The impossible challenge of human NAMES

Foreign names are the biggest challenge of language, and it doesn't seem like we've ever come up with any good way of dealing with them - though some western countries have been trying.
SUBSCRIBE: www.youtube.co...
FOLLOW ME:
🇨🇦Support me on Patreon! / jjmccullough
🤖Join my Discord! / discord
🇺🇸Follow me on Instagram! / jjmccullough
🇨🇦Read my latest Washington Post columns: www.washington...
🇨🇦Visit my Canada Website thecanadaguide.com
HASHTAGS: #language #names #linguistics

[@zsac18]

I still appreciate the fact the French call Vladimir Putin "Vladimir Poutine" in a completely non satirical way

[@basslvck]

Stop you are making me hungry

[@sachab6098]

I remember hearing that on the radio and I simultaneously confused and very pleased 😂

[@Hand-in-Shot_Productions]

Makes sense, since "Poutine" is a bit closer to the original Russian name than, say, the English pronunciation of "Putin". However, the spelling can cause some unintended humor as well!

[@Iponamann]

Well it’s a lot nicer than the alternative…

[@andramoie]

If you'd write it as "Putin" it would be pronounced exactly the same as one of the most common swear words in French.

[@Copyright_Infringement]

As a linguist, here's my 2 cents: At the end of the day, 1) a name is not going to be pronounced the same by people who speak a different language from you. Not only that, but 2) the inconvenience of having to use in an entirely different script, while not insurmountible in the age of the internet, is going to hinder comprehension by the average reader. Finally, 3) the differences between languages cause the pronunciations to drift over time anyway. 1) The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, has a name that contains 3 sounds that simply aren't in English, so it's unreasonable to expect a monolingual anglophone to pronounce it 100% correctly. Even when there are names which have only easy-to-pronounce elements _in theory,_ like the Italian politician Luigi Di Maio, certain peculiarities of a language, or even of different dialects, will lead to a pronunciation that's kinda off. 2) In that hypothetical New York Times article you mentioned, about how many English speakers would be able to tell apart two similar-looking, but different, Russian names? Using the Latin alphabet gives one very important advantage IMO: the speaker can already recognize and tell apart the symbols in question. Even if they can't tell exactly how to pronounce it, I'd guess you can tell the difference between "Mizukawa" and "Koorigawa". Meanwhile, a name that uses the character 水 will be hard to distinguish from one that uses 氷, since a Latin-literate individual won't be looking for stroke differences as much as the overall shape of the character. 3) Paris was and is spelled "Paris" in most Europeän languages. Yet, the pronunciation has changed so much since its initial naming that the French pronunciation /paˈʀi/paˈʁi/ is no longer the same as German /ˈpaʁ̞is/, which is different from English /ˈpæɻɪs/ˈpeɻɪs/ etc etc. Look at cities that have been around longer, and you'll see even greater divergence, like Munich/München, Rome/Roma, Londre/London, Prague/Praha. Between Chinese and Japanese, there are often entirely different pronunciations for the same city or individual, such as Japan's capital city "Dongjing", or the author of the Art of War "Sonshi". It seems silly not to allow names to appear differently in different languages when stuff like this so often happens between neighboring cultures.

[@TheCutL]

I love the fact that some non-Latin writing systems like Chinese characters don't have this problem at all. They just take any Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese name with their writing in Kanji/Hanja/Chu Nom, pronounce those characters the way they are in Chinese and don't waste a second thinking about native original pronunciation. Just people enjoying the moment.

[@BurnBird1]

@@TheCutL This is also how it works for languages using the Latin Script though. If you were presented with "Llanfairpwll-gwyngyllgogerychwyrndrob-wllllantysiliogogogoch", you'd just read it in whatever your native language is, since most people don't have knowledge of Welsh. This is also way almost all western languages pronounces Paris with an S sound at the end, even though it's just "Pari" in French. It's spelled with an S, so it's read with an S.

[@aa-zz6328]

I would say also translate names from Roman alphabet using languages phonetically or to the equivalent of it in English (or any other example), and of languages that dont use the Roman alphabet like Arabic or Hebrew that share many biblical names with Roman alphabet using languages.

[@TheCutL]

@@BurnBird1 It's different, because letters in an alphabet represent sounds, while Chinese characters are logograms, meaning they stand for a certain word without indicating anything about its pronunciation. So I know that Welsh place name has a certain meaning, but without knowing the Welsh language, I couldn't tell the meaning from the name. Obviously I wouldn't pronounce it correctly, but it would be the "Welsh" name I was trying to articulate. The other way round, with a city name written in Chinese characters, I would instantly understand the meaning, but I would have no idea about its pronunciation. Tokyo is written 東京, consisting of the two characters for "East" and "Capital". If any Chinese sees those characters, they would instantly recognise them as "oh, that means 'Eastern Capital'" and pronounce it "Dongjing", which is the correct Chinese reading of those characters.

[@BurnBird1]

@@TheCutL The inherent meaning of the name isn't relevant though. Plus, Chinese characters do indeed have phonetic components, that's how you're able to write foreign names at all with it.

[@marcelldavis4809]

15:08 Again, even while someone might not be able to pronounce Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz, they might at least type or handwrite it, while this is impossible with [Chinese lady's name]. For Japanese people, it would be as impossible to pronounce the name McCullough as it is for most English speakers to pronounce Brzęczyszczykiewicz, but when it's transliterated to their alphabet, they can at least read and pronounce an approximation, which is better than nothing. It really all comes down to practicality and is not a political or ideological topic in my opinion.

[@KairuHakubi]

yeah as I understand it, in order to become a citizen there you have to register the phonetic pronunciation of your name in something their alphabet can handle. Plus then you get puns because McCullough sounds like Makara, which is a mythological creature with the head of an elephant, body of a fish, and legs of a lion. and like, really freaky teeth.

