helper knew no Latin either, or Baxter didn’t, in fact, consult him very much at all. No understanding whatever that Latin was an actual language with its own, like, grammar and everything. He doesn’t even understand that Latin nouns inflect for case.
A shining exception to the crapness of SF (and fantasy) attempts at Latin is Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series (unsurprisingly, given her day job.)
He actually credits someone in his introduction for helping with the Latin: either this helper knew no Latin either, or Baxter didn’t, in fact, consult him very much at all.
A certain linguistics book I have, quite good in some ways, is plagued with a horrendous number of typos (in English at least), several on every page, to the degree that I would not trust any of its data without rechecking with the original sources. Nevertheless, the author acknowledges someone for proofreading it. That suggests that the book was even worse to begin with, and that the proofreader didn’t do a very good job, and is not served well by being named.
A linguistic work on my shelves that it would be invidious to name (and which is otherwise pretty good), by an author whose L1 is not English, credits a colleague for help with the English. Almost every page has at least one locution which is either very unidiomatic or outright grammatically wrong. I suspect that the colleague decided that doing the job thoroughly might prejudice her friendship with the author … (“How many mistakes?!") Or maybe she hadn't actually realised how much work it would entail when she innocently agreed to review the English.
I wrote: “…that the proofreader didn’t do a very good job, and is not served well by being named.”
(I at first wrote “are”, agreeing with an implicit genderless “they”. Surely I am not the first, nor last.)
@DE: When I was subscribing to F&SF and Asimov’s in the last quarter of the last century, I developed a theory that SFWA rules required all authors using a real foreign language to make at least one mistake in it per story. One that stands out was earlier and not from a magazine: James Sallis started the afterword to his story in Again, Dangerous Visions with à les étrangers.
(Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson had flouted that rule, and Lucius Shepard did so during that time.)
I share your regard for Stephen Baxter.
I’m not surprised, actually. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it pronounced, so I may have made it up (long ago), and /f/ for foreign v is more widespread in the south anyway – Karl Valentin insisted on /f/ in his name, and I’ve met two people who pronounced me with /f/.
Edit: *facepalm* Xaver Forthuber on Austrian radio. Invariant /v/.
Ostensibly thanking someone by name for doing a job which was obviously very incompetent might sometimes be a conscious attempt at revenge.
“I magnamimously pretend that any remaining errors are my own.”
I recall a work by two authors, which after exculpating helpful colleagues who had read through the drafts and made useful suggestions and corrections, in the normal way, concluded “for any remaining errors, each of us blames the other.”
Speaking of striking names, Richard Hershberger at FB (talking about Ham Avery):
I was delighted to discover that the eminent Africanist W A A Wilson (whose excellent unpublished notes on Dagbani, I wish I’d stolen from the offices of GILLBT in Tamale when I had the chance), who in bibliographies seems almost always to get mere initials, was in fact William André Auquier Wilson.
I would happily change my name to David André Auquier Eddyshaw, but I am just not cool enough to carry it off successfully.
“Tamale (Dagbani: [ˈtamali]) is the capital city of the Northern Region of Ghana.” Is that how it’s said in English as well?
Ham Avery (and his impressively named father) are distant cousins of mine, we all being among the many thousands (probably tens of thousands) of descendants of James Avery (1620-1700), who came across the ocean from Devonshire as a boy and became an important early settler of Groton, Connecticut.
Avery was an established but not-too-common given name for American boys by the early 20th century and then got a boost in popularity in the early 1990’s after a fictional tv character gave birth to a fictional baby boy who was fictitiously said to have been given that name. But just a few years prior to that Avery had popped up in the top 1000 for baby-girl names and by the end of the Nineties baby-girl Averys had become more common than baby-boy Averys, with Avery entering the top 100 for girls’ names in 2003 and being in the top 20 from 2011 through 2021. (It’s down to #31 for 2024; top chart position among boys thus far is #181 in 2017.)
I don’t know what percentage of currently living Americans with the first name Avery are blood descendants of James Avery. Although it’s the middle name of some of my own closer relatives, but not any who are commonly referred to by their middle name rather than their official first name. My own Yale classmates eleven decades after Ham was an undergrad included one guy with the first name Avery, who had a seemingly posh background (home address on Park. Ave. in Manhattan, went to boarding school at Exeter). Didn’t know him at all well, but googling tells me he is “originating and executing investment opportunities in emerging markets and loan portfolios across Asia.” Apparently lives in Singapore.
@Hat:
TAMma-lay.
In Kusaal, the name (which comes from the Dagbani Tama Yili) would be Ta’ama Yir “House of Shea Nuts.” (Would be, as places outside the Kusaasi area don’t have actual proper Kusaal names.)
Avery
All people with the name “Sykes” are, I gather, related, and descended from the same ur-Sykes in England a few centuries back.
Big deal. All Eddyshaws. Eddishaws and Eddershaws are related too. In fact, everyone who spells it like me is descended from my great-great-grandfather. (As a clan, we are both prolific and subliterate. A eugenicist’s nightmare.)
Come you back, you Ghana shea nuts; come you back to Tamalay!
Great-grandfather, even. It was he who took to spelling the name with a Y. No doubt he had his reasons. Social climbing, probably.
the many thousands (probably tens of thousands) of descendants of James Avery (1620-1700)
The name Avery I know chiefly for weighing scales — West Midlands apparently, naming dates to 1818. Any relation?
@Jerry Friedman: ‘I had trouble believing Nero Wolfe was Montenegrin, but I’m willing to learn if that was plausible.’
I always assumed his original family name was Vukčić or Vučić (although that raises another question). But now I wonder whether there is a reference to the lexicographer Vuk Karadžić (Wolf Blackson, more or less). I rather doubt it given the unlikelihood of the names in The Black Mountain. Even Joyce’s Goosepond Prhklstr Kratchinabritchisitch has a more convincing South Slav name (although he might have had a Czech grandmother) than anything Stout came up with.
Thanks, Kim B, that’s interesting. It might be a bit odd that Archie never makes a snide comment about Wolfe’s name change, as far as I remember, though I don’t remember The Black Mountain well at all.
Edit: I see that the other question is about Marko.
That undersells him and his mustache.
(Origin story for his name is included.)
@AntC: The usual focus of American genealogists and the large amounts of (not always reliable) information they collectively amass is such that while they may sometimes trace the further ancestry of an ocean-crossing ancestor a few generations further back in the Old Country if the available records permit, they generally have no interest at all in tracing the subsequent descendants of the unadventurous kin of the ocean-crossing ancestor who stayed behind rather than coming to the New World. Perhaps there are more England-focused sources that would permit the ancestry of the Wm. & Thos. Avery who got involved in the scalemaking business in the early 19th C. back another two centuries or more to see if their ancestry intersects with that of the fellow who came to Connecticut, but I’m not personally familiar with those sources.
The Avery surname is claimed etymologically to derive (maybe as a patronymic of sorts?) from the given name Alfred or an earlier form thereof, which is the sort of thing that suggests to me that not all Avery lineages in England would necessarily converge on a single Ur-Avery.
Arne Saknussemm and other Vernian oddities came up here before.
Specifically, here (it’s a long thread).
Vanya : “It does appear to be a plausible Bulgarian last name however.” I would seem somewhat unusual but not _that_ much. (Idov)
Quite a few allegedly real names are wildly implausible. I mean, Georges Pompidou? “Macron”? (Why not “Tilde”?) Sarkozy …
To say nothing of Canaan Banana.
Reality is unrealistic.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic
“Иджов” — I guy I know from my home town. Also, maybe two dozen varietias in south-east. Инджев — famous journalist.
