It’s part of the joke on Dope memes. Duran Duran’s song Rio is one of those, so he was tying that in to Frank Zappa, the rock musician.
My (step)son’s name is Zayden.
::golf clap::
I heard or read at some point that the not-really-phonetic spellings of Irish names was an intentional attempt to annoy the English, in retaliation for them always invading Ireland and such.
Looking for verification or rebuttal online, I found another set of names:
Didn’t see any discussion of the ‘spelling doesn’t match pronunciation deliberately to annoy’ theory in my search results, but then my search terms could have been ineffective.
This is nonsense, and pretty ethnocentric nonsense at that. The spelling of Irish predates the Norman invasion of Ireland by centuries. True, the spelling was a bit in flux, and true, there are a few more recent systems (such as all the Hs instead of dots or nothing at all). There was also a spelling reform in the 20th century. But Modern Irish spelling is a direct descendant of Old Irish spelling.
It’s like English. You write “boat” and you never think about why you stick a useless A in the word, but then you learn the Old English was “bāt,” no O. Or you write “knight,” knowing that we no longer pronounce a bunch of the letters, but you’re used to them and they’re historically present and they help distinguish homonyms. But when another language does the same sorts of things, it seems crazy and weird. So you assume it’s all about you, but it’s not—it’s just about change over time and the fact that the Latin alphabet isn’t really well-suited to Irish from the get-go.
Talk of Celtic spelling reminds me that I recently explained that “Loughery” is pronounced with a K, at least in some cases.
I personally know a poor child named Jonathan whose name is pronounced “Joe Nathan”.
mmm
Well, you’d be surprised. Polish spelling may look daunting because of unfamiliarity, but it’s actually a very reliable guide to pronunciation. You just have to learn a few rules. Once you know the orthographic rules, you’ll be able to pronounce any Polish word right off the bat, because of all written languages Polish spelling is one of the best matched to pronunciation in the world. (Tibetan and Burmese are the worst.)
Some of this is learning to distinguish between sounds that aren’t distinguished in English. For example, Polish has two different kinds of sh sounds and two different kinds of zh, articulated in different places in the mouth. The spelling has to account for that. Once you learn that the digraph “rz” always stands for a retroflex zh phoneme, it suddenly becomes a lot easier. Another rule is that voiced consonants are changed to unvoiced when adjacent to an unvoiced consonant.
The K in Krzyszewski is unvoiced, so the zh sound of “rz” changes to sh. Likewise, the voiced sound of /v/ (spelled w) is adjacent to unvoiced s, so it changes to /f/. It doesn’t help understanding when Americans drop the initial /k/ out of an impulse to reduce unfamiliar initial consonant clusters. The Polish pronunciation of Krzyszewski would be [kʂɨʂɛfski].
A huge advantage in learning Polish is that the stress always goes on the penultimate syllable. That’s a breeze compared to Russian, where the stress has to be specially memorized for each word, can change within the same word with declensions, and the placement of stress alters the actual vowel sounds. In Polish the vowels always have the same sound. Even when a vowel sound is altered by nasalization in a declension, they write that so you never have to guess how to pronounce Polish. I like the sound of Polish, too, and I think it’s one of the more pleasant-sounding Slavic languages. Its crystal-clear vowels help a lot. Russian vowels are muddy by comparison.
Nope.
If I recall correctly, Frank Zappa named a few of his kids something odd…my memory is a little hazy…Henry? Larry? Moon Unit?
mmm
Outside of family field trips/shopping excursions, and some tightly controlled church-based sporting events, not really.
I haven’t read the whole thread, but I heard that Frank Zappa and Michael Jackson had a love child named…
: screeching halt :
Damn, you guys are harsh!
To the OP, I can see a momentary giggle when the employee first discovered the child’s name. The laughing and pointing with other employees was too much, though.
And posting the picture was beyond the pale. Even government agencies like the Social Security Administration won’t add names with fewer than 5 occurrences in any given state to their downloadable database because it could be used to personally identify an individual.
Interesting. The list you posted bears out the pronunciation of “Siobhan” as “shuVawn”, as every instance of ‘b’ seems to be pronounced ‘v’.
I’m sure a true Irish person is horrified at “Caitlin” being pronounced “kate lin”, when it’s quite clear that it should be “cat LEEN” - and also amused / disgusted at us Murricans insisting on spelling it “kathleen” just to be cute.
Without reading the blog, calling them JimLinkCharlie might simply have been a result of any parent’s confusion over which kid to yell at. “You! Yeah, you, John, uh, Mary, uh, George”. (without the intervening “uh”). (I got around that by referring to both my kinds as “Sweetie”).
Obviously if it was a consistent thing and truly meant to destroy identities, that’s horrible :(.
An acquaintance had a husband named, let’s say, John Paul Jones. When their first son was born, they didn’t want a Junior, so they named him John Thomas Jones. Then they decided they wanteda Junior afer all, so #2 was named “John Paul Jones”. IIRC, they referred to them by their middle names, but I’m sure it’s led to a LOT of confusion.
And reading the linked blog -no cute forgetfulness was at play - the parents were monsters :(.
In Irish, “B” is never pronounced as an English V. “BH” is.* (Think of T vs TH in English, or S vs SH).
*Results not guaranteed. Your pronunciation may vary depending on dialect and whether broad or slender.
OMG, “Brandee” is what I wanted Kate and Willy to name their daughter (Charlotte), right down to the classic stripper spelling.
I think Kathleen has been around long enough to be considered a variant.
I went to high school with the last few of a Catholic family with IIRC 11 kids, and all the girls were named Mary and were called by their middle names. The Fischer quintuplets followed the same format, and they too ended up having 11 children; however, the family I knew had them one at a time. To further confuse things, three of the girls were later found to be identical triplets.
http://www.quintland.com/fischer/
The Mary in my class had a boyfriend all through high school, and after a while, there was a very persistent rumor that she had an abortion. My attitude about it, both then and now, was, “Yeah, so? What am I supposed to do with this information?” I’m posting it here because that boyfriend had one of the strangest Facebook pages I’ve ever seen. He’s a bodybuilder, in the master class now because of our ages (mid 50s) and most of the pictures were of him all oiled up and surrounded by bikini-clad sweet young thangs. However, it looked like he was in a relationship with another guy; none of the things he posted made much sense. When I knew him, he seemed like an intelligent and reasonable kid; who knows what happened in the meantime.
Apparently Caitlín (note the nice accent indicating correct pronunciation!) is just one (the Irish one) of the hundreds of variants of Catherine/Katherine/Aikaterina/…