Borrowed-a names (was: Re: Youneverknow.)

[David Bowie]

From:    Wilson Gray<hwgray at GMAIL.COM>

> When I was in the Army, in 1961, I had a barracks-mate whose
> girlfriend was named _Tamara_ [t@'mar^]. He used to annoy the hell out
> of us with his punning chant of

> "Tamara tomorrow!"

> During the MTV teen drama, Awkward, a character announces,

> "I'm [t@'mar^]! It's spelled ['tAm at r@]!"

> And then she proceeds to make the same, obvious, asinine pun.

> I deduce from this that, these days, the general assumption is that,
> unless otherwise noted, _Tamara_ is to be pronounced ['tAm at r@] and
> that the formerly-standard pronunciation, [t@'mar^], once the only one
> known to me  - and to all of my barracks-mates and, indeed, AFAIK, to
> tout le monde - is now considered to be cutely exotic.

There are, i think, two things going on here:

1. The pronunciation of names is relatively unpredictable from spelling
(e.g., 'Thomas' starts with [t] rather than theta), and this includes
what syllable is stressed.

2. Borrowed-a is regionally variable (e.g., how do *you* pronounce
'plaza'?), particularly when combined with unpredictable stress location.

My personal-history case: Jeanne and i are both from areas where
borrowed-a is pretty much consistently [a], never [æ]. (That last
character's the a-e ligature, if it didn't come across right.) Our
oldest, Sadra [sadr@] was born shortly before we moved to Utah, and we
never imagined anyone would have any trouble at all with her name. The
Wasatch Front of Utah, though, shows variation in borrowed-a treatment
(e.g., consistent Nev[æ]da, variation between Color[æ]do and Color[a]do,
p[a]sta, pl[æ]za, and so on), and people there were very confused about
how to pronounce her name, [sadr@] or [sædr@] (or [sedr@], which is a
rather different issue).

For Jeanne and me, any pronunciation of Tamara as [tæm at r@] is strange,
since you simply *can't* have a [æ] there. (You might could have
[tam at r@] if you're gonna have first-syllable stress, i suppose.) I can
imagine that for people from certain other areas (i'd like to hear from
any Canadians on the list for their intuitions, for example), [t at mar@]
could be equally strange.

--
David Bowie

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