Comment by Findecanor
4 years ago
I've been told that this is also an issue in Japan, except the reason might more often be a matter of pride than superstition. It is supposedly one reason (of a few) why fax machines are still in common use in Japan.
Later versions of Unicode support "Variation Forms" of Han characters as a way to be able to encode different variations. They are encoded as a Variation Selector code (U+E01000 and up) after the Han character. The forms are listed separate from Unicode versions in the "Ideographic Variation Database" <https://www.unicode.org/ivd/>. So far, it contains characters from a couple of Japanese dictionaries, a Korean and one from Macao/Hong Kong.
I knew someone who added an accent character to their name because everyone pronounced it wrong. She met someone bilingual who shot back that if she wants it pronounced that way she needs to add an aigue. So she did, and everyone still pronounced her name wrong.
In fact going any place with her very nearly became an “are we living in a simulation” crisis for me because the number of times she would say her name and the other person would say it back incorrectly was… upsetting. The degree to which some people butchered her name, especially combining half of her first and last name into a completely different name, made us joke about buggy NPCs.
I could imagine how in some cultures writing it incorrectly hurts as much as pronouncing it incorrectly. Or possibly moreso in places where multiple plausible pronunciations have to be negotiated via an introduction, which is the case in China, is it not?
In Poland people have a neat life hack for that problem. They have other names for non-polish folk to use. Eg pawek, tomek, bartek rather than have people mangle their real name.
My name got changed when I moved to Spain and it never bothered me, while I have met people who took great offence at the use of standard nicks that they had not explicitly sanctioned in advance. I know a guy who makes a new name up for everyone he meets. Like or lump it. If you are too sensitive about your name, you risk people not using it at all.
Apropos Poland: the chess legend Miguel Najdorf.
He was in Argentina for the Chess Olympiad in 1939 when WW2 started, so he stayed and got stuck there. It's unlikely he'd be known as "Miguel" now if this had never happened.
I wonder how far back this practice goes. There are quite a few Polish-American last names which are like that, to the point that the original last name has been forgotten.
EDIT: Aha! this website has a guide on these names, and even dispells the Ellis Island explanation I was told as a kid: https://pgsctne.org/changed-surname-list/
They did it the same way you did.
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It does goe both ways though. Take the time to learn how to say and spell someone’s name and it usually goes down well.
I say this while fully aware of my own butchering.
People are just incredibly dense sometimes. My wife has a name that's one letter different from a more common name, but clearly different in pronunciation.
Nevertheless there have been countless times where people automatically substitute the more common name, or even worse in text messages manage to misread it and reply incorrectly.
It sometimes upsets her. The npc analogy is very apt, i guess many people are just very preoccupied?!
> or even worse in text messages manage to misread it and reply incorrectly
Overzealous autocorrect can happen to names, too. There's a whole thing about Asian names not being in computer spellcheck dictionaries: https://www.abbynews.com/news/youre-not-a-mistake-b-c-group-...
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My last name isn't English, and doesn't follow English pronunciation rules. I've long ago accepted the minor annoyance of people neither knowing how to spell or pronounce it.
There's a trick in Chinese to explain which character you are referring to when it could be any number of homophones- you repeat it as part of another well-known word. To use a crap analogy, you might say "Je like Jeep" or Ge like geography" if your name is Jennifer or Gene. The latter is a bad example since Gene is itself a single syllable, but hopefully it is illustrative enough. On the other hand, if you have a special stroke in a common character (or remove a stroke, as in the post above), I am guessing it's harder to explain.
I tried to learn Thai a few years ago, and people learn the consonants in its alphabet via a mnemonic system (much like the NATO phonetic alphabet), so if you want to spell your name you could use a collection of words like "egg short-a bell long-o chicken" and the other person would immediately understand.
On a perhaps related note, I was once accosted in the street by a Thai tuk tuk driver who wanted to know which football team to bet on ("just ask any white bloke you find" probably isn't the best strategy but I digress). One of the teams was Portsmouth, but I told him unless I knew who was playing I had no idea of the strength of the team. He held up a newspaper written exclusively in Thai, which does not use a roman alphabet or anything like it, and proceeded to read out the names of the players almost perfectly. I'm 99% sure Thai has all of the sounds made in English, but even knowing that it still blows my mind to this day.
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