Hm…I don’t know. I think terrible names are popular enough presently that when the generation being born right now is school-aged, a McKeinsleigh will probably need to use a last initial in class to not get her confused with the other one(s).
Very much this. The people who make these kinds of posts forget that this is how names are invented and evolved.
People who complain about what can be termed “Tragedeigh” names seem to be fine with “Kayleigh” and “Ashleigh”, despite both being a later variation on “Kayley” and “Ashley”, with the former not becoming popular until the 80s - and because of a song, at that.
In general, people have a very hard time with the idea that language in general, and names specifically, evolve over time. Whatever was commonplace until they reach, say, their 30s is what’s “right”. Any variation after that is “wrong”. When, of course, it was just as mutable when they were young and before they were born, but they weren’t around for the latter and were equally mutable when they were themselves young.
There can often be an unpleasant class/race undertone to it as well.
Expect those examples you gave appeared due to mixing of standard phonetics of different languages. They where two normal things spelled correctly pushed together.
That’s where the VAST majority of change in language and names comes from. Spellings, or sounds picked up from other languages due to mixed language or dialect households.
So even the new spelling is still normal by the standards of the environment it came from.
Many of the recent nonsense names are entirely abnormal in their origin. Having no root in language, dialect, religion, history or culture.
They are entirely bullshit made up nonsense. Which is NOT normal historically. Even naming after a video game character with a weird name is more normal than what’s been happening.
What’s not standard about the phonetics of Emmaleigh? Or Graycyn, for that matter, to go with the example in the screnshot?
“Gray” is a word, and even an extant first name (Gray Davis, for example, or Gray O‘Brien). “Cyn” is a common syllable, like in “cynic”, but it’s also a name itself - it’s a common nickname to shorten “Cyndy” or “Cyntha” (eg Madame Cyn or Cyn Santana).
Having no root in language, dialect, religion, history or culture.
This part was important, it’s not just phonetics.
Emmaleigh
This is still a dumbass name that serves no purpose but to reveal the parents’ ignorance and desire to give their kid a “unique” name. You can make a case for something like Ashleigh, where -leigh is used as an alternate spelling of the -ley from Ashley in all sorts of English place names, with the same meaning or a similar one as -ley has in the name Ashley. Emmaleigh is just try hards desperate to be different.
“Gray” is a word, and even an extant first name (Gray Davis, for example, or Gray O‘Brien). “Cyn” is a common syllable, like in “cynic”, but it’s also a name itself - it’s a common nickname to shorten “Cyndy” or “Cyntha” (eg Madame Cyn or Cyn Santana).
You’re fine with Graycyn, right?
This sort of thought process is, as I understand it, exactly what @[email protected] is complaining about. Graycyn is stupid as fuck. Yeah, I could name my kind Pterry or Psimon and say “Yeah, but we have words like pterodactyl and psychic, so it’s consistent with other exceptions to the standards of English orthography,” but it would still be stupid as fuck and cruel to name a kid that.
I think you would have a better argument with people naming their kids Khaleesi or something. Yeah, it’s not a name that I would give to a kid, but it’s already entered the language as an explicit borrowing of a character’s title that entered popular culture. I don’t see how that’s any different than something like a person learning French and deciding they prefer the name Guillaume to William and naming their kids that. Deciding you want to name your kid Mychael, or Mathyew, or Jeze🔔, or something because your child is just too precious to share a name with all the plebs who have the same name with a conventional spelling isn’t some grand evolution of language, nor does it add any novel meaning to the name. All it does it let people know that your kid is the child of a couple of feckless muppets.
I gave examples of having a root in language - specifically, the English language.
But, okay, a name has to have all of those things when coined to not be stupid. That would mean that you have equal disdain for Vanessa? It was coined by Jonathan Swift. It has none of the things you claim are important. It’s just a combination of two syllables taken from a friend’s last and first name - Esther Vanhomrigh. Myra? Coined by Fulke Greville, it’s just an anagram of “Mary”. Wendy? Coined by J. M. Barrie, it’s taken from a young girl mispronouncing the word “friend” as “fwendy”.
There’s plenty more. I’m sure you’re equally annoyed by all of these, rather than accepting them as perfectly fine and normal because they were coined before you were born.
This is still a dumbass name that serves no purpose but to reveal the parents’ ignorance and desire to give their kid a “unique” name.
I mean, at least you’ve dropped the facade that you have a reasoned, linguistic rationale for your dislike and are now leaning into “it’s stupid because I personally don’t like it”.
