A basic guide to using Asian names

See 00:53 of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXFx3Ly_imY

In that table, त is the first column of the Dental row and थ in the second column of that same row (aspirated?). Similarly, ट is the first column of the Retroflex row and ठ is the second column of that row.

I thought my family name with an honorific should be first when in Japan, but last night I saw some advice saying that people with western style names should use the given name first when speaking there. (That didn't quite sound "fair" for all the Japanese people use their given name first in western contexts.) Now I suspect the advice was out of date, but overall I agree that knowing when to go back and forth can be a point of confusion, especially with differing explanations available online.

Reading English phonetically is highly non-trivial. Each vowel can be pronounced different ways depending on factors that are not always easy to understand, particularly for non-native speakers. Same for a lot of consonants. I have no clue which accent I am supposed to have when reading romanised Hindi. East coast American? Estuary English? British RP? Australian? That could be 4 different ways of pronouncing the letter "A". Hell, I am not even sure all Hindi speakers would agree on the pronunciation of a random word because of differing accents.

> On the third hand though, Chinese names are often spelled with a Romanization that wasn’t designed for use by English speakers, so of course they can’t do it. If you want them to not mangle your name, use the Yale Romanization.

You cannot expect people to know of any specific romanisation scheme. There are different ones, used by different people and in different contexts, and that are often at odds with the spelling of well known names (like famous people or cities).

What's hilarious is people in a non-English speaking country, e.g. Germany or France, using the same romanisation as in English because it's "the correct way" and then getting the phonetics completely wrong.

> I think people want there to be a simple answer like “everyone just change your name to John Smith” or “if they can’t pronounce Xi Jinping, they’re racists” but simple answers don’t really apply. We’re all just going to muddle through the best we can.

Exactly. Ideally, it's best effort on both sides: don't be a dick if they pronounce your name wrong a couple of times and hopefully they won't be idiots either and at least try.

As a non-native English speaker who's spent quite a few years in English-speaking countries, sometimes you roll your eyes and sometimes it's funny, but it is rarely worth fighting about pronunciation issues.

Likewise we don’t expect English speakers (or Chinese Spanish French German or any other language) to be able to say her Pali name. (In Thailand they use Pali, the dead language used in the Buddhist canon, for names) She also has a Thai language nickname as all Thais do, but it’s challenging and so she decided to adopt a simpler English name among native English speakers upon arrival.

I think it’s laudable to try to pronounce names in every language across all of humanity with alacrity, but it’s unreasonable to expect everyone can and will. Certainly in my travels there’s a great deal less sensitivity to other languages and cultures than we seem to expect in the US and to some extent in parts of Europe. It’s an unreasonable standard. However in some contexts, particularly roles of trust and respect, you should always ask and try, and I think in general it’s a polite human thing to do.

But any expectation of success and remembering is completely unreasonable. In the first case, the brain just isn’t adapted to the sounds no matter how much they respect you and your culture. The second case, it’s like memorizing random nonsense words - it’s not nonsense to you, but to the person who grew up in a totally different culture and language, it certainly is. That’s not disrespectful, that’s a simple fact of reality. IMO the disrespectful thing is to be upset with humans being human - the attempt is the act of respect - anything beyond that is a measure of some intellectual capability that not everyone has.

That confused everyone who were sure they heard him wrong, so he went by Mark instead.

Seemed very sensible and made introductions easy.