assorted comments

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:03 PM -0400 4/6/07, James Harbeck wrote:
>>"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.
>
You mean it wasn't a reanalysis of Saint(e) Alanis?

LH

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