@DE: Well, there’s unrealistic and unrealistic. In the Netflix show Barbarians, a historical drama about the events around the battle of the Teutoburg forest, the Romans all seem to have either attested or plausible Roman names (at least, nothing jumped out at me). But the Germanic names… except those that are attested in the Roman sources, they are all either Old High German (800 years too early, including the OHG sound shift) or Old Norse (800 years too early and the wrong region). I don’t think there’s any chance that any Germanic man at the period would have been called Eigil…
Quite a few allegedly real names are wildly implausible.
Did LH ever mention the Name of the Year contest? In the 2010s it migrated from blog to Twitter and did not survive the Musk Leap Forward. The 2020 champion Mathdaniel Squirrel seems to retain the title in perpetuity.
@Hans:
I, Claudius and its sequel give its Germanic characters names which are modern High German too.
In his introduction. Graves credits Laura Riding for linguistic advice. The moral is that you shouldn’t ask your lover to fact-check you …
Well, possibly, that you shouldn’t ask Laura Riding to fact-check … anything.
(I do like the way that Graves has his German soldiers carry “assegais.”)
Re Egil,would Hans prefer a form like *Agilaz (or *Agiwaltaz)? I do not feel it is fair to say such a form would be NG only. Both elements of *Agilaz appear in WG as well, e.g., Egbert, Bertl (surname only) => *Egil.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/Agilaz
I also found Aegilius, but this would seem to be a (4C?) corruption of Egidius.
@DE: It’s about 40 years since I read Claudius, but in German translation. I cannot check what they did in the translation; if the book would generally go for established modern German equivalents (like “Herrmann” for “Arminius” and “Oktavian” for “Octavianus”), it would bother me less than the inconsistency in that TV show.
Assegais is a bit much, but probably for an Englishman of Grave’s generation, warrior races and their gear were interchangeable 😉
@PP: My objection is to the specific Nordic form of the name; a reconstructed form would have been fine, as would having consistently Modern High German forms – after all, the Germanic people in that series speak Modern High German.
(I have seen language nerds criticizing that they do that while the Romans speak Latin*; in those nerds’ opinion, they should have spoken 1st century AD West Germanic. But the choice of the producers makes sense, as Arminius and friends are the viewpoint characters with whom the viewers are supposed to identify; having them speak reconstructed West Germanic would have made that quite difficult. )
*) Unfortunately with an Italianate ecclesiastical pronunciation.
Alastor is demon name.
Indeed. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue should not be confused with Alastor MacIntyre’s Against Virtue.
And then, there’s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley
The 1st century is too soon for West Germanic anyway. I mean, Arminius’ father was called Segimer – that’s not West Germanic, it’s not Northwest Germanic, it’s not even Proto-Germanic yet!
(It lacks *ē > NWGmc *ā and even *e…i > Gmc *i…i. Modern German Si(e)gmar.)
IIRC Graves’ “assegais” was inspired by the actual loanword gaesum. I think it captures the flavor.
If I were writing about the Teutoburg Forest I’d name a character after myself, *Hroþagaisaz(?).
Hans: My objection is to the specific Nordic form of the name; a reconstructed form would have been fine, as would having consistently Modern High German forms – after all, the Germanic people in that series speak Modern High German.
This is close to my complaint about the Jomsviking novel somewhere above.
To me Alastor sounded less demonic and more pharmaceutical. “Ask your doctor if Alastor is right for you.”
mollymooly: some seriously heavy ones there, though I think funny yet relatively common surnames like Crump or Beaglehole should not qualify, unless the combined name is special.
Theodore “Ted” Terbolizard was once a candidate for Congress, from northern California. He wasn’t born with that surname.
Remember Reality Winner, burned by The Intercept?
@Trond: Yes, I was thinking of bringing up “Barbarians” when I read your comment, but didn’t have time then.
@DM: Something is seriously wrong with the assumptions on the chronology of Germanic when Proto-Germanic common developments hadn’t manifested yet so late but still show up in all attested branches. Only solution I see is that the Germanic attested in the Roman sources is a deviant branch that didn’t survive and therefore isn’t ancestral to modern German. But that would mean that Proto-Germanic has to be redefined.
No Allister in the top 1000 names, but we do have an Allister Chang on the board of education here in DC. I haven’t run across any American Al(a|i)s(d|t)airs.
Hans: Something is seriously wrong with the assumptions on the chronology of Germanic when Proto-Germanic common developments hadn’t manifested yet so late but still show up in all attested branches. Only solution I see is that the Germanic attested in the Roman sources is a deviant branch that didn’t survive and therefore isn’t ancestral to modern German.
Could we posit a phonologically conservative Intergermanic used by the Romanized elite that Arminius and his father belonged to?
I presume the vast majority of people named Alastor were named after the Harry Potter character.* Most of their parents did probably think it was a variant of Alistair, rather than the name of one of the Dukes of Hell. Rowling probably knew the origin of the name, but it would be hard to be certain. The character of Alastor Moody didn’t appear until after the series had jumped the shark.
*Jack Vance wrote three novels about the inhabitants of the Alastor Cluster, but the doesn’t seem very relevant.
Could we posit a phonologically conservative Intergermanic used by the Romanized elite that Arminius and his father belonged to?
So the simple people already said *Sigime:r-, but the elite clung to more archaic forms when speaking intertribally and with the Romans? I can’t exclude that. It would imply the existence of a stable intertribal elite that already existed for a couple of centuries; I don’t know whether that is confirmed by sources or archaeology. Other explanations that I now can think of are that the Germanic names or their most frequent elements were conventionalized on the Gaulish side before the sound change, like Germans calling the French Sun king Ludwig XIV, and the Romans took the names from Gaulish interlocutors, or that /e…i/ > /i…i/ was not a proto-Germanic development but only Common Germanic and hadn’t spread to the Southwestern area yet.
I haven’t run across any American Al(a|i)s(d|t)airs.
Alistair Cooke “host of PBS Masterpiece Theatre from 1971 to 1992”, and as in the BBC’s Letter from America. But then his naming was Brit.
Have we mentioned the pronunciation of “alastor”? I was taught to call Shelley’s poem “aLAStor.”
@AntC: Thus the muppet “Alistair Cookie,” an alter ego of Cookie Monster. Who did not bother to affect a pseudo-British accent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsterpiece_Theater#Alistair_Cookie
Alistair Cooke was reportedly born Alfred Cook and changed his name in his early twenties, although the source I’m looking at does not give his motive for doing so.
Alistair Cooke was of course an actual Brit. From Lancashire, even. QED. (None Britisher.) But a US citizen from 1941.
To Brits (among whom his “Letter from America” was very popular in its day) he sounded American.
Cooke did not sound particularly like an American to American ears, although I am open to the possibility that he sounded not-obviously-British to British ears.
Something is seriously wrong with the assumptions on the chronology of Germanic when Proto-Germanic common developments hadn’t manifested yet so late but still show up in all attested branches
It’s not unheard-of for already-distinct daughter languages to continue to develop in parallel in some respects.
Distinct but closely related neighbouring languages often share innovations, after all. The two dialects of Kusaal share a recent innovation in the construction of relative clauses, for example; and this, despite the fact that the original relative clause constructions in the two dialects differ enough that a system for “proto-Kusaal” cannot be fully reconstructed.
And the Germanic languages must surely have remained pretty close to one another linguistically for some centuries after the different changes took place that we use to identify the major divisions.
There’s also the scenario where the protolanguage had a non-contrastive distinction already, which may (or may not) then have become phonemic in a parallel way quite independently in various daughter languages, because it was kinda “waiting to happen.”
“Letter from America”
We read a collection of these in our 11th grade or so English lessons; I actually liked them.
