Spelling names; Was Stress on final syllable of names

[Peter A. McGraw]

I spent six months in Ireland, where I had to spell my name every time
somebody needed to write it.  The anglicized spelling used in Ireland for
the name (one of the most common in the country) is McGrath, pronounced
[m at gra:].  One of my theories as to why it's spelled McGraw in the U.S. is
that immigration officials wrote down what they thought they were hearing,
and what they wrote then became an official document that people were stuck
with.  An alternate theory is that the immigrants themselves respelled
their name to avoid having it mispronounced [m at graeth] (where ae=ash and th
substitutes for theta).  The name spelled and pronounced McGrath in the
U.S. is, of course, originally the same name, but in my scenario the
immigration officials copied it from a written document and the immigrants
eventually gave up trying to get the natives to pronounce it right.

Peter Mc.

--On Tue, Sep 26, 2000 4:19 AM -0500 Mike Salovesh
<t20mxs1 at CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU> wrote:

> Actually, Salovesh was imposed on my grandfather by the immigration
> authorities at Hampton Roads/Newport News in the early 1880s.  They
> weren't used to Russian names, so they wrote whatever they could and
> said "That's your name from now on."



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                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu