Comment by zdragnar
4 years ago
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.
Thai has the additional wrinkle that its alphabet originates from Sanskrit and has tons of duplicate letters, so you can't just say "K", you need to specify if it's K-as-in-egg, K-as-in-chicken, K-as-in-bell, etc.
Well, those are slightly different from each other. For example, the "k" (ก) used in "chicken" (ko kai) sounds more like a "g".