Stress on final syllable of names

[Herb Stahlke]

Could /'wUl,fraem/ represent southern influence as well?

Another possibility that probably wouldn't work for the Wolframs
is a phenomenon I've observed for the last few years among young
women.  I've heard it more from California than from the Midwest,
but that's only proper.  This is the raising of the stress level
of an utterance final unstressed word.  I've heard it
particularly, but not exclusively, with words ending in -ion, so
that "suggestion" in "I have a suggestion" becomes /s at g'dZEs,tSAn/
rather than /s at g'dZEstS at n/.  Last LSA I attended a computational
paper by a young Australian who was spending a year at Stanford.
His speech was generally educated Australian, but in his formal
presentation he consistently did just this sort of final stress
lift.  I spoke with him afterwards, and in casual speech he didn't
do it.  It struck me at the time as an effect he was trying for,
because while the 2000 Valley Girl lifts the syllable to secondary
stress, he was lifting it to primary.

Herb Stahlke

>>> RonButters at AOL.COM 09/22/00 09:56AM >>>
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.  >>