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Help[Facts] Re: Elements of African American names
in reply to a message by overtheclouds
Most of the prefixes and suffixes commonly used in created African-American names are abstracted out from other names. You also have to remember that since almost all of these names are accented on the second syllable, the vowel sound in the first syllable is something like a schwa and so gets respelled in various ways. Da- therefore is really just a spelling variation of De-. Sha- was abstracted out from names like Chanel and eventually other forms like Ta- were created on the analogy of Da- and Sha-.
-isha is the ending of a great many names commonly in use before the 1960s, like Alicia and Felicia. -ique is from names like Monique and Dominique, and -iqua is probably just a blend of -isha and -ique.
I don't think -quan is just from the Vietnamese; it also is related to Chinese names like Kwan. It could also have been abstracted out from surnames like Quantrell.
The use of apostrophes probably isn't from the Arabic names but rather from French and Italian. There are French, Italian, and Portuguese surnames with spellings like D'Artagnan, D'Angelo, and D'Souza.
The other way apostrophes got into African-American names was as a substitute for other diacritical or accent marks. Until very recently it was almost impossible to use such marks in the typefaces normally provided in the United States. Only with modern word-processing programs can people in the USA easily reproduce spellings like è or é. Back in the 1960s and 1970s when apostrophes first were noticed in African-American names in places like Detroit, many of the examples were where the apostrophe was placed before or after a letter which would have such an accent mark in the names' original language. It was not uncommon at that point to see spellings like Mich'ele or Miche'le, which were attempts to reproduce the original French spelling Michèle with the typefaces available at the time.
After apostrophes were first introduced in names like D'Angelo and Miche'le, they were taken up as just another part of the "respelling repertoire" in African-American culture and started to pop up in many other places.
-isha is the ending of a great many names commonly in use before the 1960s, like Alicia and Felicia. -ique is from names like Monique and Dominique, and -iqua is probably just a blend of -isha and -ique.
I don't think -quan is just from the Vietnamese; it also is related to Chinese names like Kwan. It could also have been abstracted out from surnames like Quantrell.
The use of apostrophes probably isn't from the Arabic names but rather from French and Italian. There are French, Italian, and Portuguese surnames with spellings like D'Artagnan, D'Angelo, and D'Souza.
The other way apostrophes got into African-American names was as a substitute for other diacritical or accent marks. Until very recently it was almost impossible to use such marks in the typefaces normally provided in the United States. Only with modern word-processing programs can people in the USA easily reproduce spellings like è or é. Back in the 1960s and 1970s when apostrophes first were noticed in African-American names in places like Detroit, many of the examples were where the apostrophe was placed before or after a letter which would have such an accent mark in the names' original language. It was not uncommon at that point to see spellings like Mich'ele or Miche'le, which were attempts to reproduce the original French spelling Michèle with the typefaces available at the time.
After apostrophes were first introduced in names like D'Angelo and Miche'le, they were taken up as just another part of the "respelling repertoire" in African-American culture and started to pop up in many other places.
This message was edited 11/23/2012, 10:40 PM
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