Earlier quoted context omitted.
So is Joshua Jesus when he's in Mexico?
Hey, Zeus!
Don't forget, "Nobody messes with the Jesus"
The government ate my name
201–210 of 212 posts
Re: The government ate my name
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is John Juan when he's in Mexico? For the biblical Jesus, the situation is even worse. His name was probably originally יֵשׁוּעַ, and should therefore have been Yeshua to us users of the modern day Latin alphabet. But instead his name was adapted to Greek linguistic conventions as Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs), and from there transliterated into Jesus.
James/Jacob is even messier! They come from the same name, but are in English treated as completely distinct names. In the New Testament Greek, you get Ἰακώβ (iakob) used for Old-Testament-era Jacobs (primarily the one later given the name Israel, but also the one in Matthew 1:15–16), and Ἰάκωβος (iakobus) used for New-Testament-era Jameses (two of Jesus’ disciples, and one of his brothers). English Bibles have ended…
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Re: The government ate my name
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
People's own opinions about what their name is is not a "non-issue", shitty-ass governments or not. Declaring a people's opinions about names stupid and irrelevant (or even illegal) is one of the many ways majorities oppress or even commit slow genocide against minorities.
> Declaring a people's opinions about names stupid and irrelevant (or even illegal) is one of the many ways majorities oppress or even commit slow genocide against minorities. My point was governments do this all the time and it is a far cry from fascism. Elsewhere in the thread, it is mentioned that often times you have to compromise when registering a name in a different country (for instance, if the language does…
There are reasonable regulations and unreasonable regulation. The idea that since some regulation exist, it would be totally the allow any other rule is absurd.
Yes, people (specifically women) with strong opinion on the suffix of their name exist and proper solution of government is to butt off that decision. This is no the norm worth keeping by force.
Re: The government ate my name
#204There's an analogous problem for Russians, and presumably folks from other Slavic-language countries. Our last names are gendered; if Ivan Kuznetsov marries Elena, her last name becomes Kuznetsova. (And their children would have gendered last names, too - little Borya Kuznetsov and little Masha Kuznetsova.) So Russian families who move to America have a choice - either deal with people and systems who assume that mar…
> who assume that married couples, and parents/children all have the same last name and hit roadblocks when that expectation does not match reality Speaking as someone whose mom didn't change their name when marrying my dad, with a sister who didn't change her name when marrying my brother in law, with a wife who also didn't change her name when she married me, I think this problem is overblown. I have yet to encount…
Oh, it's not a problem, until you're a Kuznetsov-father trying to get on a plane with your Kuznetsova-daughter, and you become a suspect of kidnapping until you don't prove it's actually your daughter. After you get your mortally scared daughter back from authorities, you probably start thinking that having the same surname is something you actually need.
And no, US authorities won't make it easy for you or her.
Re: The government ate my name
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sound [æ] is not entirely foreign to Polish and some other Slavic languages. It often shows up as an allophone of /a/ when it's between two "soft" (palatalized) consonants (e.g. the first /a/ in the word "niania"). The problem for us learning it is that it's not a separate phoneme, and worse yet, the environment in which it occurs in Slavic languages doesn't correspond to anything in English - and, conversely, in…
This doesn't happen in my speech, I certainly pronounce both 's as [a] in "niania". [ɛ] is different, it certainly becomes [e] after palatalized consonants. I agree that people cannot tell the difference intuitively, though.
It happens more in fast speech. If you draw out the vowel - as people tend to when they are trying to get a better feel of it - it will end up at [a] even if it doesn't start there. I suspect you'd need to actually record it and then look at the formants to tell for sure.
Re: The government ate my name
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. Every time someone asks me, "but how do you really pronounce it", I do a big internal sigh and resign myself to the next 10 minutes being a useless pronunciation lesson.
And when they somehow come away satisfied that their wrong pronunciation works... ugh. I will say though, I'm perfectly fine with people not being able to pronounce my name, and I do expect the same courtesy in return. I'll give it my best shot, but if it's not happening, it's just not happening.
> I'm perfectly fine with people not being able to pronounce my name... I'll give it my best shot, but if it's not happening, it's just not happening.
It's hard to square this with all of the frustration you're expressing in your other comments.
