Comments on: Would you like to share a final vowel?

By: George Gibbard

George Gibbard — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 04:17:01 +0000

On the stressing of non-ethnic names — the beginning of a paper by
Anthony Dubach Green:

“While the Irish dialects of Connacht and Ulster show initial stress on almost all words, in the Munster dialect, stress is attracted to heavy syllables (by which we mean syllables containing a long vowel or a diphthong, not CVC syllables) in a complicated manner.” The first piece of data given is that if the second syllable is heavy, it is stressed, even if the first syllable and the third syllable are heavy too. According to another site, the Gaelic form of Kennedy is ó Cinnéide, where the Kennedy part means ‘helmet headed’, so presumably both this name and Kennelly would be stressed differently in different parts of Ireland.

Incidentally, the same site says Buachala (ending in a vowel!) means
‘cowherd’ and is Anglicized as Buckley.

By: Eric Bakovic

Eric Bakovic — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 18:22:41 +0000

First, Bob’s right, I meant to write “orthographic ‘y’” but originally tried using angled brackets, which is code for HTML (though not in the same way that “people with vowels at the end of their names” is code for “Italian-American”). That’s been fixed.

More substantively: Bob’s also right that “non-ethnic” names ending in vowels are generally limited in the ways he outlines. I find the rhythmic generalizations particularly interesting: just shifting the stress in Kénnedy to the penultimate syllable (Kennédy) makes it sound “more ethnic”.

This reminded me of the name “Kennelly” (the last name of a former grad student at Rutgers and was then known as “Brenda Kennelly”, who then moved on to Utrecht and is now known as “Sarah Kennelly”). I believe the name is Kennélly, with penultimate stress; moreover, Kénnelly sounds odd to me for reasons I just can’t put my finger on. (I’ve always assumed, though perhaps incorrectly, that this name is “non-ethnic” just as “Kennedy” is.)

By: Bob Kennedy

Bob Kennedy — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 07:19:41 +0000

Ben, I’m not sure if you were replying to Eric’s post or my comments to it, but if you were replying to my comment: I agree that “people with vowels at the end of their names” is code for “Italian American”. I was just trying to test Eric’s suggestion that phonetic counterexamples (i.e., truly vowel-final but non-Italian surnames) would be easy to find.

By: Ben Zimmer

Ben Zimmer — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 06:13:52 +0000

Surely “people with vowels at the end of their names” has long been code for “Italians” or “Italian-Americans”. A Google search turns up hundreds of examples (e.g., “When [Mary Cacioppo] told the Democratic Party chair that she would like to run for office, she was told that people with vowels at the end of their names did not get elected.”)

The vowels are understood, orthographically, to be ‘a’, ‘i’, or ‘o’. OK, sometimes ‘e’. Those are far more “marked” than Anglo-Irish names ending in ‘y’, hence easy to identify as “ethnic”.

By: Bob Kennedy

Bob Kennedy — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 04:25:23 +0000

I think I left out my main point in the previous comment, which was this: it may be possible that Continetti knows there are linguistic ways to detect the “ethnic” (i.e., non Anglo-Irish) origin of a surname, and he might also have ways of doing so without relying an orthography (that’s what I put across in the previous comment), but he can’t speak about it in any other terms than orthography.

By: Bob Kennedy

Bob Kennedy — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 04:17:06 +0000

I'm zeroing in on the [i]-final topic, despite that neither Scalia nor Alito fits the bill.

"at least not phonetically, where it’s easily counterexemplified by “non-ethnic” names ending in phonetic [i], orthographic"

I'm guessing you meant for a [y] to end this clause. But, despite my own [i]-final "non-ethnic" last name, I'm wondering if there are any counterexamples. The orthography may be enough to confound it, assuming in part that anyone who associates a name with a non-Anglo ancestry also knows how to spell the name in question.

What might be more of a tip-off is the stress pattern - anything [i]-final with non-initial stress sounds ethnic; e.g. Morelli, Continetti, Pirelli. But by accident the same set of surnames is coextensive with surnames spelled with final "i" rather than "y". Names spelled with final "y" are either trochees (e.g., Kelly), dactyls (e.g., Kennedy, Connelly), or (um) the-one-with-middle-stress but including an onomastic prefix like M(a)c or Fitz (e.g., McCauley).