You can make the case for something like Ashleigh, where -leigh is used as an alternate spelling of the -ley from Ashley in all sorts of English place names, with the same meaning or a similar one as -ley has in the name Ashley.
[…]the Old English (OE) noun lēah, described as ‘incomparably the commonest topographical term in English place-names’ (Gelling and Cole 2014: 220), and usually appearing in place-names ending in current spellings of -ley, -ly, or -leigh[…]
Graycyn is stupid as fuck.
Again, it’s good to see you dropping the pretence of having a reasoned position.
Deciding you want to name your kid Mychael, or Mathyew, or Jeze🔔, or something because your child is just too precious to share a name with all the plebs who have the same name with a conventional spelling isn’t some grand evolution of language, or does it add any novel meaning to the name.
You’re right, spellings should only change if it also changes the meaning of the word. That’s why I shame people for calling their children Amy rather than the original Aimee; Edith rather than Eadgyth; Alice rather than Aalis; Walter/Walther rather than Waldhar; and so many more.
You’re definitely right about Emmaleigh. The only proper way to spell it is Emelye. All subsequent spelling changes is just hipsters who aren’t changing the meaning at all. Imagine calling your daughter a stupid as fuck, dumbass name like “Emily”! For shame!
It really would have been more concise to just write “I don’t care what you write, I’m right and screw everyone who disagrees.”
You keep treating every single innovation as though it’s assured that it will one day be adopted into the “standard” (as much as such a thing can be said to actually exist) language at some point in the future, and dismissing anyone who disagrees. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is actually part of that natural evolution of language you hold so dear. If enough people see a novel form or word and reject it, for whatever reason, that innovation has hit a dead end and won’t last. The sort of names you’re championing might be enjoying rising popularity right now, but it’s a mistake to assume that means all of them will inevitably become accepted. Some of them will, and many more will fade into obscurity.
These names are not immune to any criticism just because you’ve decided that anything goes and to say otherwise is bad linguistics. Names come and go all the time, some for some fairly rational reasons, some for entirely arbitrary ones. It’s not hard to rationalize why Adolf has fallen off precipitously as a given name in the US, but what’s the basis for Clarence going from one of the top 50 names for boys in the US to not even cracking the top 1000 for the last 45 years or so? The truth is, it could be anything. Sometimes people stop using a name because it’s considered old fashioned, sometimes it’s supplanted by a new variant that proves more popular, and other times it’s just because tastes have changed and people find it ugly or embarrassing, rather than being the perfectly normal name it had once been.
I am, however, unaware of any case in which a name faced with losing its popularity or acceptability has been saved by someone riding high on their own self-righteousness telling anyone who dares criticize a name “You’re all ignorant cretins, don’t you know linguistic prescriptivism is not widely accepted amongst linguists?” while ignoring the fact that they themselves are trying to be prescriptive in their own way. Natural language is not, to the best of my knowledge, a teleological phenomenon. Just like evolution in living beings doesn’t have any special design or end goal to be worked towards, there is no perfect form, no grand design that languages are all working towards that you can compare against to assess whether a given innovation will be accepted or rejected in the course of time.
Outside such obviously insane stuff like the child abuse masquerading as a name that Elon Musk inflicts upon his children, none of us can say with certainty whether a given name will stand the test of time or not. People choosing to adopt them or not, giving their opinions on them and popular sentiment is all part of how that will ultimately get determined, and you just want to come along and browbeat people for engaging in that and expressing their own views on names. How about you propose your own objective criteria for analyzing the viability of a given name going forward, oh wise one?
Okay, so, “-ly” is equally valid as an English place-name spelling varient of “leah”. Don’t believe me? Ask the English Place-Name Society:
And? Again, thank you for admitting that despite cranking out a fair bit of text, you don’t seem to do so great on reading comprehension. Just to repeat it again, with emphasis for you.
You can make a case for something like Ashleigh, where -leigh is used as an alternate spelling of the -ley from Ashley in all sorts of English place names, with the same meaning or a similar one as -ley has in the name Ashley.
Huh, what do you know, the -ley/-leigh bit actually means something in the name Ashley, and it shares this meaning the -leigh used in place names. Yet Emily is derived from a patrician surname from ancient Rome adapted to better conform to the norms of English, or as a feminine form of the name Emil. In either case, the -ly in the name Emily is not cognate to the English -ley or -leigh. So instead of being one variant amongst many equivalent lingering forms that predate modern efforts to standardize English orthograpy, that -ly isn’t even a discreet morpheme on its own, and the name would be better treated split into Emil and -y. But sure, tell me again how it’s unconscionable to say that people deciding to jazz it up and be extra by turning it into Emmaleigh are the cool-headed, linguistically grounded voices of reason in this case.
