Damn!  Beaten to it by BiS by three minutes!   At least I've finally worked out how to merge threads! 

BeefyDeedz wrote:

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Could be fun for the Skupskis to get some singles matches in between their doubles.

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Not going to happen today though by the sound of it. According to a Neal Skupski tweet, it is persisting down.

QR1:  Fritz Wolmarans (RSA) WR 545 defeated Neal Skupski UNR by 7-6(2) 6-2

Coup Droit wrote:

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Ken has lost the first set, 6-3, against 'fake frenchman' who is, in fact, American: Jean-Yves Aubone - who, I believe, actually pronounces it Auboné, though I've never seen it written like that.

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On the latter point I posted this link in response to a post by Indy a couple of weeks ago when he took Aubone to be a Frog.  The pronunciation guide would appear to defy all the logic of French pronunciation by suggesting that the stress is on the first syllable & that the final "e" is sounded rather than silent!  Only in America... 

Stircrazy wrote:

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Coup Droit wrote:

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Ken has lost the first set, 6-3, against 'fake frenchman' who is, in fact, American: Jean-Yves Aubone - who, I believe, actually pronounces it Auboné, though I've never seen it written like that.

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On the latter point I posted this link in response to a post by Indy a couple of weeks ago when he took Aubone to be a Frog.  The pronunciation guide would appear to defy all the logic of French pronunciation by suggesting that the stress is on the first syllable & that the final "e" is sounded rather than silent!  Only in America... 

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I think the final 'e' being sounded makes sense.

i.e. there probably used to be an acute accent, and so you'd sound the 'e' (as a short 'ay' sort of sound), but they dropped the accent because it looked 'foreign' and 'weird' but kept the actual pronunciation because that sorts of stays in the family, passed on verbally. Quite a lot of immigrants do this (no idea about the Aubone family's history of course).

The stress on the first syllable is nonsense, in terms of French linguistics, of course.

There are no stressed syllables in French - something a lot of foreigners find very difficult. French does have a lot of sentence/prosodic stress i.e. whole words within the sentence, but no word/lexical stress i.e. syllables within a word.  Each syllable has a very strict equal stress.

But maybe the Americanisation of the name has added the stress - which isn't too daft, really, if the family have been there a while.