Is there a function of the apostrophe other than signifying removed letters (as in contractions) or posessives? I work with all three of these people and had always called them Duane, Latanya & Du-wahn. Those are phonetic spellings of course, because I never saw their names spelled out on anything until today when I saw them in the company directory, all spelled with apostrophes.
Thinking it was a blunder on the part of personnel, I passed by each of them at some point today, getting close enough to see their ID badge. The offending punctuation is there as well.
More well-known names like O’connor might be explained as coming from some variant such as “Of the Connor Family” which I could understand the shortening of. But “De’Wayne”?? Anybody have an idea as to what purpose an apostrophe serves in a first name?
It is simply the way that their families have chosen to spell the names. They are not (or are rarely) contractions of anything. D’ and L’could be contractions for De (of)* or Le or La (the), but no one I have met has claimed that as the reason in their name. And, as your examples show, they haven’t actually dropped the vowel, anyway. Initially, some people with apostrophes in their names used it as a glottal stop (similar to the Hebrew aleph character) where there was a slight pause in the pronunciation. However, the spelling became popular without carrying over the pronunciation.
*De could be “the” if the name is Dutch or Afrikaans, but that is rare in the U.S.
Chuck, are you suggesting that adding an apostrophe to a word is equivalent to altering the spelling? Are spelling & punctuation the same thing? If my name is Bob, and I decide to start writing it as B’ob, am I really spelling my name differently or am I just mis-using a punctuation mark?
I’ll have to listen carefully next time to see if I can hear these people say their names with somekind of glottal stop which might justify the punctuation mark.
If the mark makes no difference in how a name is pronounced, then it’s hardly more than a cosmetic thing, like dotting your “i” with a smiley-face or heart.
Exactly true. (And I suspect that some of those folks have troubles with various payroll systems that are not set up to handle punctuation. I have no idea what the IRS does with those names, although it must have been an interesting situation when the first one started paying taxes.)
Basically, they have chosen to do something sufficiently outside the older norms as to puzzle us old folks, without being so far outside the norms (such as using numerals) that they bring down bureaucratic wrath on their heads.
I’ve seen the numeral thing, as well as people who insist on capital letters in the middle of their name, e.g., JuliAn
Sometimes there is a legitmate reason for these things, as in contractions and glottal stops; and some tonal languages and at least on Native American language (Ab8naki, (sp?)) uses some numerals. But the majority of these people or their parents do it because they think they’re being clever, but to quote Spinal Tap, “It’s a fine line between clever and stupid.” --and to bring that point home, Tap does it too with the umlaut over the ‘n’.
–f%an’'dango
(It’s spelt f%an’'dango, but it’s pronounced “Throat Wabler Mangrove”)
This sort of internal punctuation is sometimes used when transliterating other languages. Perhaps the parents of these people wanted to give their kids names that had an international flavor without being too exotic. It’s not a choice I’d make with any of my hypothetical kids, but I can see where they might be coming from.
If I saw a written name as B’ob, I would assume (incorrectly, of course) that it was pronounced Bee-Ob.
IMHO, I think the recent spate of apostrophed names is somewhat of an affectation, like the new cutesy spellings.
Miek instead of Mike, Khrystyn for Kristin, LesLee for Leslie etc. (I’m a teacher; I’ve seen lots of weird spellings recently). People just wanna be different.
<<I’ve seen the numeral thing, as well as people who insist on capital letters in the middle of their name, e.g., JuliAn>>
I’d always assumed that capital letters served a very useful purpose: to indicate the two parts of a compound name, but make it very clear that the whole thing went in the first-name spot. I think “JoEllen” might be rather hard to pronounce if it wasn’t obviously Jo + Ellen, not Joe + llen (yen? len?) as it might be at first glance. But by not spelling it Jo Ellen, the lady avoids being Soandso, Jo E. or what have you.
Corr, who fought with various bureaucracies about a first name with a space, middle, and last…because two middle names just don’t fit
Because of online roleplaying games, every time I see a name with an apostrophe in it I think of elves. Self-righteous, snobby, self-centered elves. I hate elves.
I know a girl whose last name is Aube’ , where the apostrophe takes the place of the accent aigu that in french would be over the “e”. It was adapted to this because accents tend to be a hassle (not as much recently) in American word processing programs, especially payroll and class lists in school, etc. Although it isn’t uncommon to see the apostrophe written over her “e”, she and others have adopted the apostrope even when handwriting her name.
