Linguistics can be useful!

David Crystal explains why “Bob” is such a strange, and therefore funny, name for a girl in the best episode of Blackadder 2 (and why “Pretend your name is Keith” is not nearly as funny in The Chicken Song)

“if I were a scriptwriter, and I had to think up the most inappropriate name for a girl dressed as a man, the above tendencies would lead me to choose a monosyllabic form, using a closed syllable, ending in a consonant as far away from a continuant as I could find – a plosive – and with a vowel as far away from /i:/ as I could find…Bob, in short.”

And here is that data above:

“In 1990, an interesting phonological analysis of the structure of English and female names first names was published in the Journal of Linguistics (Cutler et al.). They analysed nearly 1,700 items from a dictionary of first names, looking at the differences between male and female names. This is what they found:

*Female first names tend to be longer than males, in terms of the number of syllables they contain. Males are much more likely to have a monosyllabic first name (Jim, Fred, John). and much less likely to have a name of three or more syllables (Christopher, Nicholas). By contrast, there are few monosyllabic female first names (Ann, Joan, May) and many of them are trisyllabic or more (Katherine, Elizabeth, Amanda).

*95 per cent of male names have a first syllable which is strongly stressed, whereas only 75 per cent of female names show this pattern. It is not difficult to think of female names which begin with an unstressed syllable (Patricia, Elizabeth, Rebecca). but male names are very rare (Jerome, Demetrius). In fact, none of the popular British names in the frequency lists in the last seventy-five years has had an unstressed initial syllable.

*The stressed syllables of female names tend to make much more use of the high front vowel /i:/ as in Lisa, Tina, Celia, Maxine, and the archetypal Fifi and Mimi. Male names in /i:/ are far less

common – Peter, Steve, Keith.

*Female pet names tend to be longer than male. A bisyllabic pet name could be either male or female, but a monosyllabic one is much more likely to be male. Jackie could be either sex, but Jack is male. (Other examples include Bob/Bobbie and Bill/Billie.)

*Female names are much more likely to end in a (spoken) vowel, as with Linda, Tracey, Patricia, Mary. If not a vowel, the last sound will very likely be a continuant, especially a nasal, as in Jean, Kathleen, Sharon, Ann. By contrast, plosives are much more likely to be found in male

endings (David, Dick, Jock).”

From the treasure trove that is the ELT Journal back issues, now available on the Net- ELTJ 49-2-1 “In search of English: a traveller’s guide”

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 10:47 am and is filed under Linguistics, applied linguistics and SLA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.