An examination of how well a blended last name (a real last name comprised of two seperate last names) stands up to the rules up making a good ship name. Some of the actors invovled in creating a good ship name are relevent to creating a real blended name, but other factors can be overlooked and at least one factor should be overlooked.

Ship Names

Last week we read about and discussed the linguistics of ship names. Shipping is a fan activity in which fans pair two of their favorite characters, often giving the pair a name comprised of parts of each individual characters’ names (McCulloch, 2015). McCulloch (2015) explains that there are 5 primary factors involved in the creation of a good ship name:

1. Overlapping refers to whether or not the two individual names have some existing overlap in spelling, sound, or both.

2. Stress matching has to do with where the stress of each individual name lies, and trying to preserve this stress in the ship name to make clear that it is a combination of the two separate names.

3. Onset conservation. In a good ship name, the beginning individual name that begins with the most consonants will be preserved in the ship name.

4. Orthographic transparency has to do with the fact that, in the English language, the same letters or groups of letters are pronounced very differently depending on the letters that proceed or follow them. In a ship name, this must be taken into account because the ship name should sound like a mixture of two names, but sometimes, because English is weird, this cannot be accomplished by retaining original spellings.

5. Lexical neighborhood evaluation has to do with whether a potential ship name may sound similar to an existing word. Names that sound very much like existing words are preferable.

A blended (but not a ship) name

Over the weekend, I recalled that when my cousin and her wife recently had a (quite adorable) son, they combined their individual surnames, Guberman and Aumann, giving him the last name Aubermann. Clearly, this isn’t a ship nam, as it refers to a singular, non-fictional, person. However, being that it is a combination of two separate names, we can evaluate whether or not it follows the grammatical rules regarding the combination of names.

• Overlap The last syllables of both Aumann and Guberman are identical in pronounciation. In accordance with the rule regarding overlap, this segment of both names is should be conserved and is, indeed, present in their son’s name.

• Stress matching. The stress of both last names occurs in the first syllable. Thus, regardless of which name comes first in the blended name, as long as it starts with the beggining of one of the names, the stress of the new name will match both original names.

• Onset conservation. Aubermann does not conform to the rule regarding the conservation of the beginning of the name beginning with the most consonants. But, frankly, au (pronounced aw) just sounds better than gu (pronounced goo), so they did their son a a favor by breaking this rule.

• Orthographic transparency. N/A

• Lexical neighborhood evaluation. To my knowledge, Aubermann does not sound like any real word within the English language. Again, breaking this rule is probably a good thing, here. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want a last name that sounds too closely like something else.

So, my cousin’s son’s last name conforms to two of the rules regarding the creation of a good ship name. Being a name that an actual person has to live with, however, it is probably to his benifit that the name does not sound like a real word and that, in this case, the conserved onset is not the one with the most consonants. This seems to indicate that, at least in some cases, the factors invovled in making a good ship name don’t all apply to making a good blend name for a real person.

References

McCulloch, Gretchen. 2015. “A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping.” The Toast. September 30. http://the-toast.net/2015/09/30/a-linguist-explains-the-grammar-of-shipping/.