Is there such a thing as Creative Pronunciation, and isn't it a bit...

Sorry, going right back to the beginning of the thread: By PuppyMonkey Wed 02-Dec-09 16:07:53
"I once met a woman at swimming with a dd she kept calling Mad-a-leen. I was a bit as I have a Madeleine myself and pronounce it, Mad-a-lin. Have heard Mad-a-line and even Mad-elaine before. But never leen. I asked how she spelled and it was the same as my dd, Madeleine.

Weirdo."

Not weird at all IME. DD is Madeleine. I say Mad-a-len, like the French sponge cakes. Most people including DD say Mad-a-lin. Fans of the US TV show say Mad-a-line. FIL and our Irish rellies say Mad-a-leen. I guess at some stage she will become Maddie and be done with it

HA! Found the Catriona thread, and have discovered that it was my DD that started the controversy.

VIVIA
I can damn well pronounce my DD's name however I please, and it does not make me sound thick.

Ah, read the rest of the thread now.

Great, thanks Buda. I now have the perfect answer for the auld Grannies who complain that we are pronouncing DD's name wrong.

Aside from the fact that we preferred the pronunciation, we live abroad. It would have been extremely difficult for our friends and DH's family to get their heads around pronouncing Catriona Katrina. MIL had enough bother learning the name as it was.

Dh's cousin's father is a moron. Thanks to him, her birth cert says 'Treesa'.

Vivia
I have a Catriona and we pronounce it Cat-ri-o-na.

I met a woman at a wedding from one of the Islands (I have forgotten which one) and she told me that her mother uses the same pronounciation.

I missed the Catriona thread, must go and look for it.

D'oh!
off I won't sound clever like that will I?!

Oooo sasamaxx I like that!
sociolinguistic variable it feels rather nice as it trips of the tongue

[stores away for use at a later date to make herself sound very clever]

I've probably been beaten to it but I think the above posters are meaning 'marry' as opposed to 'maree'

I don't really think any of these catriona/caitriona pronunciations are 'creative' per se - just regional variants of the same name. It's known as a sociolinguistic variable

There's MAHR-ie, and the more French way, Mar-EE.

Marie is Ma-REE, Marry, or sometimes MAHree.

Love Wivoney and Jme though- do you think they want him to be a rapper? J to the me

There's also the Irish or other foreign names part, where people apply the English pronunciation of certain letters, 'Ais' for instance, to a name that is in a completely different language, where letters make different sounds (the S in Aislinn is a slender S, preceded by the slender vowel i, and is pronounced SH -- if the S was preceded by a, o, or u, which are the broad vowels, it would be a broad S, pronounced S).

The Mar-ie pronunciation of Marie was also common in Ireland -- knew a few even in college.

Ina is definitely a Scots thing, I've even met an Angusina.

There are, I think, two different discussions here. Some names have more than one accepted pronunciation - such as Catriona and Lucia. Why not just ask the person how they like it pronounced and use that version? They're not doing it to annoy you, it's probably the way their name has been pronounced in their family for generations!

On the other hand, there are some names with creative spelling, like Jme, Xtoffer, and who knows what else. Avoid seeing it written down and it won't annoy you any more!

Personally, I'm a traditional kind of gal, but I think some of you just need to let it go - it's their name, not yours!

Bathsheba, Hugh-eye-na sounds like 'you whiner' Slip of the tongue on that mother's part, maybe?

A woman who worked at my dd's nursery (in glasgow) was called christina pronounced chris-t-eye-na. It just sounded a bit forced and wrong when I first heard it but assume it must be a scottish thing.

Agree with skihorse that in the west we say katreena

bit late to join, but my mom knows 2(!) small Aislins, pronounced ASE-LYNN. Noone around them seems to bat an eyelid or think it's unusual. Took me ages to convince her that although it's their choice, it's a little bit like calling your child SEE-O-BAN.
(I had never realised about Caitlin! )

I'm East coast Scotland, bf is West coast - he says Katreena I say Katreeuna.

I've grown up with two gaelic names... always a delight having them mangled by English tongues!

I've definately heard Eye-zabel for Isabelle (one of the main reasons I'm not a big fan of the recent resurgence of Isabelle/Isabella) and I've heard Christ-eye-na for Christina too.

My Mum talks of lots of "eye-na" names when she was at school - basically any boy's name became a girls name with the addition of "eye-na" - including in her school class a Donaldina and a Hughina

i think Wivoney is an urban legend... my friend's SIL is Yvonne, and her family sometimes call her Wivoney for a 'joke'.. ha ha.

I'd spell it Wivoney though, not Yvonne, Y.V.o.n.n.e!! ffs
'
Re: Catriona. It's not hard. CaTREEunah. The 'u' is just touched on. You don't make a meal of the uh, but it's there.

And in Northumberland Marie was 'Mar-ie', as in the old dance 'Marie's Wedding'. (Actually I prefer that pronunciation).

Two consonants together makes the preceding vowel short; one consonant following the vowel makes the vowel long, in the case of these names. General rules of English spelling that most people are aware of will lead them to assume Cassie sounds the way most people pronounce it (like Florence said). Plus, Casey is well known as a name and surname (cf Sean O'Casey) with a recognised spelling too, with just one s.
C-a-s-s is cass (short a)
C-a-s-e is case (long a)

The name Maria was often pronounced Mar-eye-a in Ireland in olden days.

But Tiny, if you wanted your DD's middle name to be pronounced Casey, why didn't you spell it Casey. That to me is how it should be spelt.

Cassie to me is pronounced Cassie (rhymes with Lassie) (short for Cassandra).

Curlycasper - thanks for describing the Catriona pronunciation. A family friend with a sister of that name pronounced it in this way and I was trying to work out how to describe it.

On the Eye-na thing. She told me when I introduced my DD1 to her (Georgina) that she had had a girl in her class (Scottish school in the 40s) whose name was pronounced George-eye-na. Eeeeek!

Also it seemed to be a truism that everybody in Scotland had an Aunt Ina so common was the name

My DD middle name is Cassie but should be pronounced Case-y....drives me nuts but the xh middle name was the same.

I am forever correcting people....

Did make me snigger when DH shared a room with an odd man who got terribly terribly angry because everyone in the office (and in fact the world) pronounced his name the "wrong" way. He just would not accept that it was the other way round and his way of pronouncing it was actually "wrong". He would get into arguments on pretty much a daily basis with all and sundry about it. Exhausting.