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Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

namez.com

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Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#101

Post by taejo »

sophacles wrote: post #14

One 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 with such names might adapt them to be pronounceable (I do: my name has an English vowel which doesn't exist in German, and I introduce myself with a German approximation when I'm speaking German). But even the pronounceable version might not have an obvious correspondence with the written name. For example Nguyen might be happy being called [wɪn] rather than [ŋʷĩəŋ], but many English speakers will say something like ['guyɪn].

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#102

Post by danieltillett »

mthoms wrote: post #75
keerthiko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a conspiracy theory that Starbucks and other large cafe chains intentionally misspell names, so that the customer will take a picture and facebook/instagram it, as free advertising for the place. If it isn't true, it certainly should be. If I opened a coffee shop tomorrow, I would instruct all my baristas to misspell the customer names for this reason.

Better still - write flattering descriptions. "Cute guy with red shirt", "Woman in pretty dress", etc.

Very clever. I have seen a similar idea used where people gossip loudly in a public place saying nice things about the person they want to ingratiate themselves with who is not present but who can overhear.

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#103

Post by Jemaclus »

I once went to church with a friend of mine for six weeks, because he was shy and didn't want to go to church by himself. We get there, and this woman walks up to me.

Her: "What's your name?

Me: "Brian"

Her: "Brett! Nice to meet you, Brett. What's your last name, Brett?"

Me: "(my last name)"

Her: "Well, it is SO nice to meet you, Brett Psycho."

I was too flabbergasted to respond properly. Even worse, we had the exact same conversation each week for the next six weeks. She couldn't even be bothered to remember my discombobulated name.

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#105

Post by a3_nm »

I agree that it is strange that we always provide the written form of a name although you cannot unambiguously determine its pronunciation from it (classical take on this: http://youtu.be/tyQvjKqXA0Y#t=0m19). Still, it sounds a bit over the top to have a service dedicated to the purpose of giving links to pronunciations of names.

I just provide the IPA for my name on my website, based on the unrealistic assumption that people who need to will read it.

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#107

Post by ternaryoperator »

commandar wrote: post #48
andremat wrote: post #8

Remembers me of "How do you pronounce 'Bjarne Stroustrup?'": http://www.stroustrup.com/pronounciation.wav

"Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux."

"Hello, this is Richard Stallman and I pronounce Linux as GNU/Linux."

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#108

Post by blahedo »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #70
CocaKoala wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno; as somebody who's name gets mispronounced essentially all the time, I'm pretty sensitive about trying to pronounce other people's names properly. If they embed the pronunciation in their email, then a) I don't have to ask, and b) I can practice on my own time with a reference to make sure I have it correct. It's nice of them.

My name gets mispronounced, too, and I'm fine with it - I actually prefer the incorrectly pronounced version of my name. It has taught me, though, that when someone tells you "you can just call me X", you should not keep asking them how to really pronounce their name. If you're an American, you are not going to be able to fluently pronounce some non-Indo-European names. It's downright rude to quiz people for minutes…

I agree, but I'll add that a minor variant of that "you can call me either X or Y" is really annoying, because in my experience "it doesn't matter to me" is almost never actually true. I see this a lot with students; they think they're doing me a favour by giving me a choice, but they do prefer one of them, and their friends call them one of them, and I end up looking like an asshole for using some other form of their name.

To avoid the appearance of that, it would be nice if instead of "you can just call me X"---which sounds like it's your less-preferred alternative, your second choice, so obviously someone's going to try for the other one---you said "please call me X" or "I prefer if you call me X". Then everybody wins! :)

Re: Put an end to people mispronouncing your name

#109

Post by bby »

icambron wrote: post #80
robalfonso wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one. My last name is not hard to pronounce but if you haven't seen it you can pick 3/4 ways to spell it...but if I've worked with you for years and my email is firstinitial.lastname@ it drives me kind of crazy when I see people misspelling it.

My first name get misspelled more commonly than it's spelled correctly. I don't mind that so much from a personal relationships standpoint (it's not an intuitive spelling), but it's caused me real issues. The pharmacy had my name misspelled such that I couldn't fill proscriptions and it was really hard to fix. My ISP spelled it wrong when creating my account. The list goes on. And my name even has the "standard" spel…

Cambron instead of Cameron? o_O
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