[@gamermapper]

@@KairuHakubi But what if you're an indigenous nation that has its own alphabet like Canadian aboriginal or Cherokee? I think they should have the right to have it written on their alphabet too because after all it's their homeland too, they have no other homeland

[@KairuHakubi]

@@gamermapper uh, native american tribes were illiterate prior to contact. making up a new alphabet later (I wanna say like 19th century) is just a ridiculous and obtrusive thing to do instead of using the one used by the people who took over. Look at the Ainu, the native people of Nihon before the new settlers from the Asian mainland showed up. they didn't make up a new alphabet for their language after the Nihonjin introduced them to writing, they just adapted the existing writing system. Even though their language is a little odd for that kind of syllabry. There are little quirks to it, but basically the same. Though in this case.. that particular writing system.. wasn't around yet at the time of the initial settlementage. so I suppose for a while they just continued to not use one. Their case is a little odd since for most of their history like, nobody acknowledged their existence? or something?

[@rebeccan7276]

@@KairuHakubi why shouldn't they continue to develop their cultures instead of being erased by imperialism? the development of culture and language is natural for any group. their very continued existence is "obtrusive"? get real.

[@KairuHakubi]

​@@rebeccan7276 once you've been taken over, your culture is over. If it survives, which has only happened once in history, that means something special. that's how we know the god of the jews is the real deal If you want to try to cling to old ways, that's fine, but developing "new old ways" is insane. you're americans now. and making new alphabets is what's obtrusive, not existing. maybe you need to read _our_ alphabet more carefully.

[@FJM713]

The nfkrz photo during the drivers license part is the funniest thing I've seen so far this week

[@mb7205]

Totally unexpected, had to see it another time to be sure i was not going mental

[@lexergaming]

That was very unexpected lol

[@Blackgriffonphoenixg]

NFKRZ bangers represent

[@jm-je4tl]

Lol

[@laarrsiavelli]

YOU FUCKING READ MY MIND!!!!

[@lorenzopagni726]

The Italian adaptation of your name would be something like: Gegè Maccala

[@martindegn690]

@Lorenzo Pagni Yours in danish would be Laurits

[@SirioResteghini]

Would it be Gian Giacomo or Giangiacomo? And why Gegé and not Gigi?

[@lorenzopagni726]

@@martindegn690 cool, yours would be Martino Degno (read it like Deño)

[@lorenzopagni726]

@Jacopo Piazzardi I interpreted his name in a very popular and oral sense, a translation knowing only the sound not his full name. Still, I can agree with you

[@lorenzopagni726]

@@SirioResteghini same thing as the previous comment

[@Pagan_0210]

I'm from Poland and in school in our books whenever there's a foreign name (or at least a name from a language that uses some form of the Latin alphabet) it's usually written with the original native spelling with brackets with a phonetic transcription in our polish spelling to show how the name is pronounced. Example in my history book: "... Angielski inżynier i wynalazca George Stephenson (czytaj: dżordż stifenson, 1781-1848)"

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

That sounds like a really good solution. It gives the name how it is originally written, but also sort of a pronunciation guide.

[@freakishuproar1168]

This comment seems like the obvious solution for most cases, nice one Poland! I suppose some people might feel embarrassed or patronized to read material with bracketed pronunciations next to the correct spelling, but I certainly wouldn't! I'd be more anxious about potentially saying the word out loud and butchering it before someone who knows better.

[@LordOfElysium]

What do you think of people using Poland vs Polska or Polsha? Sometimes I can’t really decide and I want to say the proper thing, it’s not a difficult thing to change for sure so I don’t know why small things like this can’t be changed..

[@siliconsulfide8]

@@LordOfElysium What do you mean? Do you mean using one or the other in text? Poland is just the English version, so it might be just neutral. Sure, maybe it might seem a little bit disconnecting if you're writing it as such and you're Polish, but English isn't Polish, so yeah. Go for it. Polska... hm. Perhaps maybee it might seem like you're Polish? But it might be quite neutral as well (tho maybe might seem out of place for non-Poles? can I really speak for native English speakers tho). If you want to say it like that - why not. Polsha seems like it's taken from Russian - it might seem kinda normal if it's used by someone from a Russian-speaking country (or another that translates Poland in the same way), but by native English speakers? Perhaps someone could perceive it worse than the other two. Don't take my word for it though, other people might perceive the situation differently.

[@namaenamae1]

Oh, if only we Anglophones had a principled enough orthography to be able to do this easily. Something that JJ didn´t mention in this one is the fact that English in general is written with so little consistency that you could see many words as being damn near Chinese characters in terms of how much their spelling relates to their pronunciation; ex. though, tough, and through, knight, psychology, pterodactyl, etc etc. We haven't updated shit since the 1400's in terms of spelling principles for the native words and we make the baffling decision to only slightly change words loaned in from foreign languages, changing them only slightly to fit English morphology better while letting the rest of it (things which are unpronounceable to us like and ) just stay the way they are when it would be nothing to remove them.

[@TheAlexSchmidt]

The driver's license thing reminds me of how many Irish cops (or "guards" I guess) thought the Polish word for "driver's license" was a name and thus issued many citations to "Prawo Jazdy".

[@Liggliluff]

@@Ugly_German_Truths Especially since driver licenses in Europe are more universal. This must be a very old story otherwise. Search up both driver licenses; pink card with driver license in blue at top, then it's: 1. Last name, 2. First name, 3. Birth date. it's the same on most European licenses.

[@cillianburke6441]

Irelands the best, I'm so glad to live here

[@theirishempire4952]

HAHAHAHAHA

[@jacobbailey-lawton1086]

imagine that the other way round, going to Krakow and the ticket being given to mr dri ving license

[@oliverqueen5883]

That’s class for all the Polish lads escaping sanctions 🤣

[@xinceras-6542]

You're really glossing over the fact that it's easier to memorize a pictogram composed of familiar shapes than one formed from unfamiliar shapes. A typical non-Thai reader is very unlikely to be able to even distinguish between a dozen names written in Thai script if they're not right next to each other. If the names are translated into the local script, then at least a reader can distinguish between them, even if he can't pronounce them correctly.

[@briannawaldorf8485]

Jeff White but when I’m reading a news paper I like to be able to tell the difference between 4 different foreign names and it’s easier to remember what is what in the story if you read it in your own alphabet

[@jeremyraygor1918]

I think the line can be drawn at making an honest effort. I've spent thousands of hours on Japanese across multiple stages of life and I still struggle with differentiating between ツ and シ. If the newspaper wants to write an article about the policies of 习近平, 習近平, 毛泽东, and 胡志明 regarding 中华人民共和国 and Cộng hòa Xã hội chủ nghĩa Việt Nam I'm going to be totally lost even though I know who/what all those names are for, and I won't even realize that two of those are for the same person.

