Fwd: Stress on final syllable of names

[A. Maberry]

This is not really dialectic in nature, but it seems to tie in with
Dennis's posting. I recently tried to refill a prescription for my wife
and, as I've come to expect, I had to spell my last name which is
M-A-B-E-R-R-Y and is pronounced Mabry. I repeated the spelling twice, and
the person at the pharmacy still couldn't find it. Then, I guess she
scanned all the M listings and finally came back with the fact that she
had found it but that some idiot had misspelled it as M-A-B-E-R-R-Y and
not the correct form Mayberry.
So I guess that whatever the form of the name, it will always be improved
upon.

To be fair, it isn't a common name up in the Northwest, and seems to me to
be more common in the South--and of course, there was the television
show...

allen
maberry at u.washington.edu

On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, Dennis R. Preston wrote:

> Roger Shuy appeared to have more trouble than any of us. People actually
> asked him (to his face, a favorite idiom of mine) why his name was spelled
> wrong (not to mention the many students I have had who have referred to him
> as shoe-ee).
>
> dInIs (glad to have shucked his Slavic-derived Hungarian surname
> practically at birth)
>
> PS: Please don't write and tell me that Hungarian is not a Slavic language.
>
> >walt's "like a wolf and a ram" is nice, and, i assume, effective.
> >
> >ZWICKY is troublesome.  if i can't be "alexander adams" and have
> >to give my real name, i now say "it's WICK with a Z in front and
> >a Y at the end", which seems to work.
> >
> >i much prefer the long, but more entertaining,
> >  Z as in ZEBRA;
> >  W as in WATER BUFFALO;
> >  I as in IBEX;
> >  C as in COW;
> >  K as in KUDU;
> >  Y as in YAK.
> >but few people have the patience to sit through this, and ibexes
> >and kudus are not very well known.
> >
> >arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
>
>
> Dennis R. Preston
> Department of Linguistics and Languages
> Michigan State University
> East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
> preston at pilot.msu.edu
> Office: (517)353-0740
> Fax: (517)432-2736
>