Ignoring all the straw-manning which has nothing to do with anything I wrote…
To be clear - your contention is that a spelling in a name can only legitimately be changed if the new spelling is an equivalent alternate spelling of the same syllable from a different context and where the two spellings must have an equivalnet definition in that context, but that definiteion does not need to be relevant to the name itself? I don’t think you’ve said that last part, but I’m kind of assuming that you wouldn’t argue that someone called Ashley or Ashleigh would necessarily have to have been born in a meadow surrounded by ash trees.
So…how do you feel about Kayleigh? Derived from Caoilfhionn. Means fair-haired. The spelling “Kayleigh” is around 40-odd years old. You dislike it for the same reasons and with the same vociferousness as Emmaleigh, correct?
And you are, of course, fully in favour of Oakleigh, since it’s exactly the same as Ashleigh except with oak trees rather than ash trees. The fact that it’s a very new variation has no impact on your feelings towards it, right?
people have a very hard time with the idea that language in general […] evolve[s] over time
Writing is not language. Speaking is language (edit: in this particular case), and there’s no phonetic change here. If a spelling is due to another language that the parents, or really anyone, speak, that’s fine. But if your language (read: English) has such a terrible spelling system that people can do these things completely arbitrarily and the spelling is still somewhat readable, there’s something wrong with that writing system (not with the people!)
Writing is absolutely part of language. If your point is that English has weird, illogical spelling rules, then you’re right. That’s not a new observation. People have been writing about that since spelling was standardised.
And it’s been changing for a very long time.
How do you feel when you see the name “Amy”. Do you dislike it? What if I told you that the original spelling in English was “Aimee”? “Amee” was also very common once upon a time. “Amy” was a much later spelling and was once considered a cringey, trendy “Tragedeigh”. As, as I said above, were Ashleigh & Kayleigh.
But you don’t think of them that way, because they’re now common. “Kayleigh” only gained popularity 40 years ago. “Ashleigh” is less than 100 years old. And already people don’t bat an eye at it. But they will at “Emmaleigh”, even though it’s exactly the same evolution.
What is or is not considered dumb in any particular culture is normally nothing more than a function of the age of that thing.
For example, Wendy is just considered a normal name today, but people were mocked for calling their daughters Wendy once upon a time. It was invented for the book Peter Pan and was derived from a child referring to their friend as their “Fwendy”.
Vanessa was once considered a stupid, trendy, quirky name, being another one taken from literature.
Cheryl - a combination of Cherie and Beryl. Melinda - a combination a Mel and Linda. Annabelle - a combination of Anna and Belle. Annabeth - guess what that’s a combination of?
All of those got the same push-back for being stupid and contrived. Yet now they’re just…names.
Give it 50 years and people called Khaleesi and Katniss will be talking about how stupid all these new names are, rather than sensible ones like thiers.
Hm…I don’t know. I think terrible names are popular enough presently that when the generation being born right now is school-aged, a McKeinsleigh will probably need to use a last initial in class to not get her confused with the other one(s).
Very much this. The people who make these kinds of posts forget that this is how names are invented and evolved.
People who complain about what can be termed “Tragedeigh” names seem to be fine with “Kayleigh” and “Ashleigh”, despite both being a later variation on “Kayley” and “Ashley”, with the former not becoming popular until the 80s - and because of a song, at that.
In general, people have a very hard time with the idea that language in general, and names specifically, evolve over time. Whatever was commonplace until they reach, say, their 30s is what’s “right”. Any variation after that is “wrong”. When, of course, it was just as mutable when they were young and before they were born, but they weren’t around for the latter and were equally mutable when they were themselves young.
There can often be an unpleasant class/race undertone to it as well.
Expect those examples you gave appeared due to mixing of standard phonetics of different languages. They where two normal things spelled correctly pushed together.
That’s where the VAST majority of change in language and names comes from. Spellings, or sounds picked up from other languages due to mixed language or dialect households.
So even the new spelling is still normal by the standards of the environment it came from.
Many of the recent nonsense names are entirely abnormal in their origin. Having no root in language, dialect, religion, history or culture.
They are entirely bullshit made up nonsense. Which is NOT normal historically. Even naming after a video game character with a weird name is more normal than what’s been happening.
What’s not standard about the phonetics of Emmaleigh? Or Graycyn, for that matter, to go with the example in the screnshot?