[@brumm0m3ntum94]

Also, there is 100% a technological justification for Romanizing names, people shouldn’t need to buy a keyboard that supports every writing system on the planet just so that they never encounter a name that they can’t type without using copy+paste or memorizing every unicode alt+4 number code

[@KairuHakubi]

yeah we have all learned how to say various words in various languages and we did it without any kind of weird diacritics to help us along the way. just by hearing other people.

[@floppyearfriend]

@@MrWyzdum you're not getting it, he's saying names *are* pictograms in every language (I disagree that "pictogram" is the correct term here, I guess something like "symbol" or "icon" would be a better term), and that names are just written ways to identify a person, pronunciation not mattering at all

[@appa609]

I've always thought of a name as an identifier. As long as it was sufficiently recognizable it doesn't matter what it is. When I moved to Canada I took an English name unrelated to my Chinese name. When people ask which I prefer, I say I don't care. Because I recognize both.

[@KairuHakubi]

If I'm not mistaken, too, this whole idea that names are this personal special thing is .. not universal, right? you hear it in western cultures and in like, native american ones, and some others.. but Asians kinda care a lot less about their individual names, don't they? For one thing they tend to share them with a lot more people, having fewer total names in the culture (Especially Vietnam). And in older times in NIhon and Zhongguo, they frequently just named the kids like "first son, second son" etc.. then if you were some kind of holy person you could easily end up with a totally different name, and then yet another posthumous name? I also recall hearing Jackie Chan talk about how he acquired his name and it sounded like even before he got to America it wasn't the same one he had from birth, I forget the details.

[@avacurtis2729]

I have been taking classed in the mandrin language since i was 6 years old. What i have noticed that all of my teachers go by an English name outside of class (as long ad they are talking to people that dont know Mandrin ofc). And likewise I was expected to take on a Chinese name for use during class. My full name is Ava Christine Curtis, so my Chinese teacher gave me a chinese name 柯瑞婷to use while in class. I never have had a problem going my this name. I actually rather like it.

[@chrisg1499]

这也太随意了吧

[@Music-qb2wm]

@@KairuHakubi I mean this is sort of true, in that someone's last name tends to be much more widely used than their first. See Japan normally having (last name) san. But personal names are still important, for example in the place of 'pet names'(like honey, dear, etc) a lot of Japanese couples instead call eachother just by their first name, since that's a very rare 'breech of courtesy' you wouldn't use with just anyone.

[@KairuHakubi]

@@Music-qb2wm Sure but I mean, I think people have less 'this name is just for me' feeling since there are just fewer names overall, and in the past, names would be given out not with a special meaning but just 'gotta name the kid something, what's next on the list'

[@tomlobur111]

Ah yes, historical kings, like The Burger King.

[@imrehundertwasser7094]

Also known as Louis Philippe ... :-)

[@glegos2281]

i've heard they call him "hungry jack" in australia. bizarre !

[@wbcx4491]

Бургег-Кын

[@greywolf7577]

He fought in the great Beef war of 1043.

[@davidsilverfield835]

Lol

[@ErikHare]

My wife Raquel is from China. Like many Chinese she simply picked her Western name. It is also the case that westerners will pick a name if they do a lot of business in China. It may be a phonetic approximation or it may be something completely new. The practice is nearly Universal

[@jonathankohan7434]

This used to be common in most cultures. As the world has gotten more sensitive around respecting people, places, and cultures, this is seen as some great evil as J.J. mentioned in the video. I think English and Mandarin speakers have such hegemonic cultures that they are not threatened by this and are still able to follow this sensible practice.

[@FOLIPE]

@@jonathankohan7434 probably has also got to do with how different the cultures are. There's no point chosing a name when learning french if your given name is Henry.

[@jonathankohan7434]

@@FOLIPE I would think an English speaker in that situation would be ok with the h not being pronounced but a French speaker would be more likely to insist on a French pronunciation when speaking English.

[@sbennett2435]

Koreans learning English normally have English nicknames as well. And when I was there, I would occasionally use a Korean name that some students gave me that was based on my real name.

[@nachoqualsevol554]

that's common here in Argentina too. Chinese immigrants tend to pick names that were popular in the 80s... and it's cool!

[@nonomen6665]

"Klára Dostálová is unpronounceable" Okay *McCullough*

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Mk Colla? M. C. Coolog? Mek Cu Loguhah? I see where it comes from.

[@sachab6098]

I thought it was just "mick kuh-low"

[@LeeGHThomas]

Muh-cuh-luh

[@Claro1993]

Mack colah

[@banana_man_101]

@@HappyBeezerStudios a place near me is called chulog in my native language lol

[@Jane-vd1ul]

You make a lot of valid points. However, I think you're missing the concept of phonology here. Every language has a discrete inventory of sounds and sound patterns. After speakers of a given language pass their critical language period, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern and articulate many sounds and sound patterns that are outside of their language's phonological system. It's definitely commendable to try one's best to pronounce foreign names and words as close to what they sound like in their original language, but in many cases when speakers fall short it's simply due to this inherent lingustic challenge (the limiting parameters of their first language phonology) not any kind of conscious bias or English chauvinism in particular.

[@asalihoneybadger4036]

My first name seems easy enough. but having 2 Scandinavian E's in it it proves almost impossible for Engish speakers to get right. The english alphabet pronouces the E way closer to I than the Scandinavian one which draws the sound out more.

[@infamoussphere7228]

There are very few languages around the world with the th phoneme, for instance. I believe it's mostly just English, Icelandic, Greek and Castillian Spanish. So people who are native speakers of other languages have tremendous difficulty pronouncing "th" so if you get called Teo instead of Theo, it's not so much that the French/German/Finnish/Italian person talking to you isn't bothering to try, it's that they might not be able to say it the way you hear it in English.

