View Message

It's a bit like fusion cooking, no? A little Japanese mixed with Tex Mex mixed with Italian. I think it is a particularly American trait to borrow from other cultures--an over-riding tendency to think that because we can, maybe we should.....

---

Taking my family as an example, I don't think it's that unusual...my father moved here from Quebec and married my mother who was born here but to Quebecois parents. So even though she technically was born in the US she was brought up in what was essentially a Franco-American ghetto, and what I mean by that was that everyone she knew was also Franco-American and only spoke French, went to French school, listened to French radio, ate meat pies and beans and little else--the whole nine yards. My parents and their sibs were all given very French names. (Yolande, Ludovine, Clairisse, Lucille, Madeline, Paul, George etc.) Big families, lots of kids. They grew up and most, but not all, of them married other Franco-Americans but this generation was more assimilated. They learned English gradually, most of them in their twenties, and went on to give their kids (me and my cousins) names they thought of as American because they felt it would make our lives easier. This trend was more pronounced the longer it went on. My older cousins have names that can still be easily pronounced in French, such as Norman, Robert, Louise---but the younger bunch of us were purposely given "American" names, such as Carolyn, Kimberly, Gail, Brian, etc. It's sad, in a way. In another way, it's just what happens. In my generation, not a single one of my 16 first cousins married another Franco-American, so all of our kids are from blended backgrounds with all kinds of names. Certainly nothing that sounds really French. Even the honoring names were Anglicized so that Rose de Lima (my grandmother's full fn) got used as Rose in a lot of middle names, Clairisse morphed into Claire, etc. When I had a chance to name my daughters, I wasn't that concerned with my Franco-American heritage. I just chose names I liked, in one instance a Welsh one. (My aunts had a hey day with that!)

---

So I think name fusion is here to stay and perfectly natural. Though I do think it gets tricky when we want to revert to or align with foreign pronunciations. And I think some Native Americans would feel ripped off if their names were used in this way. It could be seen as a kind of colonization or appropriation.