@DE: All granted; but the Historical linguistics terminology I am familiar with maintains a distinction between “Proto-X” (last stage before the split into daughter languages, all features of which can be found in the daughters if not subsequently lost) and “Common X” (parallel developments that show up in all daughters but can be shown not to have been present in the protolanguage, either due to historical records or because they happen in different orders or have different outcomes in the daughters. The discussed Segimer would either presume an undifferentiated Proto-Germanic spoken over a territory from Western Germany to Scandinavia to modern Poland, only 400 years before Gothic shows up, or show that /e/ > /i/ before /i/ in the following syllable is NOT a Proto-Germanic, but a Common Germanic development (leaving aside for the moment Trond’s proposal of an archaizing elite register).
Proto-X … Common-X
It’s an issue that turns up a lot in Niger-Congo historical linguistics, with large numbers of distinct but related languages continuing to influence one another, and widespread multilingualism, so that even languages which are not closely related can significantly influence one another …
It’s the major reason why Bantu subclassification is such a mess, despite Comparative Bantu being the jewel in the crown of African historical linguistics. There’s a good reason why the standard system is basically just geographical.
There’s also the way that the proto-Bantu tone system (for example) seems to lead again and again to parallel developments even in widely separated Bantu languages, with no plausible way to ascribe them either to shared innovation or to borrowing. You just end up saying to yourself, “Yup, that’s a very Bantu development. Again.”
I wonder if the Germanic love of umlaut and kindred intersyllable vowel assimilations is not a kind of parallel to this. And of course, it’s all shared with Insular Celtic too …
AFAIK the very widespread Bantu fricativisation of stops before /i u/ can’t be neatly patterned in terms of shared historical innovations.
https://www.academia.edu/533498/Bantu_spirantisation_as_an_areal_change
One genre of “invented names” is alphabetical sets of given names selected in advance to be used by meteorologists and the general news media to refer to hurricanes or other major storms if as and when they actually happen. A friend who is currently traveling in Ireland saw a news item there about the just-released list of names for potential windstorms this coming winter (for the “Western Group” of nations, comprised of the UK, Ireland, and the Netherlands) because it included the new-to-her name “Wubbo,” which is apparently of Dutch origin or at least attested among the Dutch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%9326_European_windstorm_season#Western_Group_(United_Kingdom,_Ireland_and_the_Netherlands)
I thought “Tadhg” was equally noteworthy, esp. as sort of a dare to non-Irish radio/tv announcers who would have to say it aloud if a storm given that name were to occur. I think the North Atlantic hurricane name lists are supposedly selected with an eye toward some “balance” of names from different relevant countries but also try to screen out names that are going to be excessively challenging across the range of countries using them.
@DE: Call it “drift”, and resign yourself to it never being explained.
I wonder if the Germanic love of umlaut and kindred intersyllable vowel assimilations is not a kind of parallel to this. And of course, it’s all shared with Insular Celtic too …
Indeed. And if we only had the modern languages, linguists doubtlessly would try to reconstruct, e.g., i-umlaut for Proto-Germanic.
Call it “drift”
I vaguely recall that that’s exactly what Sapir meant by “drift”, though the WP article maunders on about something rather different.
I think that it’s not altogether inscrutable. Bantu “spirantisation”, for example, is a weird and unusual change.* Which suggests that a real explanation of some kind may be out there. It’s not the kind of thing that “just happens.”
* Favourite example: Kusaal kɔnbir “bone”, cognate with Swahili … mfupa. Obvious once it’s been pointed out …
Tadhg
The only Tadhg I have met, Irish from Ireland living in the US, born probably about 1960, told me he pronounced it “Todd”. Is that a thing, or was it just an accommodation to Americans? WAry says /t̪ˠai(ə)ɡ/ (Munster, Connacht).
It also says, under etymology, “From Middle Irish Tadg (whence also Old Norse Taðkr), from the common noun tadg (‘poet’),[1] from pre-Goidelic *tazgos, from Proto-Celtic *taskos (‘badger’). Cognate with Manx Taig and with Gaulish names like Tasgetius, Tasciovanus, Moritasgus.” That is badger the animal. What does it have to do with poetry?
Brian Joseph’s Demystifying Drift is a nice exposé of the topic, offering one reasonable though unproven explanation.
That is badger the animal. What does it have to do with poetry?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI
@Y: Obviously the Celts in those days considered the badger to be the most poetic of the musteloids. Do you have a rival candidate? _The Wind in the Willows_ has Ratty (a rodent, not a musteloid, to be sure) as more poetic than Mr. Badger, but that’s after thirteen or fourteen centuries of Saxonicity.
Oh. Yes. That’s a very important factor I forgot. It’s the most likely explanation for why the Teutons appear to have escaped both Grimm’s and Verner’s laws.
But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if the exact lect in question was not descended from the last common ancestor of East and Northwest Germanic, disappeared around the beginning of the Migration Period, and the post-Roman lects of the region are all descended from what the Franks brought in in the 3rd century or something.
Also, the -mer part can’t be a Celtic nativization of Northwest Germanic, because NWGmc -mār- “famed” was consistently equated with Celtic -mār- “large and in charge”.
That is badger the animal. What does it have to do with poetry?
“Badger” is obviously a non-rhotic derivative of “bard”. Also, we do sometimes offer to continue sharing our poetry after the listener has started to think of other things they could be doing.
The storm name Wubbo is in honour of Dutch physicist and astronaut Wubbo Ockels. Wubbo is a Dutch name originating in West Frisian, according to the Corpus of Given Names in the Netherlands here (giving three options as to the origins of both its first part and second part). With 279 occurrences as first name and 138 as middle name it’s not exactly common.
And yes, Letter from America, on BBC World Service Radio (648 kHz), I remember it well, a regular listener when I was in high school (also as an EFL resource). One Letter I can remember was his report on the first US gay wedding, very moving.
the S in Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen […] Were his middle names “Saint”, “Francis”, and “Xavier”?
puts me in mind of a dennis i once knew, who was formally saint denis [surname]. because, according to at least one of his parents, he was conceived in the cathedral. so i wouldn’t rule out the possibility! (though augustus special effects van dusen would be more entertaining)
Avery
adding to the store of variations, i know an avory [surname] – but he chose the name himself (and is in no way of english descent).
Fiona
here is the definitive, as far as i know, account of the creation of the name “fiona”, as excavated by the wonderful orcadian poet josie giles (who works in both scots and english).
The Avory surname is famously borne by Mick (Michael Charles, formally) Avory, drummer of the Kinks from circa the signing of their first record contract until they kinda sorta started losing the thread 20 years later. I had never thought of it as a mere spelling variant of Avery, but that would of course make sense. Avory looks to be vanishingly rare in the U.S., but of course there’s quite a long tail with surnames in the U.S., with the 88,799 most common as of the 1990 census (rarer-than-that names not making the easily-accessible version of the list) only making up in the aggregate 90.483% of the population. Meaning over 23 million individuals recorded by the census authorities with rarer-than-that surnames.
@rozele:
Ah. Ossian. Might have known …
Wubbo is now my official favorite name.
here is the definitive, as far as i know, account of the creation of the name “fiona”
Thanks, that’s a great read!
@Y:
Thanks for the Joseph paper. Interesting.
To the *s > h examples I can (of course) add Welsh. Also the Eastern Oti-Volta languages Byali, Nateni and Ditammari, and probably proto-Gurma too (though there, the /h/ was subsequently lost altogether, as in modern Greek.)
So that one is indeed, just the Sort of Thing that Happens.
The existence of initial mutations in both Brythonic and Goidelic, I think, is susceptible to the same sort of explanation as he attempts for the parallel split developments of *θ in English and Scandinavian, viz that this reflects a sandhi phenomenon in the common protolanguage.
In fact, his idea seems to be basically that “drift” reflects real and linguistically commonplace features of the protolanguage that are not clearly expressed in the usual way of writing reconstructed forms, such as sandhi, allophony, or other noncontrastive features.