[@Jane-vd1ul]

@@infamoussphere7228 Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about. As an English teacher myself, I'm really glad my name just happens to contain sounds that are very easily pronounceable to speakers from most other languages. Sometimes the "a" can be a bit off, making it sounds more like "Jen", but of course I teach to that. Getting a good handle on "th" is more of a challenge for most English language learners. I encourage my students to retain their names and figure out strategies to help English speakers get it, but sometimes it involves accepting some variation from the original. I really like the pragmatic approach popular KZbin English pronunciation teacher Hadar Shamesh has on this: How to say your name in English [without having to repeat it!] kzbin.info/www/bejne/iXmmn356iZyYrsk

[@sarasamaletdin4574]

I don’t understand however how language which gained written form in 1993 isn’t pronounced phonetically. The reason English isn’t is because the language changed after it’s standardization in great vowel shift and because it has so much loan words in other languages, French being the chief one. My native language is Finnish which is written as it’s pronounced. Once foreigners know how to say ä and ö and know stress is always in the beginning its pretty easy to pronounce, there are no hidden letters and every letter is meant to be pronounced. I don’t know why you would not aim for it when designing a language. It’s too late to do anything about English but new language system could be designed differently.

[@lemonz1769]

@@infamoussphere7228 Myanmar has the “th” phoneme although colloquially it’s often reduced to a soft “d” sound.

[@GhostOfAMachine]

I'm just chillin here in my apartment in Фрунзенский Р-Н in my lovely city of Владивосток, sippin some столичная and expect everyone out west to read this comment without проблемы

[@TheCutL]

It's slowly getting dark in here, so I will grab a match from a Streichholzschächtelchen and light a few candles.

[@qzg7857]

Im from Poland and i learned cyrylic script in school. You have no power over me you drunk with столичная wódka.

[@friiq0]

😂 that last word-I can just hear the accent

[@Nakaska]

I've heard Władywostok is a nice place although I preffer drinking wino over wódka.

[@Inconsecuente]

Si

[@eddie-roo]

You have the right to write a proper name in your preferred writing system. Writing is meant as a communication tool, it’s meant to express a message to an audience as clearly as possible. Russia can approximate any name they want in Cyrillic and Korea can do the same in Hangul. People shouldn’t be forced to learn to read and write the millions of writing systems that exist just to be able to talk about foreign people.

[@namaenamae1]

Fair point, I find it necessary to point out that millions of writing systems do not exist - there are only a handful, and those that exist are primarily derived from only 2 ancient scripts which branched out into a great multitude. These are Egyptian, which is ancestral to our own Latin alphabet and most scripts in the world, particularly in Europe, India, and the Middle East; and Chinese, which has been essentially loaned wholesale along with the Chinese literary culture to the whole Sinosphere. There are only maybe some 7000 languages in the world total depending on what we consider to be a "language" and the majority have not been written down as of yet.

[@Lorentari]

12:32 - I have to disagree here. Beucase, when you as an english speaker read a name to yourself that is written in Latin letters you still make a (possibly) plausible guess of the name - A sound that you can associate with the word. You don't automatically do that if you are reading a name in Russian or Arabic because you have no reference for the sounds - THUS you have to rely solely on your visual memory of a text and not the combination of visual and auditory (beit wrong or not) Also.. An official, say, Police officer will not be able to reliably write down the name of someone if they are completely literate to that language because they don't know the letters... That would be like having a 4 year old do write court hearing transcript.

[@bagodrago]

Exactly. Even if Latinized names still make you pronounce it wrong, it's better than not being able to pronounce anything at all...

[@FOLIPE]

@@bagodrago There are also limitations to each languages phonetics. People can't even repeat some sounds, much less read them

[@ElVlogdeBob]

Bingo

[@BurnBird1]

Yeah, McCullough's points in this are probably the stupidest things I've heard in a long time.

[@alexbacon657]

Was about to add same two points - 1) from an IT perspective it is perfectly possible to store names in any alphabet but it would not be useable by most users of that system - the standard approach is to store two versions of the name, one with purely standard Roman letters with no accents etc that the users can use - and another how the user wants it to appear regardless of alphabet that you could print alongside the transliteration on formal documents 2) names are just arbitrary signs for things - in this case people - to an English speaker being able to read about about Xi Xinping and associate those facts with him is very useful - how his name is actually written and pronounced is just another set of facts. As long as you understand it is only a bastardised English version of his name

[@Quintarus1794]

One word: recall. Anyone who uses the same character set will be able to recall (if only imperfectly) a name they see because they all choose to memorize that same set of symbols. It makes far more sense for a foreigner living in Japan to know two character sets, than for every Japanese person to memorize every character set in the world.

[@gstarr3355]

Exactly. I may not pronounce xi jinping correctly or that may not even be a correct translation of his name but at least English speakers can reliably know who is being referenced

[@aethelredtheready1739]

IPA all the way

[@smfe]

exactly

[@disfordumboo4411]

oop i should’ve read the comments before making my own cause i had the exact same thought

[@DrakePitts]

@@aethelredtheready1739 I'm not sure using IPA wouldn't create even more challenging problems with respect to homophones.

[@Scum42]

5:55 I'm not gonna lie, I thought "Mumbai," "Bombay," "Calcutta" and "Kolkata" were four completely different places, with Bombay and Calcutta somewhere else besides India. This was kind of a light bulb moment for me when you showed that.

[@WinstonLy-g8l]

I also used to think that Ho Chi Minh City and Saigon were different places

[@Halo_Legend]

Sees "Pyotr" Says "Pyortor" Ah yes, the famous syllabe adding among English speakers.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

I instantly liked the the picture of Roman on his BC drivers license

[@melanphilia]

Yeaapp... And distorting.. makes ne cringe all the time

[@Frozo-nt2ky]

@@melanphilia dude he doesn’t speak the language, give him a break

[@Halo_Legend]

@@Frozo-nt2ky The language of what? English?

[@melanphilia]

@@Frozo-nt2ky also , ue doesn't have eyes to read?

[@TheAmericanPrometheus]

As someone with a very ethnic name myself, I think its somewhat unreasonable to expect people to get your name fully correct pronunciation wise, especially if its spelling doesn't match up with the actual pronunciation very well. I just think its more trouble than its worth, and creates another unnecessary barrier between people.

[@JJMcCullough]

Have you thought about using a phonetic spelling?

