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Help[Facts] Re: Tippa
in reply to a message by Daffodil
Tippa will probably be masculine, but it's a byname, or abbreviation, not a full name. As such there could be many different origins, and the form Tippa, is more likely the Norman form, not the Old English (the phoneme |p| is extremely rare in native Old English words). Among the possibilities are Tilberht, Tidbeald, or a continental name such as Thiodbald (Tybalt). In all these cases we know that both the |lb| and |db| are frequently reduced to |bb| or |b|, and the |b| pronounced as |p| in some parts of Europe (cf. names such as Rupert). There recorded names Tibba a.k.a. Tilba with no further hint of the original. There's an outside chance it could go back as far as a British name, where |p| is more common, but a Norman, rather than an English name is more likely.
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Thank you!!! A very detailed response. :)
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It should also be mentioned that certain consonant pairs do not occur in speech, as each cluster must be either consistently "voiced" or "unvoiced/voiceless". If one part of the pair must be unvoiced, the normally voiced consonant will be unvoiced to it's associated allophone/phoneme. Thus a word which grammatically would end with the voiced |d| will instead be pronounced as if voiceless |t| if the preceding consonant is also voiceless (e.g. slept, slapped, wept, left, sipped, dipped, blessed), and retained if the the preceding consonant is voiced or there is an intervening voiced vowel (e.g. webbed, waved, loved, subbed, dubbed and blazed). This also occurs the other way around - a normally voiced consonant may be unvoiced if the following consonant is voiceless, and normally unvoiced consonants may be voiced (house v. housed). Grammatically the former is rare, but is frequent in compound names such as Tipton - in this case neither the i and o are long enough to force the consonant pair to be voiced (if they were it may have become Tibbedon), so if the if the eponymous individual was Tibba, it would be forced to to Tipton anyway (the short vowels i and a explain why a Saxon Tibba would soon become Tippa as well - the same forces are at work in names such as Padraic, Patrick, Patty and Paddy).
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