(In proto-Oti-Volta, there is no evidence for two sets of mid-open vowels /e o/ and /ɛ ɔ/, but the reflexes in several languages strongly suggest that POV *e *o were actually realised as more open when nasalised – especially the reflexes in languages in which contrastive vowel nasalisation has actually been lost, which has happened independently in several branches.)
I don’t think this is different in principle from standard reconstruction: it’s just reconstructing the protolanguage in more detail, with real-language features not featured in the usual too-abstract formulations. But that is pretty much Joseph’s point, I guess.
A lot of this comes down to the question of what exactly it is that one supposes oneself to be reconstructing in reconstructing a protolanguage.
I’m sure this is a good line in many cases, but (as Joseph himself implies) it can’t explain everything.
Not sure that the idea helps much with Bantu “spirantisation”, for example. The difficulty there is trying to come up with phonetically plausible stop allophones before /i u/ (affricates, presumably) which would not only give fricatives in many languages, but also consistently revert exactly to the corresponding bog-standard stops, regardless of the point of articulation, in many others. Declaring that it was a form of allophony with exactly this kind of propensity, without displaying any real-world examples of such a phenomenon, is just cheating, or at best a kind of circular argument.
If there was a good solution to this, those clever Bantuists would have already incorporated it into proto-Bantu long since.
Some sort of areal phenomenon looks like the best bet to me, although, as I implied above, that’s a whole other can of worms itself in comparative Bantu.
Thanks for the Josie Giles link, rozele. It’s a great read. (I have a soft spot for people who disclaim knowing much and then floor you with their erudition.)
One may well deplore Macpherson for some things, yet acknowledge him for the earliest known distant dog bark.
And a very important fact I intended to mention but forgot is that there is a seg- “strong” in Gaulish names.
I don’t think you could derive the High German outcome from that. Either it’s Just the Sort of Thing That Happens (intervocalic voicing of all short fricatives), or it’s areal (…like the later voicing of all word-initial fricatives from Somerset all the way up the Rhine and beyond).
I’ve always supposed that the name “Catriona” (mentioned in passing by Josie Giles) was popularised by Robert Louis Stevenson, though presumably it was not actually invented by him.
I haven’t come across it wrongly stressed on the o, myself, but no doubt such depravity is possible.
I have a soft spot for people who disclaim knowing much and then floor you with their erudition.
Same here.
Yes, in a warm-and-fuzzy dreamland of the semi-plausible.
I did not know ‘Iona’ is a typo. Chalk it up on the Poetical Misprints thread.
Douglas Rushkoff — The only Рошков-s I know are from my mother’s side of the family originally from Bansko. It means carob.
The cite to Broderick is worth reading throughout, for all the fumes of whisky.
Is that what the Phoenicians were trading? Are (proto-)Semitic etymons plausible?
I marked Iona on a sketchmap for a book, and the cartographer’s first draft made it “Iowa.” Put it down to my drafting skills.
Longtime Hatters already knew about the origin of Iona.
This past Sunday at church we were read the vita of St. Aidan of Lindisfarne, with the detail that, after being on the losing side of the Synod of Whitby, his successor at Lindisfarne (one of the many saints named Colman) gave up on Northumbria and returned to Iona, bringing (at least some of) the relics of Aidan with him. It would have been much more striking, of course, if the relics had been translated to Iowa.
Aidan (and variants thereof) is one of those names that became quite popular in recent decades for US-born boys after being virtually unknown in my generational cohort. I doubt too many of the younger bearers are the sons of parents with any particular devotion to, or knowledge of, the founder of the Lindisfarne monastic community.
The 1911 Irish census database records 6 Fionas;
– one 21-year-old is OCR for “Bridget”(!?)
– four aged 4 to 7; one US-born Catholic, 3 Belfast or Scottish Presbyterian
– that leaves Marie Fiona Lyster Jenings, age: 59; occupation: “Living on Interest of Money”. She is listed in a 1913 book as “Mary Fiona Lyster-Jenings”
Хиония is occasionally anglicised Fiona (I think I mean anglicised rather than transliterated) but I doubt that plays much part in its popularity in English.
I used to think “Snow-White” was an Extremely Serbian name (Snežana) till I encountered a Сняжана from Belarus. So it’s a calque from Greek?
Somehow it never occurred to me to wonder where the name Koloman came from. And now I see Hungarian Kálmán and even the last name Kollmann are the same!
(Specifically, they’re this one. Looks like xenophobia goes way back in Austria…)
There’s a pretty good newish restaurant in NYC named Koloman (apparently for the artist Koloman Moser), which sort of blends French and Austrian cuisine, or something like that. Reasonable drink prices during happy hour. I had never noted the Irish etymology of the perfectly Viennese-seeming name.
Seems like an appropriate Patron Saint for opponents of sadopopulism.
See also Joshua T. Katz, Hittite tašku- and the Indo-European Word for ‘Badger’, which connects the poet/badger words with Hittite tašku- “anus”. I’m convinced!
An interesting article. Here’s the start:
Here’s the final paragraph:
And here’s an amusing bit from the middle:
Plus, from even later times, the dat. pl. ending on the matron inscriptions is -ims, PGmc *-imz, but NWGmc *-um.
i-umlaut in particular spread late enough that it showed up in High German after writing set in – and it occurs in ever more restricted phonetic environments, but is ever more morphologized, as you go south; I think that’s common when sound changes spread as a fashion.
…and now that I’ve actually read the paper…
First, demonstrative articles; we’ve discussed them at length before.
Then (pp. 50–52), the idea of reconstructing allophonic variation. Sure, but the example used for this simply takes the (arguably still allophonic) distinctions of “standard High” German and projects them straight to Proto-West Germanic even though they aren’t found elsewhere, and proposes that they merged in English. How would that explain anything? It just turns one step (development of the distinctions in German) into two (development of the distinctions in Pre-West-Germanic, followed by their loss in English).
Immediately comes footnote 13, which speculates: “These s‘s may well be slightly different even in English today, in these different environments; I leave that to phoneticians to explore (or confirm, if already known).” That’s… not something I expected a linguist to write. If you’re able to take for granted there are distinctions all around you that you’ve somehow never managed to hear, despite that being (one would think) part of your profession, then why not take a look at the literature to see if there’s something like that? I know the whole example is intended as just an example, and the actual science comes later in the chapter – but why risk using a bad example?
The footnote continues: “It is true too, as an anonymous reviewer has noted, that southern German varieties today have [s-] in initial position [as opposed to [z]], suggesting a different resolution to the proto-language variation presumed here from that found in other dialects, including the standard language.” This is actually part of Standard German in Austria, Switzerland and to a lesser extent southern Germany, where people can’t necessarily even pronounce [z], but never mind*; we’re now up to three steps (development of 3 allophones in Pre-West Germanic, complete loss in English, partial loss in southern German)… and still ignoring that the actual history of [z] can be reconstructed much better than that. For example, if you go south even farther (Ultramontane German?), [z] resurfaces: listen to it here (southeastern Aosta valley), here (only 2 or so examples; just west of Trento) and here (southwest of Trento), and here’s a mention of [ʒ] (in Slovenia).
A rather long paper from 2003 on “the voicing of fricatives in West Germanic” is here. I have a few nits to pick there – and so does the author, in later papers – but in general it’s probably accurate: the spread of aspiration in voiceless plosives made far-reaching voicing of fricatives possible.
