After seeing yet another “Happy St. Paddy’s Day,” I have to ask: Huh? How do you get “Paddy” from “Patrick”? There’s no D in it.
Seriously?
I assume you can see where “Patrick” becomes “Patty” for short, and “Patty” & “Paddy” sound almost identical, especially with some Irish accents (I’ve seen and heard “Patrick” coming out as “Padrig”, for example).
There’s no “B” (for Bill) in William, either, but sometimes nicknames don’t make a whole lot of sense.
For instance, Sally is sometimes a diminutive of Sarah (or it used to be). And Molly for Mary.
Patrick in Irish Gaelic is Pádraig.
I can imagine that the diminutive of that name would be Paddy.
St. Patrick’s actual name was in Britannic Latin (he was born in what’s now England near the end of Roman rule in the area), and either was, or was very similar to, Patricius (hard c, /k/ sound). (This assumes that the facts about his life are valid, which barring later embroideries like driving out the snakes is probably a reasonable assumption.)
Seriously. I never see anyone refer to “St. Patty”—why not?
If you have explanations/derivations for any of those, I’d be interested in hearing them, too.
There’s no K in Nicholas, but some people call him St. Nick.
Probably because Patty is diminuitive for Patricia, not for Patrick.
Here’s WikiAnswers explanation for William/Bill.
This website suggests that the swapping of letters can happen between two languages, such as when Normans conquered the AngloSaxons, or when children can’t pronounce a certain letter, and another is substituted that is easier for them to say.
Paddy is an Anglo-Irish shortening of Padraig (or -aic, if you prefer), not of Patrick per se. /t/ and /d/ are the unvoiced and voiced dental stops respectivelty, and languages (such as the Celtic languages, German, and Russian) where voicing is governed by position in the word will show the relationship. Even in English the related pair /s/ and /z/ can be noted in the final soudns of “plants” and “herbs.”
Similarly to “Paddy”, the national ethnic nickname for the Welsh is “Taffy”, from St. David, Daffyd in Welsh, with the initial /d/ very lightly voiced, almost a /t/ sound.
Just because you haven’t seen it, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen. I’ve seen the term “St. Patty’s Day” frequently throughout my life, probably more often than “St. Paddy’s Day.”
For reference, I’m in my late 40s and originally from the NYC metro area.
Okay, this is GQ and that wasn’t a factual answer. Sorry about that.
An exact phrase search on Google turns up 49,200,000 hits for “St. Patty’s Day,” but only 372,000 hits for “St. Paddy’s Day.”
That’s funny - I would have said “especially in some American accents”. Irish accents distinguish between “ladder” and “latter”; American accents don’t.
Lots of Irish people are called Patrick, but very few of them are actually called Patrick, it’s usually Paddy or Pat. Why Paddy? Maybe because the Irish version Pádraic is abbreviated to Páidí, which can be anglicised to Paddy.
Yes, they do. I can’t speak for all American accents, but I know I personally do not pronounce “ladder” and “latter” the same way and I can’t recall ever noticing anyone else in the US doing so. They’re very close, but not the same.
If you make the distinction, then I over-generalised. But for most American speakers the medial consonant in both “latter” and “ladder” is realised as an alveolar tap. It’s one of the characteristic features of American accents.
FWIW, I’m American, and I’ve noticed this and pronounce the words the same. “Latter” = “ladder”. “Water” = “wadder”. And so forth. In fact, it sounds odd to me when someone clearly enunciates the “t” in those words, and I tend to think of that as indicative of a “British” accent.
Indeed, most Americans, in my experience (I am a Brit, but I have lived in the U.S. for over 20 years) pronounce a T in the middle of a word as a D. This can lead to real problems. Not long ago, a waitress, who understood the rest of my order perfectly well, could not understand my request for a glass of water. The problem was exacerbated because my first instinct was to pronounce the T more definitely and clearly, which only puzzled her more.
My sister-in-law, whose name is Patrice, is usually addressed and referred to as “Paddy” (at least it pronounced that way, perhaps other family members would write it down as “Patty”). When my English parents were introduced to her, they were puzzled, and asked me what name “Paddy” could be short for.
The problem was first forced on my attention, however, when I was a TA for a psychology professor who was lecturing about human memory. Psychologists commonly draw a distinction between what they call “semantic memory” (roughly, memory for facts) and “episodic memory” (memories of particular episodes in one’s life), and as he was explaining this to the class he wrote the word EPISOTIC on the blackboard in large block letters.
When I drew his attention to what I thought as a simple mistake, he looked surprised, and said “Well that is how I say it. How would you spell it then? . . . Oh, with a D? Yes, I suppose it is from ‘episode’.”
I can only imagine that, before I turned up, a generation of students had come out of his classes believing in some mental function mysteriously named “episotic memory.”
Hmm. I’m American, and my experience is what Lamia describes, rather than what pulykamell and njtt relate. Part of it may be what part of the country each of us is in; there can be significant regional variants. I’m thinking also that part of it may be that the distinction between medial “t” and “d” is quite subtle. Someone who is accustomed to hearing a more pronounced differentiation may not perceive the difference, while Lamia and I may be trained through experience to detect it.
I can’t help but think there was more to this than just some T/D confusion (e.g., perhaps your pronunciation of some other portion of the word was unfamiliar to her). It beggars belief that she couldn’t make out that you wanted water.
This, sadly, I find all too believable, and overwhelmingly despair-inducing.