elementary school kid names

[flea]

Children from Casper's school who have art in display at the University this month (ages K-5th grade):
Laura
Aleshia
Kiara
Davion
Ty’Quavious
Cristina & Kenya (probably siblings)
Ziah
Carolina
Quindarius
Kim
Danarius
Victor
Haleema
Shaqrius & Shycrius (probably siblings - how do they pronounce the names so they sound different, I wonder - "shack" and "shy"?)
Juan
Elizabeth
Jordan
Stacey
Uriel
Ty’Dria
Jetssiri
Tiger Lili
A warning to anyone making assumptions about ethnicity based on naming style - I don't know any of these kids personally (I think they are mostly in the older grades), but I did have the last names, and basically, the names are all over the map, as far as Anglo name plus Latino last name, African-American style name plus Latino last name, Latino name plus Anglo/Afam last name. Make no assumptions about what a given kid would look like!

Comments

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I am interested in the -ius endings, on the one hand, and the two Ty'- prefixes, on the other. Are the Ty'-s siblings, perhaps? I don't think that's a vestige of a foreign language, or else there's be a higher chance of it being spelled ten different ways. (Ta-, Ti-, Ti'-, etc.) Is there a famous person with the Ty'- setup? (It's tickling my brain, like there's a football player whose name I will remember as soon as I hit post.)

I kinda like the -ius ending -- it sounds like a fanciful Latin thing. Jalavius, Moristius, Derandius, Wistius! Everything sounds better with an -ius ending. And it beats the hell out of a classroom of Jadens and Bradens.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

In the K lists when Casper was in K, there were three kids with names ending in -quavious! And, IIRC, a Montavius. I think that degree of specificity must be some local thing; certainly I can't think of any celebrity -quaviouses. But I do think that the -ius ( and -us) names, especially in the South, and especially among African-Americans, reflect a long tradition of semi-classical names. I.e. Darius Rucker, lots of Marcuses as opposed to Marks in the South.

Ty- is a pretty standard African American name segment, in my experience, up there with D'/De. Tyrese, Tyrone, Tyshawn, Tydashia, all names I've heard.

I should really look up some scholarly articles on African-American naming history, because it's really interesting.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that Tyrone is the oldest of those names by far, and may be the template by which the others came to be. However, that doesn't explain how Ty- became so separate from the rest of the name that it needs an apostrophe or a second capital letter to signal the syllable-change. (DeAngelo or D'Angelo I can understand, because of the vowel-transition and the tradition of Spanish name-spelling.) Ty'Dashia looks like a character from Star Trek, whereas Tydashia is more of this earth.

(It is possible I am biased against apostrophes, especially where they do not signal a noise unavailable in the catalog of letters. Now if Ty'Quavious's name really does have a glottal stop -- the traditional meaning of the non-possessive apostrophe -- in it, that would be awesome!)

I realize I associate the name Darius with Estonian, because I had a classmate with a very Estonian last name whose first name was Darius. I have always found it as charming on Hootie as I find the fact that there's a man in my org named Kermit. (Older than me, and thus also older than Jim Henson's usage of it.)

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

The apostrophe (not indicating a glottal stop or really, anything at all) is a pretty common part of 'kre8ive' spelling across the board. There are Ry'leighs, for example. It is as one with the superfluous 'y'.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Okay, now Ry'Leigh is really unfortunate, unless that child grows up to be a big fan of H. P. Lovecraft.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

I just remembered, a woman at my work has a 2 year old named Sha'Miracle.

[ellenbs.livejournal.com]

I know three Kermits (two as a middle name - not sure if that counts). I think it's an old New England name. Wasn't one of the Roosevelts a Kermit?

The '-ius' ending for African-American names may be a family thing - if you read through old lists of slave names, they were often given names from classical history or from plays. I knew a guy named Titus, who was named after an ancestor who had been named after a family slave who had saved his sister from drowning.

Also, Sha'Miracle actually made me do a spit-take.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

There are (were) several Kermit Roosevelts - son, grandson, great-grandson, and great-great grandson (the last being our age: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Roosevelt_III) of Teddy. I also went to prep school with a (different) Kermit, who was a III or IV or something as well.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Now see, there the apostrophe is necessary, so that you don't look at her name and think, "Sham wow!" It breaks up the syllables properly.

[mearagrrl.livejournal.com]

On first glance I thought that was pronounced Sha-KREE-us and Sha-CRY-us. But then I saw the second one had that extra Y in there, and now I have no idea. Huh.

[(Anonymous)]

Tyrone is the Anglicized version of an Irish place name. In the Gaelic, the prefix is spelled Tir, which means "land of," as in Tirconnell, or land of the Connell family. Not sure that it relates to African American naming patterns, but there is a linguistic precedent for "Ty" to be attached to different names.