Then comes the section actually titled “Germanic fricative voicing”. It is about initial *θ > [ð] in function words in English and > [d] in the Scandinavian languages in the cognates of the exact same words. (Not mention is Frisian, which goes with Scandinavian here.) This, too, “becomes understandable as the reflex of proto-language variation and specifically of parallel resolutions of that early variation.” I’m afraid that turns two steps into five or ten and explains nothing. In High German, there’s no such phenomenon. In Dutch, I just learned from reading the paper I linked to, the same class of words shows distinctive behavior, too – but the opposite! It devoices after voiceless consonants instead of voicing them. Both Old English and Old Norse had medial voicing of *θ; lack of stress got the initial position of the words in question treated as medial. Dutch had intervocalic and initial voicing of *θ. Upper German evidently turned *θ into [d̥] before fricative voicing struck.
Then we get to what seems to be the author’s specialty, Indo-Iranian… but even there I’m not sure why things that are in Wikipedia and seem pertinent are not mentioned here. In Vedic Sanskrit, visarga is actually [ɸ] before p(h) and [x] before k(h); [h] only occurs before pauses. They merged as [h] in Classical Sanskrit.
According to the top of p. 56, “the Sanskrit visarga is not identical to the Avestan h.” What is it, then? Has Joseph somehow not noticed that the Sanskrit h is [ɦ], breathy-voiced instead of voiceless? Two lines on, “Sanskrit o […] counts as a long vowel in the Sanskrit phonological system” – it’s also phonetically long (and e too). I mean, the Vedas are still recited today. By 2013, there were recordings on YouTube. I see no reason to be so circumspect about this.
Conversely, the Avestan “c” is claimed to be a “palatal stop”, which would make it identical to the Sanskrit c. For that I see no reason, and indeed the Avestan one is routinely transcribed as č elsewhere.
Same page: “Rather than treating the -ō/-o similarity as an accidental convergence, or a ‘drift-induced’ parallellism in later Indic and later Iranian respectively, given that there is some variation even at the oldest layers, this is another situation where projecting the variation into the proto-language makes sense and captures the similarities across the two branches of Indo-Iranian.” I would rather project the allophony to Proto-Indo-Iranian, as sort of happens on the next page, and have it confused later: first *-ɐs > *-ɐh, *-ɐz > *-ɐɦ; then *-ɐɦ >: *-əː, which gets rounded to -ɔː by following labials; then the split; then Dravidian purges Indic of voiced fricatives, so *-ɐz > *-ɐɦ >: *-əː is extended to medial position; then Indic does *(-)ɐw(-) >: ɔː, which makes ɔː phonemic, and *(-)ɐj(-) >: ɛː, into which the rare *əː merges (Avestan mazda ~ Sanskrit medhá), so ɛː becomes phonemic, too. That means the ɛː ~ ɔː alternation cannot be allophonic anymore, so it becomes regularized by non-phonological criteria except for lexicalized remnants.
The next section, about random irregularities in Avestan and Sanskrit vowel lengths, leaves me wondering why compounds aren’t mentioned. In sufficiently old compounds, Sanskrit has a long vowel at the end of the first component if the second began with a laryngeal; but synchronically there was no reason for this, so chaos set in, with generalizations in both directions.
At the bottom of p. 59 there’s a very short mention of the cases with *-m- in Balto-Slavic and Germanic vs. *-bʰ- in most of the rest of IE. The simplest explanation I’ve seen yet begins on p. 186 of this paper, which is scanned in sideways: *-m- is original (and of vaguely adverbial origin), but *-n-m- (in the *n-stems) was dissimilated to *-n-bʰ-, and the resulting distribution was regularized in different ways in different branches (or regions – there are other contact phenomena between Balto-Slavic and Germanic).
The same paper takes care of the rather misguided idea that the 1sg ending of “PIE” thematic verbs (as opposed to the 1sg “perfect” ending) was *-h₂; that’s elaborated in this later paper which is scanned in upright. Deletions by regular sound change and analogical restorations are featured.
* …actually, yes, for the sake of consistency we should mind this. 🙂 The table at the top of p. 51 portrays “standard High German” as rhotic. That’s correct – in Switzerland.
Well, there is das kleine Arschloch, but there can be only one.
‘Mr. Anus.’
i hesitate, but feel obligated to at least gesture to edward coristine, who is not primarily known, even in the legitimate press, under that name.
Idly checking the Random Link feature, as one does, I discovered that Michael Idov commented at LH back in 2006 (here et seq.).
edward coristine, who is not primarily known, even in the legitimate press, under that name
Lucus a non lucendo?
Wenche Myhre, just sayin’. And as such, well imbedded in my Sprachgefühl as a girl’s name. TIL that she spells it Wencke in German contexts.
Yes, but even in that form the name was exotic for Germans.
I think I’ve encountered it as a last name. (In that function it need not even be related.)
Bathrobe said:
Sue Butler just blogged on the history of “sheila”:
Obviously the early Seventies tribute to H.M. Elizabeth II (“She’s a good Sheila, Bruce, and not at all stuck up.”) was done by outsiders who may not have been up-to-date on the word’s changing resonances in Australian discourse.
When I read _Studs Lonigan_ many decades ago I was struck by the use (generally in the characters’ voices) of “jane” as a generic word meaning “woman” and quite possibly “woman viewed as a sex object,” although maybe the characters didn’t talk about women *not* viewed as sex objects often enough to be sure. I don’t know to what extent this was a lexeme commonly used in the novel’s setting (Irish-American neighborhoods in Chicago circa 1930) or a bit of a literary invention by Farrell.
Green takes it back to 1651. (Anybody know what the 🌐 symbol means? It’s not in the list of abbreviations.)
Green’s only post-Farrell AmEng example is in the fictionalized autobiography of Emmett Grogan (1942-1978). I feel like I’ve read enough other stuff by writers of his approx age and geographical/class background to find that a bit odd, but maybe it flows in context or maybe it’s just idiosyncratic in context. You could draw a certain parallel (smart NYC kid from non-elite Irish-American neighborhood who gets scholarship to fancy private high school and is also simultaneously a teenage heroin addict) to e.g. Jim Carroll (1949-2009), but as best as I can confirm via google books Carroll didn’t use “jane” in that sense in e.g. _The Basketball Diaries_.
BTW for offbeat NON-invented names, there’s a twitter feed named simply “Actual Names,” which offers a steady stream (one per post) of allegedly actual names found in various archival sources that are though wacky and/or amusing (sometimes reflecting a rather adolescent sensibility re what is amusing). Temperance Parsons Stabbings (1813-1879) is a recent one.
Anybody know what the 🌐 symbol means? It’s not in the list of abbreviations.
I think it’s the “World Wide Web”.
Ed.: Maybe not… most of them are, but Exciting Detective from 1943 doesn’t fit.
@JWB: there’s the “jane faces” in gibson’s Pattern Recognition, but that’s definitely fictional slang and possibly individual idiosyncrasy.
o! and, not necessarily changing the chronology, Guys and Dolls: “chances are he’s insane / as only a john can be for a jane” (that song’s a bit of a thesaurus, really).
I’m sure we figured out that symbol before, but I’m not sure how you’d search for it!
It’s very frustrating that it’s not listed anywhere in the front matter.
Apparently you can actually google for the little symbol – previous discussion was here, but we may not have reached a conclusion.
It’s just another character and sure enough, a search (via the search box on top) finds the same question, in May of last year.
(Ed.: jinx!)
Ah yes, I thought it had come up before; ktschwartz explained it (to some extent) here.
The story with the 1943 citation for “janes” is in fact on the web at Pulpgen Archive; I wonder if Green meant to indicate that he read it there, rather than on paper? (If so, it would be appreciated if he’d provide the link.)
IMHO Green’s quotation is slightly over-abbreviated. He quotes:
The original according to Pulpgen:
It’s a restrictive clause: not all janes! And what are those quotation marks doing there? It’s narration, not dialogue.
And there he is in Table 3, Σεγομαρος the big strong Gaul.