“Gray” is a word, and even an extant first name (Gray Davis, for example, or Gray O‘Brien). “Cyn” is a common syllable, like in “cynic”, but it’s also a name itself - it’s a common nickname to shorten “Cyndy” or “Cyntha” (eg Madame Cyn or Cyn Santana).
You’re fine with Graycyn, right?
This part was important, it’s not just phonetics.
This is still a dumbass name that serves no purpose but to reveal the parents’ ignorance and desire to give their kid a “unique” name. You can make a case for something like Ashleigh, where -leigh is used as an alternate spelling of the -ley from Ashley in all sorts of English place names, with the same meaning or a similar one as -ley has in the name Ashley. Emmaleigh is just try hards desperate to be different.
This sort of thought process is, as I understand it, exactly what @[email protected] is complaining about. Graycyn is stupid as fuck. Yeah, I could name my kind Pterry or Psimon and say “Yeah, but we have words like pterodactyl and psychic, so it’s consistent with other exceptions to the standards of English orthography,” but it would still be stupid as fuck and cruel to name a kid that.
I think you would have a better argument with people naming their kids Khaleesi or something. Yeah, it’s not a name that I would give to a kid, but it’s already entered the language as an explicit borrowing of a character’s title that entered popular culture. I don’t see how that’s any different than something like a person learning French and deciding they prefer the name Guillaume to William and naming their kids that. Deciding you want to name your kid Mychael, or Mathyew, or Jeze🔔, or something because your child is just too precious to share a name with all the plebs who have the same name with a conventional spelling isn’t some grand evolution of language, nor does it add any novel meaning to the name. All it does it let people know that your kid is the child of a couple of feckless muppets.
I gave examples of having a root in language - specifically, the English language.
But, okay, a name has to have all of those things when coined to not be stupid. That would mean that you have equal disdain for Vanessa? It was coined by Jonathan Swift. It has none of the things you claim are important. It’s just a combination of two syllables taken from a friend’s last and first name - Esther Vanhomrigh. Myra? Coined by Fulke Greville, it’s just an anagram of “Mary”. Wendy? Coined by J. M. Barrie, it’s taken from a young girl mispronouncing the word “friend” as “fwendy”.
There’s plenty more. I’m sure you’re equally annoyed by all of these, rather than accepting them as perfectly fine and normal because they were coined before you were born.
I mean, at least you’ve dropped the facade that you have a reasoned, linguistic rationale for your dislike and are now leaning into “it’s stupid because I personally don’t like it”.
Okay, so, “-ly” is equally valid as an English place-name spelling varient of “leah”. Don’t believe me? Ask the English Place-Name Society: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/epns/documents/journal/49-2017/jepns49-2017-wager-95-126.pdf
Again, it’s good to see you dropping the pretence of having a reasoned position.
You’re right, spellings should only change if it also changes the meaning of the word. That’s why I shame people for calling their children Amy rather than the original Aimee; Edith rather than Eadgyth; Alice rather than Aalis; Walter/Walther rather than Waldhar; and so many more.
You’re definitely right about Emmaleigh. The only proper way to spell it is Emelye. All subsequent spelling changes is just hipsters who aren’t changing the meaning at all. Imagine calling your daughter a stupid as fuck, dumbass name like “Emily”! For shame!
It really would have been more concise to just write “I don’t care what you write, I’m right and screw everyone who disagrees.”
You keep treating every single innovation as though it’s assured that it will one day be adopted into the “standard” (as much as such a thing can be said to actually exist) language at some point in the future, and dismissing anyone who disagrees. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but this is actually part of that natural evolution of language you hold so dear. If enough people see a novel form or word and reject it, for whatever reason, that innovation has hit a dead end and won’t last. The sort of names you’re championing might be enjoying rising popularity right now, but it’s a mistake to assume that means all of them will inevitably become accepted. Some of them will, and many more will fade into obscurity.
These names are not immune to any criticism just because you’ve decided that anything goes and to say otherwise is bad linguistics. Names come and go all the time, some for some fairly rational reasons, some for entirely arbitrary ones. It’s not hard to rationalize why Adolf has fallen off precipitously as a given name in the US, but what’s the basis for Clarence going from one of the top 50 names for boys in the US to not even cracking the top 1000 for the last 45 years or so? The truth is, it could be anything. Sometimes people stop using a name because it’s considered old fashioned, sometimes it’s supplanted by a new variant that proves more popular, and other times it’s just because tastes have changed and people find it ugly or embarrassing, rather than being the perfectly normal name it had once been.
