There are 5 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: YAEPT: Gloucester and Worcester
From: David McCann
1b. Re: YAEPT: Gloucester and Worcester
From: Philip Newton
2a. Re: Naming systems
From: Philip Newton
2b. Re: Naming systems
From: Daniel Nielsen
3.1. Re: The 2010 Smiley Award Winner: amman iar
From: Philip Newton
Messages
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1a. Re: YAEPT: Gloucester and Worcester
Posted by: "David McCann" da...@polymathy.plus.com
Date: Fri Sep 3, 2010 4:39 am ((PDT))
On Fri, 2010-09-03 at 00:42 -0500, Eric Christopherson wrote:
> Anyone know if the surname _Wooster_ is a form of _Worcester_?
It is indeed, along with Worster and Wostear.
Our conservative spelling, and lack of the immigrants who have
introduced spelling pronunciations into the USA, have produced quite a
few interesting mismatches: Plaistow /ˈplɑːstəŭ/ in London, Cley /klɑĭ/
and Stiffkey /ˈstĭuːki/ in Norfolk. But a lot of the old pronunciations,
that were still in use when I was a boy, have been lost: Cirencester
was /ˈsisitə/, but is now pronounced as spelled.
Messages in this topic (14)
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1b. Re: YAEPT: Gloucester and Worcester
Posted by: "Philip Newton" philip.new...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Sep 3, 2010 5:01 am ((PDT))
On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 02:34, Daniel Bowman <danny.c.bow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> And why is it
> they've come to be pronounced so differently than they are spelled?
You also get the opposite: I believe that Bristol used to be Bristow
(cf. Felixstowe, Cheapstow, ...), but since Bristol dialect was
characterised by L-dropping, people there thought that [br...@u] (or
whatever) was a "corruption" of /br...@l/ and began spelling it with
an -l.
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
Messages in this topic (14)
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2a. Re: Naming systems
Posted by: "Philip Newton" philip.new...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Sep 3, 2010 5:29 am ((PDT))
On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 06:27, Sai Emrys <s...@saizai.com> wrote:
> I'm considering legally changing my name to just "Sai" (mononymic),
> and considering the implications of that. (See
> http://saizai.livejournal.com/tag/naming for details.)
>
> Currently, mononyms proper are rare outside Indonesia, Japanese
> royalty, and celebrities.
Possibly also (some subset of?) Tamils.
I remember corresponding with Sarathy, who is sometimes referred to as
Gurusamy Sarathy - I had initially assumed that G = given name, S =
family name but was told that S = given name, G = father's given name.
As I recally, people there used to go by one name, but when the
British came, it became fashionable to adopt a first initial (à la "G.
Sarathy"), using the first letter of the father's given name. (This
could be extended further with grandfather etc., with names such as
"Foo Bar Baz Qux" indicating "Qux, the son of Baz, the son of Bar, the
son of Foo".)
Apparently, there are also family names, but since those are
associated with castes, they are deprecated and not used much these
days, so it's effectively mononyms all around.
(I may be missing or misrepresenting some details, but I believe the
gist is right.)
> So the only real argument in favor of my polynymy is to better please
> silly databases... which is an interesting and (IMO) a bit odd
> constraint to have in a cultural system.
That may be, but if you live in the computerised west, you'll be
dealing with such constraints a lot, so adopting a mononym while
continuing to live here may simply be swapping one set of pain for
another. (I'm also glad my name doesn't contain any non-ASCII
characters or, for that matter, non-letters such as apostrophes or
spaces, mostly because of computerised forms.)
I'm reminded of how Ascension, St. Helena, the Falkland Islands, and
other UK overseas territories were assigned postal codes (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom#Overseas_Territories
) - not because the post in such areas would be distributed more
efficiently if they were introduced (which wouldn't work since each
area only got one code anyway), but at least in part because "many
online companies would not accept addresses without a postcode".
> a tendency for mononym + profession/location to crystallize into
> a given name / family name system.
Reminds me of how grandparents are named: in languages such as English
that don't distinguish between mother's father and father's father,
children may nevertheless wish to distinguish their two grandfathers
(similarly for grandmothers). Occasionally, unique names are used
(e.g. "Grandad" vs "Grampa"), but other common strategies include
family names ("Grandpa Smith") and location ("Grandpa Springfield").
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
Messages in this topic (7)
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2b. Re: Naming systems
Posted by: "Daniel Nielsen" niel...@uah.edu
Date: Fri Sep 3, 2010 5:52 am ((PDT))
>Read it already. It's interesting that you can legally take a mononym. I
>don't think it's possible in the Netherlands for instance (Dutch law rests
>mostly on the Napoleonian code, that makes last names mandatory). I'm just
>wondering about name conflict issues (and the fact that "Sai", if
pronounced
>/saj/ or similar, means "boring" in Dutch -spelled "saai"-).
Are you considering the semantic intermingling with the Hindi "sai"
(aspirated; "saint/divine master", so it is in a sense somewhat similar to
English "mister/master")? If you actually like that, you might enter ji as
your last name where required as an honorific suffix. A notion..
Messages in this topic (7)
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3.1. Re: The 2010 Smiley Award Winner: amman iar
Posted by: "Philip Newton" philip.new...@gmail.com
Date: Fri Sep 3, 2010 6:15 am ((PDT))
On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 06:55, Rebecca Bettencourt <beckie...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.kreativekorp.com/epsilon/ammaniar.png
My first impression on seeing that was "Armenian".
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
Messages in this topic (31)
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