Mark Krikorian of the National Review Online is upset that he’s supposed to pronounce Sonia Sotomayor’s last name with the stress on the final syllable:
“Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English […] and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.”
Now, Krikorian is right that final stress is rare in multisyllabic English words. But it is certainly not unheard of, and it’s certainly not “unnatural”. Consider these common English words, all of which have final-syllable stress:
- personnel
- Japanese
- volunteer
In fact, according to a study of the subset of English in the Hoosier Mental Lexicon (Clopper 2002), 11% of the multisyllabic words had their primary stress on the final syllable. By comparison, Wikipedia notes that about 2-6% of the U.S. population has red hair, and around 10% is left-handed. So if final-syllable stress is unnatural, so’s red hair and left-handedness.
Furthermore, I’m willing to bet that Krikorian isn’t always so obstinate. I’ll bet he doesn’t go into Victoria’s Secret and ask to buy “lingery” because the pseudo-French pronuciation is too unnatural. I’d be surprised to hear he refers to a sauté pan as a “soat” pan to avoid that unnatural final stress. And I’d be shocked if he can’t go to a Starbucks because it’s a café.
What Krikorian is complaining about is having to use a stress pattern that occurs in a full 10% of multisyllabic English words. He’s looking for an excuse to be lazy, and does a terrible job justifying it with his foray into armchair phonology.
Oh, and Krikorian also whines about “the whole Latina/Latino thing — English dropped gender in nouns, what, 1,000 years ago?” He’s spot-on there. That’s why you can say that Brad Pitt is a hunky actress and that Joan of Arc was burnt for being a warlock. Or that Sonia Sotomayor is an intelligent man and Mark Krikorian is a confused woman. Right?
Motivated Grammar 
12 comments
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May 28, 2009 at 10:21 am
bobolinq
And let’s not forget the even more apt Kal-a-ma-ZOO.
May 28, 2009 at 10:52 am
p of v
Perhaps Mark Krikorian really IS a confused woman. Would certainly explain a lot…
May 28, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Erin
I love it when people dress up racism in pseudo-linguistics.
May 28, 2009 at 11:38 pm
mike
Well, he does have a point. One cannot be expected to be able to pronounce all the dang names from those, you know, … ethnics. Like, for example, the name Krikorian. We should anglicize that a bit to be less of a hardship in the mouths of us English speakers. For example, we could just refer to him as “crikey.”
June 1, 2009 at 10:25 am
Brad
OK, I’m kinda late to the party here, and I agree with this post all around, but “employee” has final stress? Really? It’s definitely em’PLOY,ee around these parts.
June 1, 2009 at 10:30 am
Gabe
Brad: You’re definitely right. I am terrible at determining where stress falls in a word. Thanks for the correction.
June 2, 2009 at 7:07 am
Twilight2000
Employee, like so many words in English, has various regional pronunciations – em-ploy-EE in the north, em-PLOY-ee in the south – and I suspect the midwest has adherents of both pronunciations.
But just try pronouncing Caribbean ;>
The point, of course, is that at best, Mark Krikorian is being disingenuous – and an idiot if he thinks we don’t see the crap he’s pulling.
Good heavens, my spell check doesn’t even recognize his name – wow – he really should be more polite and simplify it, doncha tthink?
*sigh*
June 2, 2009 at 8:33 am
Nathan
If I were to drop the final vowel of sauté I would get sot, not soat. Have some Americans borrowed the [o] of the French pronunciation?
June 2, 2009 at 9:21 am
Ray Radlein
Didn’t Mr. Krikorian just finish voting for a Presidential candidate last year who pronounced his last name with a stress on the final syllable?
June 2, 2009 at 9:59 am
Hal
Please… “Anglicize” is too French. It’s Englishize.
In fact, I demand a campaign to Englishize the National Review. I also demand that they remove all references to laissez-faire economics.
June 6, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Timothy Hadley
Way to go, Gabe–give ’em hell.
September 21, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Graham Asher
British English is often (not always) more eager to move the stress to the front than American English, and in sauté, like many other French loan-words, the stress on our side of the Atlantic is firmly on the first syllable. The same is true of café, soirée, negligée, passé, etc.; fiancé has the stress on the second, not the third syllable, as does attaché. Of course nearly everyone here stresses the first name of your president on the first syllable, pronouncing it the same as ‘barrack’. Other names like Bernard, stressed on the first syllable in the UK and the second in America, follow the same pattern.