Stress on final syllable of names

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

Since this discussion took place late last month, I have been listening for
other examples. One thing that interests me is that both Walt Wolfram and his
wife Marge pronounce WOLFRAM as /wUlfr at m/--with more or less equal stress on
both syllables, and with a very definite ashe in the second syllable. I have
not asked them why they use this un-American pronunciation, but I suspect
that it is so that people will have some sense of how it is spelled--/wUlfrm/
doesn't give any indication of what the word looks like. Or maybe it is
because they grew up in a German-descendant community where the vowel would
not have been lost in the second syllable. At any rate, I doubt that their
pronunciation comes about because of French influence.

Indeed, the fact that people pronounce surnames variably should not be
surprising--the way one says one's name is open to all sorts of contradictory
rules (only one of which is Frenchifiedness) and personal idiosyncracies
(e.g., Mrs. Bucket's pronunciation of her married name as [bukej]). Does one
say [l* 'b*v], [l* 'bov], or [l* 'b)v] (where [*] = schwa, ['] precedes the
stressed syllable; here [)] could be either open-o or lower-back-a, depending
on your dialect). My guess is that if this most famous linguist wrote his
name LABOFF rather than LABOV, a fourth alternative would be introduced,
['lab )f].

So, I'm not sure that there is really any kind of change taking place in
English, as Stahlke seems to suggest. Rather, there is inherent variability
brought about by a welter of conflicting phono-orthographical rules.

In a message dated 8/29/2000 3:31:14 PM, janivars at BAHNHOF.SE writes:

<< Herb Stahlke writes:


"A strange thing is happening to American English stress on words ending
orthographically in <el>.  Surnames and one or two other words are showing up
with final stress.  It's pretty universal with Nobel, but I'm hearing Wiesel
frequently pronounced [wi'zEl]..."


Like Dennis R. Preston, "I see no reason to doubt that it is modeled on
French for the obvious cultural stereotypes", at least not in many cases.  >>