Fwd: Stress on final syllable of names

Dennis R. Preston preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU
Mon Sep 25 03:22:34 UTC 2000


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



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