I had hoped that he might be the original Seymour, but, alas, it is not so:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Seymour
Saint Maurus apparently ran on water to rescue Saint Placidus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Maurus#/media/File%3ABenedetto%2C_Mauro_e_Placido.jpg
(by Fra Lippo Lippi hisownself.)
…whence Seymouria baylorensis.
Incidentally, I’ve always felt well-disposed to Brother Filippo Lippi, of the Order of Carmelites, since discovering that the strikingly beautiful model for many of his pictures of the Virgin was Lucrezia Buti, (ex-)Dominican novice, his mistress and the mother of his two children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucrezia_Buti
Cosimo de’ Medici apparently got a papal dispensation for them to marry, but they never did.
[Terrible poem, BTW.]
Green naturally has copious quotations for sheila, including a few from South Africa with somewhat different senses — his wide reach in both space and time is his strong point. Etymology, though, is not: he says “[proper name Sheila, ult. Irish caille, a young girl]”. Actually, caile (one l, not two) is the source (with a diminutive) of Colleen, as mentioned above. Sheila is an anglicization of Síle, which in turn comes from Cecilia via the Normans. (To complicate the picture, in the 19th century women named Síle were often recorded as “Julia”, “Celia”, “Cecilia”, or “Cicely” in English records.)
Cicely.
Etymology, though, is not
Well, that’s distressing — I’ll take his etymological notes with much larger helpings of salt.
I was really weird how late night hosts bungled Curtis Sliwa’s name — do New Yorkers regularly change the pronunciation of their names? That should be [‘sli.va]. They were pronouncing it with a [w]. It’s the same as with pronouncing name ending in -icky- as [iki] rather than [itsky], and maybe at least three other examples I can think of. And some Italian inserting g before l where it is not necessary, and dropping final r in French names unnecessarily.
Curtis Sliwa’s name has never been pronounced (in the 40-odd years he has been a public figure, at least) with a /v/. He’s a New Yorker, not a foreigner. Indeed the wikipedia article on him begins “Curtis Anthony Sliwa[1][2] (/ˈsliːwə/ SLEE-wə; born March 26, 1954) is an American …”
That his foreign ancestors might have spelled the name Śliwa and pronounced it /ˈɕli.va/ is neither here nor there. They probably didn’t speak with an old-school “Outer Borough” non-rhotic accent either.
J.W. Brewer: I know that, but that was not my point. While I am not a New Yorker, I still think that people should not have their names forcefully incorporated into a English-speaking phonetic reading. My great-grandfather would have had that happen to him had he not returned to Bulgaria in his (and then) ’30s.
@V: Apparently the 1920 U.S. census picked up at least one family (in Ohio) surnamed Shliva, which might have been a respelling of Śliwa aimed at conserving a closer approximation of the old-country pronunciation. That’s a strategy that can work. There are other 21st-century folks with that surname who look to maybe be Israeli although whether it’s in that context a loanword from Polish or an unrelated false friend is not clear to me.
One way or the other, no spelling will satisfy everyone: see Berenstain.
It’s not just the USA. In Germany, the famous critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki used to regularly complain about people mispronouncing the Polish part of his name.
It’s not just the USA.
Of course not. Everywhere people adapt foreign names to their own pronunciation habits; I’m quite sure they do it in Bulgaria as well.
It still surprises me that the pronunciation of -cki isn’t common knowledge in Berlin, where Polish names have been around for a while. It is in Vienna…
…where a TV weather announcer with no Polish background once had the rare opportunity to pronounce Kermadec and went for Polish.
Caermadog, presumably (as rendered by our refugee relatives)?
Just discovered that Porthmadog is not, in fact, named after the intrepid (if a bit mythical) navigator, or indeed any Madog at all:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porthmadog
I think so.
I wondered if that same /v/-to-/w/ shift that historically affected Mr. Sliwa’s last name had affected mine approx three centuries ago when in colonial New York it was anglicized from Brouwer to Brewer. But it appears that while the letter “w” in Dutch orthography can correspond with a sound closer to /v/ (although maybe technically /ʋ/ which is kind of in between?), in the specific phonotactic context of “Brouwer” it doesn’t really do that and you got /ˈbrɑu̯ər/. Which is still not exactly how we pronounce it now as assimilated into AmEng. And maybe I haven’t dug deeply enough to see if the echt-Dutch pronunciation back in the 1600’s when the surname was brought across the Atlantic was the same as it is now.
Could Brewer simply be a translation of its cognate Brouwer, rather than an imperfect pronunciation or transliteration?
just to add more confusion to the mix, i happen to know a few (unrelated, to each other or to me) anglophone north americans surnamed lewicki who pronounce it /ləwɪki/. they’re perfectly aware that the old country pronunciation would be different (and i suspect one of them has used /ləvɪtski/ when in eastern europe), but those versions aren’t their names; the anglicized versions are.
those versions aren’t their names; the anglicized versions are.
Exactly. You’d think that would be obvious and indisputable, but such is some people’s worship of an imagined “authenticity” that they are ready to say that other people don’t know how to pronounce their own names (or the names of their own towns, in the case of places like MAD-rid or CAY-ro).
I think
“they pronounce it […]” – is descriptively accurate
“those versions aren’t their names” – can accerately reflect how they feel or think about their name (when that’s what they think and feel).
But I can’t think of a good solution to the descriptive problem “what one’s name is”.
(not an objection)
I accept the version of my name with Arabic phonemes as “my name” but giggle when someone writes it with a different Latin vowel letter, even though this is precisely what the Arabic version sounds to my Russian ear.
“accept” – I mean: when I’m thinking about what to say to an Arabic speaker, I will think my name in Russian or in Arabic
“giggle” – I don’t mean I don’t like it:) But I don’t write it so and don’t think about it this way.
One problem illustrated by the Sliwa example above is that because of superficial visual similarities between e.g. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_alphabet and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet, people generally don’t try to transliterate words originally spelled in the former script into the latter script in order to provide a “new” spelling that cues the closest possible approximation of the source-language pronunciation. That the same glyph “w” implies /v/ in one system but /w/ in the other is one problem caused by lack of transliteration. That “ś” in one gets silently simplified to “s” in the other even though “s” in the source alphabet implies a different sound and the sound implied by “ś” would be better represented in transliteration by a digraph is another problem with the same cause. People have different ideas about what transliteration from Arabic script should be trying to accomplish, which is why we have a lot of different approaches, but one thing it could try to accomplish is the spelling in the new alphabet that will cue the closest available pronunciation in the target language of the pronunciation in the source language.
languagehat: I’m not disputing that his name is /sliwa/ — I might have phrased that wrongly — it’s more than it’s such an ordinary, commonplace word in Bulgarian that it throws me off when I hear it pronounced like that. And I know it’s not /’sli.va/ in Polish, but /ˈɕli.va/
Thanks for clarifying!
The Bulgarian word is not “sliwa” but слива, which would be standardly transliterated into English as “sliva.” This is further confirmation that the problem, if there is one, lies with the weird orthographic conventions of Polish and the failure to appropriately adjust for them when absorbing Polish-origin lexemes into English.
BTW, lots of people reinterpreted him as Silwa altogether. (Too often to all be typos.)
given his concession-speech threats to switch to the other side of law, perhaps he’ll go full runyon and reintroduce himself to the world as curt the plum…
I guess some subset of AmEng speakers are familiar (at least implicitly) with the “plum” meaning of the Slavic morpheme because of its obvious presence in “slivovitz.” Which is of course “Sliwowitz” in German and “śliwowica” in Polish, but we don’t defer to them on w’s.
(FWIW I recently picked up a bottle of Romanian origin whose label says “PALINCA” in larger type but “SLIVOVITZ” in smaller type, perhaps for the benefit of Anglophones who don’t know what “palinca”* means, or perhaps to evade alleged EU regs saying that “pálinka” can only be used to label booze produced in Hungary or specified provinces of Austria.)