[@FOLIPE]

Yes people don't usually master all the sounds of every language. Most names are kind of culture-specific although some are lucky to have easier sounds than others

[@Corwin256]

Yeah, that's why I went back to using my middle name after a while using my first name, Damhan. the 'mh' says 'w' and an explanation of that get downright time consuming when you consider how many strangers one meets, even being as highly introverted as I am. Also, I discovered that phonetic spelling wasn't much help. When I'd give my name at a restaurant, for example, people would not call my name with my meal. they'd just state what the meal was. When I started using the phonetic spelling, the avoidance of having to pronounce my name stayed the same. No one tried it either way. I think if I wanted to people to even attempt it, even with a phonetic spelling, I'd probably have to change the actual sound to something like Devin, and that'd only work because that's an actual name in common use in Standard American.

[@hobofactory]

@@JJMcCullough the issue with phonetic spelling is that many languages contain phonemes that don’t even exist in other languages and thus have to rely on approximations. I have a rather foreign name and it contains a sound that simply doesn’t exist in English so I can’t really expect people to say it right without a fair amount of practice. The same is (naturally) true in reverse. For example, the “uh” sound like in Trump, doesn’t exist in the Russian language, so the name ends up pronounced more like Trahmp.

[@SuperKing604]

@@JJMcCullough my uncle did that for his daughter he spelled her name indian name more phonetically Poonum instead of poonam which was the “standard” anglicized spelling. All he did was change one letter.

[@Siddif]

Ive found even in Ireland, Irish names with fadas (accents like in Seán) and apostrophes in names like O’Neill are often issues when using English language IT systems especially outdated government systems. For something so common here it’s shocking how it’s been overlooked.

[@justin.booth.]

Or in the US José Peña is always Jose Pena, which is absurd because we absolutely do have the technology to handle that, Unicode has existed for 30 years!

[@RhodianColossus]

@@justin.booth. Don't beat yourself up over not using Unicode, in Germany faxes are still used every single day in the government almost 180 years after they were invented.

[@vaclav_fejt]

The Irish comedian Dara O'Brien changed his name to Dara Ó Briain to correspond with Irish spelling, didn't he?

[@Siddif]

@@vaclav_fejt his surname is Ó Briain, his father changed it from O'Brien as part of an Irish language revival (before Dara was born from what I can gather).

[@KairuHakubi]

Hell even without the accents, it's no fun growing up named Sean and getting people saying 'seen' just because some schmuck couldn't translate gaelic runes properly into roman letters and made it shane or something.

[@stylus59]

Hector Boiardi named his pasta brand as Chef Boy-ar-dee to guide Americans pronounce his name.

[@ayes1669]

Its easy to pronounce tbh🏆🥲

[@RomeoMike22]

Oh god, shouldnt have changed it. Something about boy ar dee that gives me hillBilly vibes

[@oldvlognewtricks]

@@Ugly_German_Truths The vast majority of transliteration choices are arbitrary. Should it be Tchaikovsky, or Tschaikowski or Chaicovskee or any number of other options? The only rule is consensus or PR or both.

[@Claro1993]

His original birth name and spelling is Ettore Boiardi.

[@jasonisbored6679]

Very cool fact about something in my pantry, I learned something new.

[@Findeeney]

I wasnt ready to see NFKRZ for the Russian, I burst out laughing 😂

[@Smooth_Collision]

same

[@happyswedme]

My Cyrillic comprehension is super bad so first I thought "oh wow his last name" the I got confused because "why are there no vowels" and once I got it I fell of my chair.

[@Findeeney]

@@happyswedme 😂

[@ACDC012345678]

I don't see writing someone's name in a different script as an indignity, the point of language is communication. So go with what the target readers will understand the most. As a Bulgarian I am used to phonetic spelling and I think it should be the standard but different languages have different phonetic ranges and quirks. If everyone learned the international phonetic alphabet it'd be grand.

[@wtripley]

The IPA is not meant to write words in lieu of a previous script. It is meant to clarify pronunciation - which can both change with time and change from person to person. The IPA is a scientific tool, and it is completely unintuitive for almost any other purpose than linguistics. Writing things in the IPA would ruin the actual functionality of the IPA because then it takes on the same problems as the Latin alphabet - which problems were meant to be overcome by the development of the IPA in the first place

[@hoiming]

In HK, so Cantonese (a Chinese language), Japanese actors' names are just pronounced in Cantonese. So for example 金城 武 Kaneshiro Takeshi is pronounced something like Gum Sing Mo in Cantonese which is just the Cantonese pronunciation of the three Japanese characters, which are actually borrowed Chinese characters.

[@rachelcookie321]

What about names that don’t have kanji letters like さくら?

[@soyoltoi]

@@rachelcookie321 Maybe 櫻

[@nevreiha]

@@rachelcookie321 you mean 桜? you could probably find a better name without a kanji

[@rachelcookie321]

@@nevreiha I have a friend called さくら and her name doesn’t use kanji so that was just the first thing I thought of.

[@KabalFromMK9]

@@nevreihaJapanese names can use both the old kyuujitai characters (equivalent to traditional chinese) and shinjitai characters (basically japanese version of simplified chinese, but still different) as long as it falls under the "approved for names" characters, so you will see both 桜 and 櫻 being used as people's names

[@ndv135]

I mean, I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say that it's exactly the same to write out a name in another language that uses the Latin Alphabet and a language that doesn't is the exact same thing. I learned to pronounce Polish words in like 5 minutes from a book on Polish history, while if we do what you propose we would literally all have to learn potentially hundreds of scripts, then we would have to learn how to pronounce them. Like looking at Ka'nhehsí:io Deer. Most of the symbols we are already familiar with at the very least, and most letters make recognizable sounds, all people need to learn is which letters make different sounds than they are used to, which they can easily remember due to the fact that they are symbols they know, for an English speakers it's going to be much easier to remember that a "K" or a ":" make a different sound than they are used to because they know them already. Similarly with Pinyin (the new Chinese Romanization system) that's all people have to do as well, learn a few letters that make sounds that they are unfamiliar with such as "X" and "K". Not to mention if we just randomly started using other alphabets what you end up doing is cutting off information on politics and history from people who aren't willing, or don't have the time to learn a new script. Leading to an ever increasingly uninformed public on anything international. At least even if people pronounce Wojciech Jaruzelski wrong they still get a pronunciation. Throw 習近平 at someone and they don't know what to do, and will likely just loose interest, never learning anything about the subject. Also just saying, official Pinyin does actually contain information on how to produce the tonal parts of Chinese. In pinyin Xi Jinping is actually Xí Jìnpíng. The direction that the accents go shows how to pronounce the tonal changes in a way that someone who uses the Latin alphabet can easily understand. So in pinyin Beijing is Běijīng. Showing that the first syllable had a down then up tonal shift and the second has a neutral tone.

