name regret

[Ronald Butters]

I'm confused. What does "homophonous spelling" mean????

/#esd/ seems to be a permitted initial sequence in Spanish (though rare; _esdrújulo_ is the only word I know of); to that extent, "Esdelmira" would be a normal interpretation of "Sdelmira," but "Edelmira" would surely have sounded OK to a municipal clerk if that is what the parents said--and I can't see why a clerk would have written down a bizarre-seeming, phonetactically alien "Sdelmira" if someone had spoken "Edelmira" to the clerk.

On Oct 14, 2011, at 12:45 PM, Michael Newman wrote:

> I had a Dominican student once who told me that her name, Sdelimira, "violates phonotactic constraints."  (It was supposed to have been "Edelmira," which in Dominican spanish would be a homophonous spelling with Sdelmira. She blamed the municipal clerk. )
> 
> 
> 
> Michael Newman
> Associate Professor of Linguistics
> Queens College/CUNY
> michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu
> 
> 
> 
> On Oct 14, 2011, at 6:32 PM, Ronald Butters wrote:
> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Ronald Butters <ronbutters at AOL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: name regret
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> What percent regret the dorky name that they gave their children? (E.g., RONALD REAGAN JONES might cause his parents to have deep remorse for inflicting such an uncool name on one who grew up to be a trendy professor of literature at Yale.)
>> On Oct 14, 2011, at 9:17 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>> 
>>> Seems like this should be "Namers' Remorse".
>>> 
>>> LH
>>> 
>>> On Oct 14, 2011, at 8:01 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Eight percent of U.S. parents regret the "cool" name they gave baby:
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/10/baby-name-mistakes-tenth-_n_1003279.html
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> JL
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
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