Is it reasonable to think/spell it Jim McCosta if you never saw Jim Acosta in print?

To me, not very.
M(a)c sounding Scottish, and Costa sounding Spanish.

That is if the speaker separates the Jim and the Acosta, (just for example) which is rare to some people’s ears.

When one considers the preponderance of Scottish Latinos in journalism, what could be more reasonabull? ;-)

No, it isn’t reasonable. Properly pronounced, one does not elide the “emm” into the “uh’ sound.

The “emm” sound is at the end of a stressed up syllable; the “uh” is an unaccented down syllable.

If it were “Mc” it would sound like “JI-mic-COSta. Instead it is JIM-uhCOSTa.

Said fast enough I guess someone could hear it wrong and in turn spell it wrong. Especially, if that person is surrounded by a lot of Mc’s they might be more inclined to make the mistake. Most Mc and MAC end in a consonant though, unless we count the letter y as a vowel, but that’s really pushing it, and silent e, but that’s silent. My point is, people very familiar with Mc names would have a clue it’s not likely McCosta, but that’s getting really technical. One random person getting it wrong isn’t a big deal, unless he was a reporter?!

People misspell names all the time.

@Brian1946 Ironically his mother is half Irish half Czech from what I read about Acosta just this morning in Wikipedia. I don’t know if she was Cuban also, or if her family came to the states from Europe.

@zenvelo when was the last time you listened to a conversation in a foreign language? All of the words blend together….“elide,” as you put it. Thanks for the new word. To non-English speaking listeners, English does exactly the same thing, elide, man.

Listening to the video above can you distinguish separate words?

@zenvelo It looks like you mean it’s reasonable if people don’t make a point of separating the first and last name when they talk.

…I mean if we’re talking about properly pronounced, then there is no issue, there is no mistaking anything, right?

Perfectly reasonable

I think so too @josie. It takes a certain amount of education to put together the fact Mc is Scottish and Costa is Hispanic so they wouldn’t go together. Since Jim ends in “m” we’d elide it, just like we would if the guy’s name was Liam McGowester. We’d just use the one M for the last letter of the first name, and for the first letter of the 2nd name.