Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Accents of wonder

Since coming to Utah, my mind has been drawn to unusual words. Each time I hear one, I ask myself, "Could this be a baby name?" The answer is . . . sometimes.

Two such names showed up in Joseph's homework. He's come back with simple worksheets about short vowels and long vowels, and the parent instructions include explanation of the diacritical marks which indicate the pronunciation of those vowels. I guess you indicate a short vowel with a breve (Ă) and a long vowel with a macron (Ā).

Breve and Macron. Aren't those just the most darling twin names? I'm sure some kids in France are named Macron but I bet we could make a fun twist on the name here, like Mackronn.

For that matter, perhaps we could incorporate the marks into the names themselves. If we ended up with twins we could name them Zeniff and Zeniff, just one with the breve and one with the macron. This would help the ZEENiff/ZENNiff feud Kevin and I have had over the past few years. We'd both be right! (I'd be more right, of course.)

Looking at an ASCII chart of diacritical marks, we could also have kids named Ogonek, Caron, Cedilla, Tilde, or Slash. Hard pass on Circumflex and Dieresis.

Who said first-grade homework was boring?

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