[@neeonlight]

I agree

[@JudeOhHecc]

I’m too lazy to read this comment but ok

[@Schoritzobandit]

As usual, JJ's arguments about language are weakened by the fact that he speaks no other languages

[@georgeptolemy7260]

Yeah stupid video

[@AwesomeEth9]

I think the other really important point that was missed is that if a name is written in Roman script then, even in another language, it's easy to recognise when it is written again in the same article. Whereas with foreign characters it's not so easy to memorise the sequence of characters, even if both are equally unpronounceable (which as you point out, they probably aren't.) so you would end up having to go back every time you see a name in another script to see who that is. Even outside of a single article, every time I read Xi Jinping, I immediately know who that is even if I can't pronounce it correctly. Whereas if it was written in Chinese, as a non-chinese-speaker I doubt I'd be able to recognise his name even if it was always written that way. I think JJ focussed to much on pronunciation and not on simply reading and comprehension.

[@ethantoal42]

5:17 I'm not sure when this happened, but my family name used to be O'Tuathaill (pronounced 'Oh-too-hull') and was changed by the English to O'Toole (oh-tool), and then changed again to Toal ( like the word 'tall'). I'm Irish.

[@Estellemusic]

I watched this, and the thought that immediately sprung to mind was: "This would be nearly impossible to put into practice in braille." I am blind and, primarily, this is the system I use to read with. The issue isn't that it would be hard, it's just that the way that braille is set up now, you write, edit, print and proofread according to the rules of one language, and so having a Chinese, Russian and Hungarian name all in one article would pose some challenges... I sincerely hope it will be possible someday, but I don't even know how these languages look in braille. We're all confined to the same 6 dots, so it would be an experience to say the least. I'm all for it though, just know that universal accessibility and comfort comes at the price of making these things actually universal, and that includes people with disabilities who can't just see these things on a screen and copy them onto paper accordingly.

[@zjzr08]

IPA does have a braille system so maybe that could be helpful?

[@williamwaugh2004]

you should really search out something written in a different language just to experiment and feel the difference between the two.

[@MRCOLOURfilld]

Could be like a braille quotes around the words

[@niladrichatterji9140]

Wait, how did you watch if you are visually impaired.?

[@dinamosflams]

@@niladrichatterji9140 he listens like most of us

[@ezrapster]

14:57 I caught the NFKRZ cameo in there. I love Roman's channel. He's like the Russian J.J.

[@mustafalekic4106]

So cool to see!

[@deutschelehrer69]

Slightly younger JJ lol

[@D.S.handle]

Where?

[@Ironbanner12]

Time stamp?

[@draxthylocalrespectorofanime]

@@D.S.handle When he talks about IDs

[@thetruechickenlord]

I noticed that Chinese people (in my experience) have a hard time pronouncing my name. My name is Rob, but one of my friends in middle school, an immigrant from China, had a hard time learning my name and when he did learn it he pronounced it as "Wob-owe" trying to say Robert, and he did that for the 3-4 years we were friends. Years later I started working at an amusement park and a Chinese immigrant coworker of mine also had a tough time learning my name, so I had to remind her what it was a lot and I noticed her whispering it to herself after I told her, probably so she would get the pronunciation down. I didn't mind at all, just found it interesting that they couldn't really pronounce my name. I don't think I would mind if they called me something else to make it easier for them to say if they asked, since they didn't really say my name right in the first place. Just shows that it goes both ways a bit.

[@bedrock6443]

I mean the process of learning English for a lot of immigrants is hard. They have to learn new grammar and spelling for words they do not know of. So they do struggle and many immigrants who speak English at a proficent level still maintain certain pronunciation quirks from their language into English.

[@Rocket_Try]

It wouldn't be a good idea to only have the name in foreign script on a driver's license. Officers need to be able to identify whether the person are who they say they are. Having only the foreign script would make that mostly impossible. But it would be great to have both versions on the license. Especially when dealing with additional foreign documents.

[@aethelredtheready1739]

Or, native spelling and then native pronunciation in IPA

[@martinmaynard141]

A number of years ago there was a call out from the Welsh police for a specific Polish driver who had a record number of motoring offences. It turned out the police had read "driving licence" as a proper name and this was why the "offender" had so may hits!

[@Nakaska]

@@martinmaynard141 So the most wanted person in Wales is Prawo Jazdy? Lmao

[@Rocket_Try]

@@Nakaska OK, I was about to blame the Welsh officers, but this really could be mistaken for a name for a speaker of a non Slavic language. Depending on the font sizes used etc.

[@anonymousbloke1]

@@sohopedeco no they just transliterate your name and surname. Jean Melanchon would be Жан Меланшон, not Иван Меланшон. But iirc some documents require a patronymic too so you'd be given one automatically by virtue of being your father's child.. say your father's name is "Bernard", the patronymic assigned to you will be Бернардович (Bernardovich)

[@cfv7461]

For those wondering,"Santiago" is "Saint Tiago", spanish incorporated the "saint" in the name. "Jacobo", "Tiago", "Joaquín" or even "Diego" could be other possible translations.

[@BurnBird1]

While the connection between Santiago and Jacob is true, the "Diego" being related is not. It's only connected to Santiago due to folk etymology.

[@NacorAfonso]

also "Jaime" im pretty sure

[@cfv7461]

@@NacorAfonso oh right right you are right

[@cfv7461]

@@BurnBird1 why? I have read that "Diego" and "Tiago" are two forms of the same name, and they really do sound similar.

[@BurnBird1]

@@cfv7461 Tiago comes from the final T in "Sanct" being attached to the front of Iago. So it's essentially a naming stemming from a mistake. Diego on the other hand comes from Ibero-Celtic.

[@himesilva]

My mother is Eastern European, and when she immigrated to South Africa her teachers straight up started calling her "Michele" despite the fact that her ACTUAL name isn't even that difficult (Michaela)

[@placeholdernameisplacehold7671]

That sounds more like confusion rather than an inability to pronounce the name

[@ARCtheCartoonMaster]

Seriously? I thought that was a pretty well known name.

