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[James Harbeck]

>"Shared a _surname_"? Eh? I didn't get it. Oh, Elise went on to
>explain, her generation was the first to frenchify the family name as
>"Piquette." Theretofore, the family had retained its original
>Anglo-Saxon name of "Pickett." Okay, now I got it. Then, for no
>particular reason, I asked her what her father's name was. She
>replied, "Orville Pickett," pronouncing it in the ordinary,
>North-American-English manner.

In Quebec, Paquette is a very common family name, so it only makes
sense from that angle to change Pickett to Piquette by analogy.
Especially since in Quebec French the i in Piquette is pretty much
the same I as in Pickett (rather than the i as in "peak", which it
would be in Standard France French).

Another common name is Morrissette. There's a town in Quebec that's
called Saint Morrissette. Reasonable enough, except that there never
was such a saint. It turns out the town (like many in Quebec, for
example Sherbrooke) was named by the English after some famed toff:
Somerset. Well, when you have an assortment of illiterate and
semi-literate people (as rural and small-town people in Quebec tended
to be a century and more ago) pronouncing a foreign name, they'll
pronounce it according to their own phonotactics, and "Somerset"
converted into Quebec French phonotactics sounds not significantly
different from how they would say "Saint Morrissette." And so that's
how the town came to have its current name.

Ciao,
James Harbeck.

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