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Help[Facts] Re: Osithe
in reply to a message by namebug
Your ancestor was undoubtedly given a French form of the name, which wouldn't necessarily be pronounced the same as the English form. The English form is probably "OH-sith", but as almost all French names are accented on the last syllable, your ancestor probably pronounced it something like "oh-SEET".
I remember reading a scholarly paper by a Canadian name expert several years ago where he pointed out that the French Canadians may have actually been the first group in the modern world to create the fashion of consciously looking for unusual names for their children. They did it by searching for unusual names in the Roman Catholic church's saints calendar. Many other unusual saints' names, such as Telesphore, Emerence, Lomer, Herminigilde, Zenon, Zephirin, and Narcisse, are found among French Canadians in the 19th century.
I remember reading a scholarly paper by a Canadian name expert several years ago where he pointed out that the French Canadians may have actually been the first group in the modern world to create the fashion of consciously looking for unusual names for their children. They did it by searching for unusual names in the Roman Catholic church's saints calendar. Many other unusual saints' names, such as Telesphore, Emerence, Lomer, Herminigilde, Zenon, Zephirin, and Narcisse, are found among French Canadians in the 19th century.
This message was edited 1/19/2009, 4:10 PM
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This is a standard Germanic dithematic name, of which the first element is Os "deity", which has a long "o" (in English there is loss of |n| before the |s| of the root ans-, with compensating lengthening of the vowel). The second element is gyþ "battle" (again with lengthening of the vowel with loss of |n| before |þ| of the root form gunþ-). In this case the vowel in English underwent i-umlaut due to the earlier nominative stem, and y represents this i-umlaut of u, a sound similar to Greek Υ, and German ü. In most English dialects, this y lost its rounding and merged with i, with the y spelling only retained in words of foreign (usually Greek) origin, like Cyprus, Lydia, etc.. Now, front vowels such as i and e cause a preceding (and final) Old English g to be palatalized to |j| (but still spelled g), and if the front vowel is an i, then final or medial g may vanish altogether, as in Godiva, from Godgifa (medial f is frequently pronounced as v, and later spelled as such, cf. wolf v. wolves; leaf v. leaves - the actual condition is whether the preceding/following letters cause the f to be "voiced"). The English pronunciation would have developed from OHS-gooth>>OHS-yeeth>>OHZ-eeth>>OH-sith; since french does not have a consonant |þ|, this normally becomes t or d, while |z| is simply the voiced allophone of |s| and frequently retains the "s" spelling; since in French the second syllable is accented, the s is naturally voiced to |z|; similarly |d| is the voiced allophone of |t|, so Osithe seems to have been pronounced oh-ZEED, which explains the later record.
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