[@ssdd4424]

This is the first time I’ve actually disagreed with you. In this context you’re putting the burden of responsibility on everyone else to know what Random abject symbols should mean. Instead of somebody trying to assimilate into another society. At least if you give a local spelling you give the opportunity for the name to be somewhat understood and pronounced even if imperfectly. If you give the Mandarin characters there’s no way for somebody using a Roman alphabet to look up those characters later. At least with the phonetic translation it is easier to look up the term later.

[@Plasmathedeathjester]

Got a point

[@cocoacoolness]

When I was in Japan, it was actually easier to spell my name out in Japanese for people so they understand how to pronounce it. It takes the burdon off them trying to know how to pronounce English words and at the end of the day, it's still my name.

[@lawden210]

@@bigscarysteve Doesn't JJ refer to himself as a conservative?

[@flutterg1035]

@@lawden210 i dont know if hes still a conservative, but he has stated before that he is. Though, Canadian conservatives on an American conservatism are very different things because America's political system is more right leaning than Canada is. But that other guy is a dumbass with a stick up his ass and thinks considering other people's feelings for even a second is considered political correctness.

[@rachelcookie321]

Imagine being in a classroom with kids from multiple countries and the teacher trying to take the roll. They wouldn’t even be able to attempt to call out kids’ names for the roll. “John! Matt! Umm… I think this one is Chinese. Is there a Chinese kid here?”

[@SupImTylerP]

I’m a huge language nerd so I’ve thought of this before! Every language has “phonotactics” which are the rules for what sounds can happen where in a given word of a language. For example, there’s no native English word with the “ng” sound happening at the beginning of a word - only at the middle or the end (like in the words thinker or wrong). This is one of the reasons it can be difficult for English speakers to pronounce the Vietnamese name “Nguyen” or why it’s difficult for Japanese speakers to pronounce and “L” sound. I personally don’t see a problem with transliterating names to their closest pronunciation in another language. My name is Tyler, and I know it’s difficult for Japanese or Spanish speakers to say that with ease. When I worked at a Mexican restaurant, the chefs would pronounce the E instead of saying the English pronunciation without the E “Tylr” vs. “Tyl eh r”. Similarly when I studied Japanese in College - my Japanese professor spoke good English and pronounced my name fine, but occasionally he’d slip up and say something like “Tyrur”. Not to mention the fact my name in Japanese becomes “Taira-“. This is entirely because of those chef’s or that professor’s phonotactics in their native tongues. At the end of the day, they said my name in a way that was close enough for me to understand who they were talking to - and that should be the rule when translating names in my opinion. Fit the name into the phonotactics of the language you’re translating it into (as closely to the original pronunciation as you can get it) and then adjust the spelling accordingly.

[@RunawayYe]

Don't forget the schwa in your name in the english pronounciation. The spanish are not inserting their e in Tylr, but instead swapping their e for the schwa in Tylər. It's kind of interesting that schwa isn't written in english yet it is the most common vowel in the entire language (or if not the most common, it's the second most common). In the following words every vowel is schwa yet written in completely different ways: dirt, hurt, pert, worth.

[@Liggliluff]

_> "For example, there’s no native English word with the “ng” sound happening at the beginning of a word - only at the middle or the end"_ Note that it's more accurate to state it does not appear at the start of a syllable, only at the end of one. So "thinker" has the syllables "thing" and "ker". But it wouldn't be valid to have it as "Thicknger", since now you have the second syllable as "nger" which isn't valid.

[@dibutime]

This is a byproduct of language, there is no right or wrong side here. My name is Benjamín, most people call me by the anglicized pronunciation of it which is the English Benjamin, when in reality it is pronounced in the Spanish way something like ben-ha-MIN, though with a much more Spanish j sound, and while I would love it if people could call me by my actual name, I think it’s unfair to them to expect immaculate pronunciation.

[@simaopinto-torres9048]

Hi J.J.. Actually "Bombay" comes from the Portuguese word "Bombaim", which means "good bay".

[@manasvinsingh3217]

A better example of anglicisation would be Awadh to Oudh or Kanpur to Cawnpore. Never in their history were the names Mumbai or Kolkata ever used until quite recently

[@isabexiefromthehall]

That's not the case… "baía" has always been a feminine noun and "bom" has always been masculine (the 16th century fem. form was bõa, often spelled boma). The first navigators just probably mixed up things as they always had and started saying Bombaim.

[@Girish_Rao]

Tiruchirappalli was called Trichnopoly

[@CPUAlexis]

British rolled up and said “Damn this bay bomb ass fuck. Bombay”

[@simaopinto-torres9048]

@@isabexiefromthehall That is the most accepted theory of the name’s origin.

[@Lycaon1765]

This form of "disrespect" goes both ways, getting uppity about someone not pronouncing your name in the way it's said in a language they don't speak is just shaming that person for speaking in their own language. I don't get mad when people pronounce my irl name in the english way rather than the spanish way with the spanish accent, because they speak English! Of course they're going to communicate in the language they know. It would be unreasonable, rude, and entitled of me to expect a Japanese person to pronounce it the spanish way and read it in the Roman alphabet and then get mad when they can't. They literally cannot read it. Same way for English speakers trying to read Japanese in the Japanese script. The goal is to be understood, so changing what you're saying to better communicate is necessary. If you want to create an impasse, then that's you're own deal but know that you won't get anywhere that way.

[@CosmicBiohazard]

A lot of the time I see discussions around the pronunciation of names to the tune of "here's how to pronounce a name authentically" when in fact the name is still Anglicized. A while back, when there was controversy over the pronunciation of the name "Kamala Harris", the main point of contention was the placement of the emphasis onto the first syllable. The fact that the "k" in that name is, 'authentically', unaspirated, like in Spanish, went completely unaddressed, and even Harris herself Anglicizes her name by aspirating that 'k'. It raises an interesting question, that being 'how authentic is authentic' when it comes to names? That question is made even harder to answer by the fact that even within a language, regional accents will create variation in the pronunciation of a name; do we treat a 'Charles' from Denver as having a different name from a 'Charles' from London since they pronounce their names differently, and if not, do we still treat a 'Carlos' from the Spanish-speaking world as *also* having the same name as our two 'Charles's? (getting into the 'name-translating' practice mentioned in the video)

[@asherl5902]

@@CosmicBiohazard once I saw a Latin American girl angry because Spaniards pronounce her name with Castilian soft C sound (th) instead of like an S, like all did in her country, like "that's not my name!". The problem was that her name was actually a Spanish name "misspelled"!: Spanish orthography is made to be able to distinguish soft C from S for the people who say them differently, then if their parents really wanted her name to be pronounced by everyone like they do in their dialect, they should have spelled the name with an S. That was going to happen... And still there are some Spanish speakers who would pronounce it as with Castilian soft C since in their dialect they also say the usual S sound like that!