*Supposedly ultimately from proto-Slavic *pālìti (“to burn”) – compare the “burned” etymology lurking in our word “brandy”
Slivovitz is a traditional thing in our family, since that was what my grandfather and his best friend Shelly drank on V-E Day, to celebrate that they were not going to have to serve as battlefield doctors after they finished medical school. (They could have gone into the peacetime army, but in the end they both reimbursed Uncle Sam for paying for their medical education by working as commissioned officers in the Public Health Service.) Apparently, it was the only liquor they could find, and they were in a desperate hurry to get drunk.
As a consequence, my brothers and cousins and I occasionally drink slivovitz when we get together. I was sent out to buy a bottle during one family gathering, and the conversation with the clerk at the liquor store went something like this:
@Brett: at one point my (first) mother-in-law commented on a bottle of slivovitz I happend to have had out on the kitchen counter – she was familiar with the potation on account of having grown up in an “ethnic” neighborhood in Chicago in the Fifties, but thought of it as something that someone’s uncle had made in the basement and claimed to be unaware you could buy it legitimately in a liquor store.
But to return to the other point, it is perfectly fair to turn things around and note that English orthography may be puzzling and confusing to those used to Polish orthography. And thus, the historical existence of maps of England prepared for Polish military personnel* but with the toponyms spelled “phonetically” according to the Polish alphabet in order to guide pronunciation. Examples: Czelmsfed (Chelmsford), Koulczyste (Colchester), Byszeps-Stofed (Bishops Storford), and of course Saufend-on-Sji (left as exercise for the reader). https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/greetings-from-saufend-on-sji-in-polish-occupied-england/
*this says the map was prepared in anticipation of a Warsaw Pact occupation of England but I’ve seen the same map described elsewhere on the internet as dating to the 1940’s and made for the convenience of “Free” Polish soldiers and airmen who had managed to escape the occupation of Poland to continue the fight stationed in the UK. I don’t know how to judge between those accounts.
Reminds me a bit of those three famous characters from the (Mooré) Bible, a Moyiis, a Zã and, of course, a Zeezi.
Apparently, it was the only liquor they could find, and they were in a desperate hurry to get drunk.
I’ve been there (though not with that particular unappetizing drink).
something that someone’s uncle had made in the basement
i’m very fond of fruit brandies (and have made some myself*)! the best rakias** i’ve had – slivka/plum, krushka/pear, and dunya/quince – have been made in people’s backyards or barns, and sold in bottles labeled with a marker. much smoother and more flavorful than almost any commercial version i’ve tried. i hope that if/when i make it back to belgrade, the cheese-vendor i met a decade ago is still selling liters from whoever distilled the bottle i bought on my way out of town.
.
* most recently an armenian-inspired mulberry version, which turned out well (after a small intervention by a centenarian czech chemist).
** the balkan term became my generic at some point
Once I went into a small bar in Paris right around Tourist Central by the Latin Quarter, and asked for Calvados. The proprietor positively beamed at me and poured me some from an unlabeled bottle. It was very tasty.
I might use “rakija” rather than “rakia” as my generic category-name, but spelling in AmEng clearly varies and it’s a free country. I would admittedly have to be hoping that context sufficiently signaled that it was to be pronounced with a /y/ rather than a /d͡ʒ/. And maybe “rakija” suggests I’m working from the FYLOSC/Macedonian ракија rather than the Bulgarian ракия and I should want to be more impartial?
Y: Once I went into a small bar in Paris right around Tourist Central by the Latin Quarter, and asked for Calvados. The proprietor positively beamed at me and poured me some from an unlabeled bottle. It was very tasty.
I did exactly that exactly there the weekend before last. Not exactly beaming, but positive enough. That goes for the Calvados too.
He did beam when the five or six of us didn’t ask for separate bills.
Which is of course “Sliwowitz” in German and “śliwowica” in Polish, but we don’t defer to them on w’s.
…and “slivovica” in Czech, which doesn’t use W that way.
Projížděl jsem dědinou cestou na Vizovice,
Přivítal mě předseda, řek mi u slivovice:
“Živého či mrtvého Jožina kdo přivede,
Tomu já dám za ženu dceru a půl JZD.”
Slivovica in _Slovak_ but Czech has slivovice with the usual change of a to e after c.
I don’t have an opinion one way or another about what people call plum rakia? Why do you? It’s just a kind of rakia made from plums, rather than grapes or raisins, or apricots? Or the spelling? It’s just rakia, or however you want to spell it. It’s kind of strange, really.
“Ō Rakaia”
Is there something special about plums in English (or Polish, HUngarian, Serbian, whatvee) culture? Or apricots? Plum rakia is kind of not common, rather that the common grape rakia. Apricop rakia is more common than plum rakia here.
So слива is not at all thought of as something to do with alcohol.
@V: It’s more that plum-based brandy is somewhat exotic in mainstream US boozing culture so the somewhat-exotic loanword “slivovitz” is a common way to refer to it, because that loanword came to the US with the various ethnic groups partial to its referent. You can say “NAMEOFFRUIT brandy” for any sort of raki[j]a if you want, with unmodified/unspecified “brandy” meaning “the kind from grapes.” The only sort that’s really solidly indigenous to American/Anglophone culture is applejack, which became marginal as a local product in much of the U.S. after the 19th century turned into the 20th, which is why the French name Calvados gained market share as the generic one. I guess the German-origin “kirsch” (clipped from kirschwasser) is an example parallel to slivovitz, where we use a loanword because the referent is ethnically-marked. And maybe the Italianate “grappa” for grape-derived stuff that’s distilled from pomace and not necessarily aged all that much.* Stuff distilled from peaches or pears or apricots or quinces or what have you is so culturally marginal in AmEng it doesn’t really get fruit-specific generic names that will be widely understood.
I personally quite like the Troyanska brand of pear brandy from Bulgaria, but the one store I patronized that used to have it in stock frequently no longer seems to and I haven’t traced another convenient retail source.
*Generic “brandy” distilled from grapes is in the US generically expected to be amber-colored from aging in wood or at least some fake simulation thereof for the cheapest stuff. Clear grape-based rakija from the Balkans can be and is legally sold as “brandy” but is a little weird that way. There’s a store I sometimes go to in White Plains, N.Y. that seems to have a regular supply chain of such clear grape-based stuff coming from Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro etc. But you can get amber-colored brandy distilled in California really cheap if you’re not too snobbish to drink it.
(FWIW I recently picked up a bottle of Romanian origin whose label says “PALINCA” in larger type but “SLIVOVITZ” in smaller type, perhaps for the benefit of Anglophones who don’t know what “palinca”* means, or perhaps to evade alleged EU regs saying that “pálinka” can only be used to label booze produced in Hungary or specified provinces of Austria.)
I would guess the importers think „slivovitz“ is the English translation of palincă, which is arguably the case, although technically only palincă de prune is actually slivovitz.
One more datapoint: the booze menu (online version) of the Dalmatian/Croatian restaurant near where I live has entries like “Viljamovka (Pear Brandy).” Which confirms both that a) they don’t assume the FYLOSC name is extant as a loanword in AmEng; and b) there isn’t a generic descriptor of the referent in AmEng more specific than the “NAMEOFFRUIT brandy” formula. Presumably “viljamovka” is etymologically related to the French “poire Williams” and the German “Williamsbirne,” but this doesn’t make things any more transparent to the AmEng reader, since apparently the relevant sense of “Williams” is BrEng for what is called a “Bartlett pear” in AmEng.
J.W. Brewer : “I personally quite like the Troyanska brand of pear brandy from Bulgaria, but the one store I patronized that used to have it in stock frequently no longer seems to and I haven’t traced another convenient retail source.”