I am, however, unaware of any case in which a name faced with losing its popularity or acceptability has been saved by someone riding high on their own self-righteousness telling anyone who dares criticize a name “You’re all ignorant cretins, don’t you know linguistic prescriptivism is not widely accepted amongst linguists?” while ignoring the fact that they themselves are trying to be prescriptive in their own way. Natural language is not, to the best of my knowledge, a teleological phenomenon. Just like evolution in living beings doesn’t have any special design or end goal to be worked towards, there is no perfect form, no grand design that languages are all working towards that you can compare against to assess whether a given innovation will be accepted or rejected in the course of time.
Outside such obviously insane stuff like the child abuse masquerading as a name that Elon Musk inflicts upon his children, none of us can say with certainty whether a given name will stand the test of time or not. People choosing to adopt them or not, giving their opinions on them and popular sentiment is all part of how that will ultimately get determined, and you just want to come along and browbeat people for engaging in that and expressing their own views on names. How about you propose your own objective criteria for analyzing the viability of a given name going forward, oh wise one?
And? Again, thank you for admitting that despite cranking out a fair bit of text, you don’t seem to do so great on reading comprehension. Just to repeat it again, with emphasis for you.
Huh, what do you know, the -ley/-leigh bit actually means something in the name Ashley, and it shares this meaning the -leigh used in place names. Yet Emily is derived from a patrician surname from ancient Rome adapted to better conform to the norms of English, or as a feminine form of the name Emil. In either case, the -ly in the name Emily is not cognate to the English -ley or -leigh. So instead of being one variant amongst many equivalent lingering forms that predate modern efforts to standardize English orthograpy, that -ly isn’t even a discreet morpheme on its own, and the name would be better treated split into Emil and -y. But sure, tell me again how it’s unconscionable to say that people deciding to jazz it up and be extra by turning it into Emmaleigh are the cool-headed, linguistically grounded voices of reason in this case.
Ignoring all the straw-manning which has nothing to do with anything I wrote…
To be clear - your contention is that a spelling in a name can only legitimately be changed if the new spelling is an equivalent alternate spelling of the same syllable from a different context and where the two spellings must have an equivalnet definition in that context, but that definiteion does not need to be relevant to the name itself? I don’t think you’ve said that last part, but I’m kind of assuming that you wouldn’t argue that someone called Ashley or Ashleigh would necessarily have to have been born in a meadow surrounded by ash trees.
So…how do you feel about Kayleigh? Derived from Caoilfhionn. Means fair-haired. The spelling “Kayleigh” is around 40-odd years old. You dislike it for the same reasons and with the same vociferousness as Emmaleigh, correct?
And you are, of course, fully in favour of Oakleigh, since it’s exactly the same as Ashleigh except with oak trees rather than ash trees. The fact that it’s a very new variation has no impact on your feelings towards it, right?
Writing is not language. Speaking is language (edit: in this particular case), and there’s no phonetic change here. If a spelling is due to another language that the parents, or really anyone, speak, that’s fine. But if your language (read: English) has such a terrible spelling system that people can do these things completely arbitrarily and the spelling is still somewhat readable, there’s something wrong with that writing system (not with the people!)
Writing is absolutely part of language. If your point is that English has weird, illogical spelling rules, then you’re right. That’s not a new observation. People have been writing about that since spelling was standardised.
And it’s been changing for a very long time.
How do you feel when you see the name “Amy”. Do you dislike it? What if I told you that the original spelling in English was “Aimee”? “Amee” was also very common once upon a time. “Amy” was a much later spelling and was once considered a cringey, trendy “Tragedeigh”. As, as I said above, were Ashleigh & Kayleigh.
But you don’t think of them that way, because they’re now common. “Kayleigh” only gained popularity 40 years ago. “Ashleigh” is less than 100 years old. And already people don’t bat an eye at it. But they will at “Emmaleigh”, even though it’s exactly the same evolution.
I don’t have a problem with language and names evolving, I have a problem with them evolving into something dumb.
What is or is not considered dumb in any particular culture is normally nothing more than a function of the age of that thing.
For example, Wendy is just considered a normal name today, but people were mocked for calling their daughters Wendy once upon a time. It was invented for the book Peter Pan and was derived from a child referring to their friend as their “Fwendy”.
Vanessa was once considered a stupid, trendy, quirky name, being another one taken from literature.
Cheryl - a combination of Cherie and Beryl. Melinda - a combination a Mel and Linda. Annabelle - a combination of Anna and Belle. Annabeth - guess what that’s a combination of?
All of those got the same push-back for being stupid and contrived. Yet now they’re just…names.
Give it 50 years and people called Khaleesi and Katniss will be talking about how stupid all these new names are, rather than sensible ones like thiers.