anise

[Charles Doyle]

I am continually astonished at how un-selfconscious, unknowledgeable, incurious my students are about their own names or those of their classmates and others! Maybe, on account of budget cuts, recess had been abolished at their elementary schools, so they never had to endure (or got to inflict) name-taunts.

Just today I tossed out the softball question, "If Columbus WAS born Jewish, then he must have adopted the name Christopher later in life; what's the reason for that conclusion?"  Silence.  Finally, a very tentatively offered response: "Because it sounds kind of like 'Christian'?"

Besides taunt-resistance, doesn't the preference for pronouncing "Regina" with [-jin@] instead of with [-jain@] parallel the evident (American) preference for the Latinate pronunciations of "Maria" and "Sophia," which we have discussed here?

--Charlie
_____________________________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:34:48 -0400
>From: Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
>Subject: Re: anise
>
>On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 2:08 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>
>> (As for (non-rhotic) "Viner", there's also "Regina", which has pretty much been excluded from the U.S. inventory of given names by taboo avoidance, and when I've heard it spoken (hard to avoid when you're referring to the capital of Saskatchewan) it's often rendered with the Italian /i/ (as in Gina) rather than the English /ay/.   This isn't true figure in various puns and jokes (especially when figuring in the collocation _acute angina_).
>
>I was always surprised "Regina" didn't come up in the _Seinfeld_ episode "The Junior Mints", wherein Jerry is trying to remember the name of the woman he's dating, knowing only that she was teased as a child because her name "rhymes with a part of the female anatomy." George suggests "Aretha", "Celeste", "Bovary", and "Mulva", before Jerry belatedly realizes it's "Dolores".
>
>http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheJuniorMints.htm
>
>
>--Ben Zimmer
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org