I personally don’t like it, but I can source it for you, if you want. I know people who know people who produce the original thing.
EDIT: Just asked Steve to give you my email, so I can get you in touch with them.
@J.W. Brewer (specifically the November 5, 2025 at 5:19 pm comment) — I like Polish orthography in general but I *especially* love seeing it applied to English words and names, so that map is a treat, thanks!(Jerzy Waszyngton is another long-time fave.)
“Saufend-on-Sji” for “Southend-on-Sea” really threw me for a minute before I remembered that <si> is a digraph for /ɕ/ so the <j> is needed to avoid palatalization.
Somewhat relatedly, I recently saw this probably-19th-century guidebook to help Polish speaker learn English which is also delightful. It transcribes a couple dozen useful phrases (even some short conversations) into English-written-with-Polish-orthography, side-by-side with regular English orthography and a Polish translation.
Where on earth is Grejz-ferek?
Whoever the map is for, I would have thought it would have been more useful if it had included the written name as you would see it locally, as well as the pronunciation.
@Jen in Edinburgh
Apparently an alternate name for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grays,_Essex is “Grays Thurrock”
Maybe the true purpose of the map is entertainment for orthography nerds on the internet 😛
this plausible-looking site suggests the Polish map fragment is the NW corner of a 1957 edition of sheet NM-31* of the International Map of the World, a 1:1,000,000-scale project with a decidedly nonmilitary origin story.
* title “Paryz”, covers SE England, NE France, Belgium
@Jen in Edinburgh : “Whoever the map is for, I would have thought it would have been more useful if it had included the written name as you would see it locally, as well as the pronunciation.”
I’m quite sure we’ve seen this map here before, but I can’t remember in which thread.
EDIT: @mollymooly : maybe when we were talking about the names for Paris (the city) in various languages?
mm: I don’t see the connection to the International Map of the World on that site, which just calls them ‘Polish Topographic Maps’ or ‘Polish Military Topographic Maps’. Am I looking in the wrong place?
But it does suggest that it’s unlikely to have anything to do with an invasion of England – it’s just the odd corner of England that turns up on a map of northern France, in the same way that Calais and Boulogne can’t help getting into the corner of a map of England.
sarah: Thanks for that, I’d never have thought of it!
@V: thanks for the offer re Troyanska, but I actually got it together to use the miracle of the internet to find a conveniently-located liquor store I’ve never been to before that allegedly has it in stock, and will see if their internet claims are accurate next time I’m in that neighborhood.
@JWB: my original frame of reference for rakia was indeed bulgarian /gestures vaguely towards the Mehanata dive/, though i mostly aim for the ex-yugoslav varieties when i go to brighton beach or ridgewood for eastern european booze. but my spelling is more transcription-y than an attempt to follow any of the regional spellings.
and i’m pretty sure the slivovitzs of my youth were mostly hungarian or polish – interruption for fact-checking in which i found that i’m quite wrong: moravian (jelínek) and croatian (maraska), and some hungarian (zwack).
@Jen: the preview of the Polish map matches another NM-31
Re the Polish map, why “Hejstynz”? WP gives its pronunciation as /ˈheɪstɪŋz/. Surely Polish would spell the velar nasal as it does in Anglia?
Anglia is pronounced [ˈãŋɡlʲja], so not only with a velar nasal, but with a fully sounded voiced stop following (and IIRC, you get velar nasals only in front of actually pronounced velar stops in Polish.) I assume that the creators of the map would have seen pronouncing the town [‘heɪstɪŋgz] as overkill – farther from the actual pronounciation than missing an unimportant detail like the velarity of the nasal.
Except after phonemically nasal vowels*, [ŋ] only even exists in central and southern Polish. Northern and western Polish lack it like Russian does; I’ve heard angielski pronounced [anˈgʲɛl̟skʲi].
It’s also possible that -ing > -in is a feature of local English anyway.
* I haven’t encountered [ã] in Polish, but I don’t doubt that it varies, and this is the obvious environment for it to occur. I think I would notice it, though: it’s phonemic in my dialect – /ã/ ein, /a/ auch, for example… I also haven’t encountered [lʲ] in Polish, but likewise I’m sure it varies and this the most likely environment for it.
After the operation of Polish final devoicing, [ˈheɪstɪŋks] ~ [ˈheɪstɪnks] would have a very unfortunate sound to Anglophone ears.
Oh yes, final fortition is taken very seriously in Polish.
@DM: I copied the IPA for Anglia from Wikisłownik, so I hope it’s a phonetic transcription that survived vetting by Polish speakers. Phonemic nasal vowels are much more limited, as you noted.
I had no I idea what “ethnic” meant in USen at all until relatively recently, and I’m still not sure what it means — as in I was not aware of it as a term, but I think I better grasp of it in the last 15-ish years. I’m still not sure what it means. Is Arnold Schwarzenegger? He’s from Styria? I’m only slightly exaggerating.
A friend of mine used to tell the racist jokes he’d heard, with “ethnic” substituted for the target of the joke (which often had been his own ethnicity.) It worked fine. Any stereotype can be attached to anybody.
Generally, “ethnic” in the benign sense means non-American. Many supermarkets have a section of “ethnic foods”, which might have Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Eastern European Jewish, or Middle Eastern ingredients, depending on what the local demand is. More Americanized ingredients, like imported Italian pasta, would not be included. “Ethnic restaurants” might include American-Italian ones, but that’s a borderline case.
I think “ethnic” as applied in certain usages to human beings in the US context has faded considerably over the last 50-plus years due to changing immigration patterns: the bulk of more recent immigrants were not “ethnic” in that particular sense (to a first approximation, non-Hispanic white with ancestry from Eastern or Southern Europe) and the descendants of the old “ethnic” population came with the further passage of time to be seen as less distinct from the “regular” white population than they had previously been seen as.
German-Americans, including those from Styria, would generally not have been particularly “ethnic” in that sense: you could be non-Protestant without being “ethnic” if your “ethnicity” (being used with a different scope) was German or Irish or I guess Walloon (and the Quebecois who migrated south are sort of an interesting edge case that that schema doesn’t handle very well). I suppose any immigrants of Styrian origin who embraced a “Slovene” identity rather than a “German” one after arrival in the U.S. might have been “ethnic.” Schwarzenegger has an accent that betrays him as a recent arrival, but that’s a different category.
…and I’d be very surprised if he ever called himself “German”.
I don’t dispute Arnold’s native-German-speakingess, I just pointed out that he’s from a marginal Austrian region.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: I have now succeeded in obtaining a fresh bottle of Troyanska/Троянска pear brandy. The first place whose website said they had it had recently sold out their inventory, but the second place whose website said ditto (only about 5 miles from my house) hadn’t, although the fellow behind the counter who agreed that his computer said they had two bottles in stock couldn’t immediately figure out what shelf it was on. But we found it.
A friend of mine used to tell the racist jokes he’d heard, with “ethnic” substituted for the target of the joke (which often had been his own ethnicity.) It worked fine. Any stereotype can be attached to anybody.
Joey Bishop, IIRC, published a jokebook like that in the distant past, e.g., “Why is there no ice in Ethnickia?” But “The bride is the one in the clean bowling short” can’t be attached to certain ethnic groups.
*shirt, which may be obvious.
I wasn’t replying to that, but to the comment immediately before mine. However, the place he’s from is only technically outside Austria’s second-largest city, which has 500,000 people.
Byszeps-Stofed (Bishop’s Storford) — I’ve actually been to Bishop’s Storford, a really nice town. It’s very close to Luton airport, and I was on a layover, and visited the local pub.
David Marjanović That’s like Plovdiv?
Schwarzenegger’s home-town-proper (“technically”) is so marginal that it doesn’t appear to have a Slovenian name different from its German name. Maybe the irredentists don’t want it?
Apparently.