{"id":52970,"date":"2021-12-08T09:05:25","date_gmt":"2021-12-08T14:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=52970"},"modified":"2021-12-08T09:05:51","modified_gmt":"2021-12-08T14:05:51","slug":"rfks-first-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=52970","title":{"rendered":"RFK's first name"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Below is a guest post by Bob Ladd.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>For years I\u2019ve been puzzled \u2013 or at least struck \u2013 by the fact that my (Italian) wife always refers to \u201cBob Kennedy\u201d rather than \u201cBobby Kennedy\u201d whenever he comes up in a conversation (his assassination was one of the first international political events she was really aware of).\u00a0 Today it came up again because Beppe Severgnini (a prominent Italian journalist) wrote a piece in the <em>Corriere della Sera <\/em>about how RFK Jr. is a prominent anti-vax person.\u00a0 So I thought about it again, and it occurred to me that maybe \u201cBob\u201d is simply how he\u2019s referred to <em>in Italian<\/em>.\u00a0 Sure enough, in Severgnini\u2019s piece he is referred to as \u201cBob\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>So I fired up Google\u2019s n-gram site and ran the relevant comparison.\u00a0 It\u2019s 100% clear that this is not an idiosyncrasy of my wife\u2019s, but just what the guy is called in Italian.<\/p>\n<table cellpadding=\"5\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"text-align: center;\">ENGLISH<\/td>\n<td style=\"text-align: center;\">ITALIAN<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/RFKngrams1.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/RFKngrams1.png\" width=\"210\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<td><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/RFKngrams2.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/RFKngrams2.png\" width=\"210\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>So then I wondered if this was an English vs. Italian thing or a native vs. foreign thing. There\u2019s enough data in Google to suggest it might be the latter, though recently at least some foreigners seem to have moved toward the native version, and in any case the gap in Italian looks bigger and better established than in other European languages:<\/p>\n<table cellpadding=\"5\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"text-align: center;\">FRENCH<\/td>\n<td style=\"text-align: center;\">GERMAN<\/td>\n<td style=\"text-align: center;\">SPANISH<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/RFKngrams3.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/RFKngrams3.png\" width=\"150\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<td><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/RFKngrams4.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/RFKngrams4.png\" width=\"150\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<td><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/RFKngrams5.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/RFKngrams5.png\" width=\"150\" \/><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>Any ideas why or how this difference (whichever it is) might have come about?<\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<p>Above is a guest post by Bob Ladd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Below is a guest post by Bob Ladd. For years I\u2019ve been puzzled \u2013 or at least struck \u2013 by the fact that my (Italian) wife always refers to \u201cBob Kennedy\u201d rather than \u201cBobby Kennedy\u201d whenever he comes up in a conversation (his assassination was one of the first international political events she was really [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-found-in-translation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52970"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52976,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52970\/revisions\/52976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}