Sabine goes on to add a note demonstrating abundantly the depth of his own feelings in the matter: If we believe (we don’t necessarily have to) in honoring the practice of those who actually bear the name, many of us are going to have to change what we say when a pair of tangram wings flies past on a cold October morning. W.H.W., and thus almost certainly his famous relatives Edward and Joseph, pronounced their surname with a short vowel followed by a long. The accent is placed on the first syllable, as marked.įor nigh onto 40 years now, I’ve been rhyming the name with the word “cabin.” And now comes an honest-to-goodness Sabine to tell me that I’ve been wrong. The correct pronunciation of SABINE in England is: SAB’ (short as in ‘cab’) and INE (long as in ‘wine’)…. But here, on page 84, we have exactly what we’re looking for: Most of the book’s hundred pages are filled with extracts from parish registers, pedigrees, wills, shields of arms - the usual miscellaneous debris of amateur genealogy. It would be checked out for the very first time fifty-eight years later. In 1953, William Henry Waldo Sabine published his Sabin(e): The History of an Ancient English Surname, a typescript reproduced in 250 stenciled copies. One of those copies he presented to Princeton University, where it entered the library on November 18, 1954, and was shipped off in January 1955 for binding in the ugly gray card traditionally used for pamphlets and programs. If you’re fortunate enough to know Vauxes and Bewicks and Bendires, they’ll be happy to help you out, but otherwise we’re cast on the tender mercies of family histories, most of them rare, obscure, and nearly inaccessible.

That information isn’t always easy to come by, of course. I generally think we owe those eponymous souls a nod in the direction of the way they preferred their own names to be pronounced. That said, the stakes are higher when a bird bears the name of a historical person. As long as you give two syllables to “phoebe” and observe the juncture in “nuthatch,” I’m perfectly willing to believe that reasonable tongues might differ.ĭon’t we all have more important things to worry about? I long ago reached the point that I just don’t care if someone pronounces a bird name in a way different from mine.

How to you pronounce hoopoe