[deleted]
Put an end to people mispronouncing your name
11–20 of 147 posts
Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name
#12[deleted]
Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name
#13My problem is not with people mispronouncing my name but modifying it to something easier for them.. No you may not call me Mario, or Martin. Mispronounce it! I don't care, just don't change it to something different!
Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name
#14One thing this solves is the pronunciation of odd spellings of names, and to an extent, names that are foreign to the recipient (e.g. to an anglophone many eastern European and Asian names don't have an immediately decipherable pronunciation from spelling).
However, one of the problems it doesn't help with, is that different languages and language families have sounds that are not used in other languages. This means people will still get your name wrong, because they don't necessarily know how to make those sounds, nor do they even know how to hear the subtle distinctions - e.g. the classic r/l confusion, or my own inability to get tones right when trying to learn mandarin words/phrases.
I guess what I'm saying is I don't think anyone should expect this to suddenly make everyone pronounce their name perfectly all of a sudden.
Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name
#15I've liked the way some people have mispronounced my name. Answering to a mispronounced name feels like wearing a wig to me; it's fun, and it makes me feel more exotic than I am.
Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name
#16There is one advantage in people mispronouncing your name though. In my experience, people within a group tend to converge towards one pronunciation or variation of your name. On a random encounter in public or out-of-the group environment, if someone is addressing you, you know which group he/she is from, based on the pronunciation he/she used.
Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name
#17Sounds like a good way to solve a corner case in speech recognition: speech to text for names. In reverse, it could also improve speech synthesis for personal robots that would speak the names of their users.
Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name
#18[deleted]
Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name
#19My problem is not with people mispronouncing my name but modifying it to something easier for them.. No you may not call me Mario, or Martin. Mispronounce it! I don't care, just don't change it to something different!
Or you can adopt a short nickname everyone can say right, and put the entire problem behind you.
There are more important things in this short life. A name is just a bunch of random sounds so when someone talks, you know they mean you.
Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's the same name as your HN username, I don't see any obvious way to mispronounce it, other than whether the first 'o' is long or short. Is that the bit people mispronounce?
I'm guessing any pronunciation errors are caused by people misreading it and skipping letters or adding extra ones.
This is pretty close to what happens. It's generally phonetic, and yet there seems to be a wide variety of first pronunciations, which deviate from the phonetic by several syllables either way.