Talk:Wendy

On 13 July 2023, it was proposed that this article be moved to Wendy (given name). The result of the discussion was no consensus.

Origin

An anon user added some text from where the name Wendy came from. This was copied straight out of the link at the bottom of the page; I reverted it because there was already a paragraph that summarized the page, so copying directly from the source (which is plagiarism) was unnecessary. -- VederJuda 10:59, 29 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Inconsistency

In the lead it says Margaret befriended a girl, yet later the 'girl' is referred to as a boy. someone clear this up. —Preceding unsigned comment added by IngeniusDodo (talk • contribs) 18:11, 14 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

One big mess

do you know what the greek meaning for wendy is? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.78.203.126 (talk) 03:14, 29 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Almost nothing of Welsh origins, spurious claims that Barrie created the name and spurious suggestions that it may be related to Chinese Wen Di, which isn't even pronounced the way it is in English. 89.231.104.212 (talk) 19:08, 20 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Earliest use in the US

The article contained the following:

Wendy Gram, a female resident of Ohio, was born in 1828

Anon editors added:

(this name is incorrectly indexed[see NOTE], her name is Lucindy (Lucinda in 1870))

NOTE: The name Wendy in this instance comes from the Ancestry.com index. Upon viewing the original census document, it is obviously NOT Wendy.

I am taking this in good faith and removing the original statement about 1828. – Fayenatic London 19:59, 28 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Straight Dope

For what it's worth, The Straight Dope's article on the origins. 75.37.22.28 (talk) 01:25, 18 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Rhotacism (or not)

This reads almost like OR...Who says that the pronunciation of "friend" like "fwend" is really due to rhotacism? If we recall Bugs Bunny and the proverbial pronunciation of "wabbit" (rabbit), AND that Bugs had a New York accent in the classic episodes, well, then the pronunciation "fwiend" (friend) may as well be due to dialect, thus originating of the region where somebody grew up. From that reason, we should not always assume a kind of "speech disorder" with everything. Just my 2c. -andy 77.190.17.108 (talk) 09:13, 22 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

to respond... Well, /r/ is late acquired in sorts of dialects of English, and reduplication is also ubiquitous in child speech. There is no implication of a disorder, but the production of Friend with /fw/ and the partial reduplication with no cluster at all, just /w/, are both excellent examples of typical development, which in an order child would be correcctly called a "delay". This is very unlikely to be a dialect feature of adult speech. See Dickens or Wodehouse (rather than Mel Blanc) for more social variants relevant to your 2c. There is little justification for the regional analysis you suggest at the time Barrie was writing. We should not always assume... etc... but we should not just contra-assume.

"rhotacism" is a terrible term to use for something that is LESS of a rhotic than expected, by the way, as a more general point. Linguists would reject this term 100%.

"Emperor Wen" in here?

Not only is "文帝" not a name at all (hence does not belong to an article on a name), it is not even one word - it is the combination of the posthumous name "Wen" with the title "Emperor". While it does sound similar to "Wendy", and additional knowledge certainly won't hurt, this just seems so irrelevant to the point of being misleading. Please feel free to add it back if someone thinks otherwise. 15.211.185.78 (talk) 08:56, 27 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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Inspiration for the name and its lack of use before Barrie's play

Barrie was Scottish. So why the focus on the name Wendy in the US? Cultural imperialism? :-)
Using www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk there are various facts that might help clarify the idea that Barrie "invented" the name Wendy. Though wikipedia does not report original reseach, it is possible to rely on common sense. Barrie almost certainly was able to use it as a name for a character because it is a diminutive of Gwendolyn, and its phonotactic properties resemble other names. People do not accept a new name out of the blue - so while "friendy-wendy" might be be a conscious or unconscious inspiration for Barrie, this DOES NOT explain how half of a random phrase unconnected to any name can (a) inspire Barrie to invent a name and (b) be accepted as such by an audience.
Rather, the Edwardian British audience for the work was very familiar with the Welsh name Gwendolynne, with common practices in forming "hypocoristic" or nicknames for cousins and family members all given the same name, like Jane or Mary or Elizabeth. There are lots of variants, from Lizzie to Beth, but nobody is credited with "inventing" each of these, even if they were the first to use it in print.
Bear in mind also phonotactics: the phonemic cluster /gw/ does not appear in English words, other than names borrowed from Welsh.
In Scotland, the name "Wendy" does not appear before 1910 in 50 years of national records, despite pet-names and variants frequently appearing in census returns. This suggests "Wendy" was not a common variant in Scotland. There are precursors however - variants of the name starting "Gwen..." have around 300 births, even in Scotland, and there are some dozens of "Gwyn..." variants. The name "Wynne" with a simpler /w/ beginning is used for more than 3 dozen individuals, but mainly as a middle name. It appears only three times as a first name before 1910, twice for a girl and once for a boy. There is also a Wenda Klatt born 1906 in Bellshill, but I am not prepared to spend £1.50 to eyeball the original certificate, so (as with the US example) the index might not be right.
The oldest clear examples of Wendy come from 6 girls born between 1916 and 1920. The earliest is Wendy Blanche Besandt (1916, Stranraer) with rather an international-sounding name, and then there is Wendy Anderson (1918) and some others with more traditional names that show the more mainstream uptake has started. From 1921 to 1930, there are 29 birth index entries, and from 1931 to 1940, 107. The following decades show exponential growth, with 533 and 1080 index entries. I'm sure there must be some actual piece of work out there that could be cited to improve this entry from its current anecdotal level.
"Wendy" is a perfect example of a family name version of "Gwendolyn" or "Gwendolynne". The "friendy-wendy" story is far more likely to be a folk-etymology. Perhaps some Wikipedia editor might like to edit this entry a bit to give it a little more intellectual content? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.106.196.13 (talk • contribs) of 10:31, 12 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
- The above comment is just incorrect. There is no evidence that Wendy was used as a pet form of Gwendolyn, Gwendoline, etc. before Barrie's play. I removed the reference to the British 1881 census. There are only three women listed in the index of that census on Ancestry.com as "Wendy". If one looks at the original records, one sees that in one of them "Wendy" has been crossed out by the census taker. One of them is actually "Weney" in the original record, and one is illegible: the census taker obviously first wrote "W. Amy" as the girl's name and then tried to add the full first name later, making it impossible to read clearly. There are now links on Ancestry.com to genealogical research showing that both the latter two women had Winifred as a first name, not Gwendoline, so even in the unlikely event they really were called "Wendy" as a nickname, they give no evidence for a Gwendoline connection. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:8804:3F04:200:A956:ADB2:E1D:496C (talk) 00:28, 24 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  - I think the Gwen theory should be listed here.[1]--Jack Upland (talk) 03:16, 31 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Move discussion in progress

There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Wendy (disambiguation) which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 19:01, 13 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]