childish pronunciation of "Christophe"

        The thread about "lunch nicknames" made me remember something about my own
first name.

        Christophe is pronounced /KRistOf/ in French, and when she was young, my
sister couldn't pronounce it at all (until she was three or four!). She
first pronounced it /tita/ with a very open /a/, and then /titOf/, and this
form was my nickname in my family for years (even an uncle of mine still
continues to use it in fact! Now my mother calls me /titi/, which is a well
known word in very informal French, and makes us remember of the /tita/ and
/titOf/ stages).

        What's interesting in that is the fact that I can recognize in this
childish pronunciation of my name some phonological changes that seem to
occur often in languages, I mean:

- loss of s and f in coda position in a syllable (very often for s in
Southern American Spanish as I discovered it in this list),
- Assimilation of the sound of the 't' to the first cluster /KR/.
- opening of the /O/ to /a/.

        So what do you think of it? Do you think it's only a coincidence or not?


                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html