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I'm breaking down the phoneme-grapheme pairs for the name, "McKeen".

  • The "M" grapheme appears to represent the sound /mə/ ("muh"). I've noticed the "uh" sound is added sometimes to single consonants, similar to how Cthulhu is often pronounced /kəˈθuːluː/ ("kuh·thoo·loo").

  • The "cK" grapheme represents the /k/ phoneme.

  • The "ee" represents a /iː/ (a long i sound as in "eye")

  • The "n" represents the /n/ phoneme.

So in total, the word can be mapped as /məˈkiːn/. (It's also possible to map it as /məkˈkiːn/, where both the "c" and the "K" are representing separate /k/ phonemes. But that's not how I hear it, and not consistent with IPA pronunciations I'm finding.)

The "ck" grapheme often represents the /k/ phoneme, as in BLACK or TACKLE or PICKLE. But names like McKeen (or McKinley) are the only case I can think of where the grapheme has a capital in the second letter: "cK".

There are other proper names with graphemes in the middle of the word that start with a capital letter, such as:

  • deSantis
  • FitzGerald
  • leClerc
  • o'Donnell

But in all of those cases, the capitalized letter is at the start of a grapheme ("S", "G", "C" or "D").

For "McKeen" though, the "cK" grapheme has a capital letter on the second letter of the grapheme (not the first). (The same appears to be true for other names that start with "McK", such as McKinley, McKinnon or McKenna.)

Are there other proper names that:

  1. Have more than one capital letter in a single word, and also
  2. Have the second capital letter on something other than the first letter of a grapheme?
kanamekun
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    I don't think that "cK" really jointly represent a /k/ sound, as they do in a word like "black." There's a /k/ sound at the end of the "Mc-," and another at the start of "Keen," and they get merged together. – alphabet Jun 11 '23 at 03:50
  • So the c represents a /k/ sound and the K also represents a /k/ sound? – kanamekun Jun 11 '23 at 04:09
  • What do you mean by "represent"? In English there's no 1:1 correspondence between letters and sounds. – alphabet Jun 11 '23 at 04:11
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    I mean, the c is a grapheme here and it corresponds to the /k/ phoneme. And the K is also a grapheme and also corresponds to the /k/ phoneme. – kanamekun Jun 11 '23 at 05:03
  • "Mc" is short for "Mac" - see Wikipedia. There are several existing questions e.g. this if you search. (The question seems based on a misconception about graphemes so not sure which is the best action re closing, or if the OP would accept some name in e.g. Swazi with a capital in the middle, but I guess questions about Swazi are off topic.) – Stuart F Jun 11 '23 at 12:34
  • What does it matter what you call it? It's a proper name and doesn't hafta follow The Rules, let alone get tagged with a Descriptive Term. Proper names get spelt the way their owners prefer. – John Lawler Jun 11 '23 at 17:56
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    See also FitzStephen and FitzSimon. – TaliesinMerlin Jun 12 '23 at 13:36
  • The '-cK-' in McKeen doesn't sound quite like a single sound to me. The 'c' sounds almost like a (quiet) hard 'g', maybe a guttural stop. It's almost swallowed just before the 'K'. – Lawrence Jun 12 '23 at 16:55

1 Answers1

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After detailed research, I realized two things:

  1. In the word "McKeen", it is the "Mc" grapheme that corresponds to the /mə/ phoneme. This mapping also holds true in other Irish "Mc" names like McKenna and McCarthy.

  2. Given this, the "K" in McKeen is its own grapheme and corresponds to the /k/ sound. So in this case, only the first letter of a grapheme is capitalized (not the "K" in "cK", as was the original concern.

The correspondence between "Mc" and /mə/ is also described in the 2018 journal, Teaching Exceptional Children:

The name McCready has three spoken syllables, where the Mc represents “muh” (/mə/)

Helping Students With Dyslexia Read Long Words Using Syllables and Morphemes, by Devin M. Kearns and Victoria M. Whaley, page 215

I also reviewed various list of names and places with more than one capital letter in them. This explanation covered many of the names I have been seeing:

Fitz, Mac, Mc (an abbreviation of Mac) and O’ are prefixes that denoted the family lineage (father/grandfather/head of tribe) of an individual – and future generations adopted these as their surnames.

Since they were used to prefix names which are proper nouns in themselves, the derived surnames have two capital letters. e.g. FitzGerald, McDonald, MacIntyre, O Henry etc.

https://housenama.com/blogs/naming-matters/surnames-with-two-capital-letters

A review of these names revealed that in all cases of surnames with more than one capital letter, the capitalized letter was always the first letter of a grapheme.

kanamekun
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  • I'm pretty sure the book you cite (by Kearns and Whaley) is just wrong on this point, since clearly in a name like "McDonald" the "Mc" morpheme is /mək/. – alphabet Jun 13 '23 at 00:44
  • The "Mc" grapheme in "McDonald" does indeed correspond to /mək/. But graphemes can correspond to multiple phonemes. The "mn" grapheme can correspond to /m/ as in autumn, column, condemn and hymn... or to /n/ as in mnemonic. In this case, "Mc" can potentially correspond to either /mə/ or /mək/. – kanamekun Jun 13 '23 at 01:25
  • So why not hold that "Keen" could correspond to /in/, instead of positing that "Mac" could correspond to /mə/? – alphabet Jun 13 '23 at 01:46
  • Grapheme/phoneme correspondences can be done in various ways. But for the record, I don't believe I ever said that "Mac" corresponded to /mə/? I only said that "Mc" could correspond to /mə/ (or to /mək/ for that matter). – kanamekun Jun 13 '23 at 02:13