Re: The government ate my name
#207The American presumption of having a single middle initial has always seemed weird to me. In NL, you can have as many names as you want, and some have a lot. Others have just a first and last name. I happen to have that single middle initial, but my wife and kids have two. Also, my wife's first name is not actually any of her legal names. Same with my dad and his brother and sister. "Calling name" is a common field o…
In NZ someone I know has a single name. Due to the constraints of the system, effectively he has no first name and only a surname. In things where a first and last name are required (I think the drivers licence system needed it), he uses "citizen" as a filler. It can go the other extreme too of course: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360848808/worlds-longest-nam...
I used to work for a university in Australia, our solution to mononymous students was to put their single name in both first name and surname fields. So if your name was just Mayawati, we'd put you down as Mayawati Mayawati.
Some US bureaucrats seem to like FNU (First Name Unknown) or LNU (Last Name Unknown). So one encounters mononymous Americans whose first name is Fnu or last name is Lnu. A while back I had a coworker whose surname was Fnu – I believe her legal paperwork had Fnu as her first name, but she got IT to swap her firstname and lastname in our corporate systems, because she didn't want people addressing her as Fnu.
Re: The government ate my name
#208A few years ago I was unable to register a new Australian company via the automated systems because one of our directors has a hyphenated middle name and the various agencies concerned normalised this in differing ways, leading to rejection at a validation step. Resolving this turned a process of a few minutes into a multi-week telephonic saga. I subsequently learned that many folks faced with the same problem simply…
An Aussie friend has a hyphenated last name and has had so many headaches in her life due to it she made everyone she knew swear they wouldn’t inflict that on their future children
Some cousins of mine have hyphenated surnames (Mothers-Fathers)... but in practice they just go by their mother's surname, only on official paperwork do they use their father's too. They aren't disowning their father's surname–they aren't estranged from him or anything, their parents are still together–they just prefer it this way.
Re: The government ate my name
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is John Juan when he's in Mexico? For the biblical Jesus, the situation is even worse. His name was probably originally יֵשׁוּעַ, and should therefore have been Yeshua to us users of the modern day Latin alphabet. But instead his name was adapted to Greek linguistic conventions as Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs), and from there transliterated into Jesus.
So is Joshua Jesus when he's in Mexico?
Probably he’d be Josué. But in Greece, he’d be Ιησούς (Jesus). Beginning with the Vulgate¹, there was a distinction between the two names in Biblical texts that is carried over into most modern contexts (although I would note that Russian follows Greek in preferring then name Иисус (Jesus) for Joshua the prophet and I’m guessing that this in general follows the Catholic/Orthodox split (Croatian uses Jošua while Serbian Исус lending support to my hypothesis.²
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1. Or maybe the Vetus Latina, I can’t claim enough authority over early Biblical translations to say with any certainty. And perhaps some other non-Western translation would have priority in making the Joshua/Jesus distinction.
2. My grand strategy for making these sorts of cross-lingual comparisons is to use the “other projects” links from Wikipedia which is also a great way of getting more accurate translations for somewhat niche terminology than machine translation or dictionaries can offer.
Re: The government ate my name
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds as if it could slowly erode the whole "gendered surname" concept even in the origin countries (e.g. Russia) If you can treat the gendered name simply as a grammatical construct, things are easy - and a "name" like "Elena Kuznetsov" would simply be a grammatical error and never occur as a real name. However, now people from abroad visit the country or possibly even (re-)immigrate and suddenly you do have r…
As everyone said already, the gendering isn't something just cultural, it's baked into the grammar. Specially because of grammatical case, different genders have different inflections. In a setting like "Let's call Kuznetsov(a)" accusative case applies, so Kuznezov would become Kuznetsova, Kuznetsova would become Kuznetsovu. Gender-neutral speech is absolutely impossible without overhauling the whole grammar, not jus…
Although in at least some cases the gendering isn’t just a simple gender marker: In Czech, for last names which are adjectives, then yes it’s a gender inflection (e.g., Rosický → Rosicka), but for non-adjectival names, the female version is expressed as a possessive, so, e.g., Hošek → Hošková, which to my liberal American ear feels kind of weird.
I would note that in Spanish-speaking countries, it’s generally the case that a woman does not take her husband’s surname, but simply keeps her own. She might add de + her husband’s name to her own after the marriage,¹ but this is less common than women in English-speaking countries retaining their name after marriage.
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1. When my ex-wife’s green card was processed after our marriage, the attorney had added “de Hosek” to her name which she didn’t want and had to have the attorney change everything to keep her name as it was.