[@tennis501tennis501]

yes, it goes both ways; for example the Japanese have a special alphabet 'Katakana' for writing words of "foreign" origin - as you write Lycaon1765 the goal is to understand communications

[@papaicebreakerii8180]

I understand using different scripts but there’s trouble when people completely change names. Like calling someone named Juan, John might be considered disrespectful so there needs to be a middle ground

[@mrttgrg]

There’s need to be a middle ground. My name is the Italian Giorgia but I always say to call me Gio (joe) cause I know it’s easily translated and pronounced in other languages. I would never expect an English speaker to be able to pronounce my name perfectly,I know they can’t (I wouldn’t expect it even from Italians to automatically know the right way as in Italy we have to ways of pronouncing it),but I will not accept them to not treat my actual name w respect. Many have said to me that they pronounced it fine and I was just making it more complicated or that it didn’t matter, that it was easy while not even trying making an effort, just saying Georgia in English like it was exactly the same like I was trying to be special ecc. it’s a compromise, I need to make peace with the fact that you’ll never gonna be able to pronounce it correctly but you still need to respect it. an easy way to see if they actually do respect it(and therefore me) is to see how fast they dismiss spelling errors, I’m not talking about Starbucks ecc I’m talking about documents.

[@FunkyJeff22]

We should just go back to translating every name, but acknoledging that it's a translation. I think it's cool seeing my name written out in different scripts/languages. It's like you're given one name at the start of your life, but gain more as you learn languages/people of other languages learn about you.

[@largedarkrooster6371]

Fr. I mean, in practise I never call myself by a different name when I switch languages because for most of those other languages it isn't really a cultural norm and you'll be seen as weird. Out of the languages I speak I could probably only do this in Hebrew, where it is normal to have two names (one name for daily life like Bert and a Hebrew name like Boaz Ben-Yosef or something)

[@Monosekist]

This video has made me realize that although I was born in South Korea with a Korean name, I have never learned to write it in Hangul due to being adopted as an infant.

[@gamermapper]

It's the easiest writing system in the world so I think you could very easily learn it tho

[@bedrock6443]

You are not alone. I am Korean American born to South Korean immigrants, but many South Korean babies were given away after the Korean War, which caused much seperation from Korean culture. The reason for the adoption was basically a lot of biracial children born (father is white and mother is Korean) and because of the stigma of biracial children many were given away to places like the US. There is also a lot of other adoption waves coming into Korea until 2012 because it was a private system. The hangeul writting system is quite easy to pronounce. Lot of the sounds are similar or outright the same as Latin letter pronunciations. Tip this letter ㄱ makes a g sound. Remember a g sound. I have heard from a lot of experiences of people saying this and people who do not speak korean saying it sounds like a k sound but its a g sound. In fact this is why the last name 김 is romanized as Kim. Because I guess with that letter i previously mentioned there is something in the phonics with it that makes it seem like a k. I feel fortunate to be born into a Korean family that would teach me Korean. I wish the best for you in whatever you do because the circumstances in which you were brought here wheither you know it or not is quite unfortunate.

[@MrChuckya]

In Serbia, we use both the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets. We tend to "phoneticize" foreign names, so J.J. McCullough would be written as Džej Džej Makala. You're welcome!

[@asherl5902]

In Spain we would call him something like Jota Jota MacQuiúlough but I mean like, although written the same, JJ directly in Spanish and McCullough with a somehow made up pronounciation of English partially based in the spelling

[@lurji]

lol in my conlang it would be djey-djey akëlë (there is no /m/ sound)

[@red_Sun24]

another thing worth keeping in mind: for the children of immigrants, it's entirely possible that you yourself are unable to pronounce your own name in the way that it would be in your parent's home country. many (maybe even most?) children of immigrants don't learn their parents mothertongue, and if they do they don't necessarily learn it to native level proficiency

[@SenhorKoringa]

Oh yeah I had a teacher named Wieckiewicz who took after his brother who pronounced the family named like Wick-y-wizz

[@philipmcniel4908]

@@SenhorKoringa Sometimes, this happens even with names that _are_ pretty easy to pronounce in the new language. Just look at how many Europeans pronounce Christian Pulisic's name with the "ch" ending, but he himself pronounces the "c" ending like in English.

[@Claro1993]

There as a small town in Pampanga called Sasmuan that got the name “Sexmoan” until 1991 as a result of Hispanification of the name by Spanish friars.

[@Mullkaw]

I'm sorry, what name did it get?

[@Claro1993]

@@Mullkaw Pre-Spanish was pronounced “Sasmuan” and written using the native writing system like baybayin: ᜐᜐ᜔ᜋᜓᜀᜈ᜔, the Spanish friars transcribed it in their language as “Sexmoán” until 1991 when if officially adopted the official spelling and pronunciation of Sasmuan.

[@71.218-westshed]

I'm not surprised that got changed as shown by me, an English speaker chuckling that a town was named that.

[@amyness3452]

Why did they change it though, I'm sure the name alone would attract a lot of tourists. Who wouldn't want to go honeymoon in Sexmoan?

[@abunchofiguanaswithinterne2186]

@@71.218-westshed It doesn't help that 70% of that country's population speaks English as a second language (being a former US colony).

[@rom4102]

For the twenty two years I've been alive I've always pronounced my last name "Panganiban" in an American way. This year I found out I've been pronouncing it unauthentically this whole time, and that there's a proper way to pronounce it in Tagalog. But with that in mind, I'm still going to pronounce my name *wrong* because it's what I've grown up with. And most people I come across in person usually can't pronounce either way, so I might as well go with what is easier for English speakers.

[@JJMcCullough]

This is a great example of a related phenomenon, the debate over who gets to declare the “correct” pronunciation. I remember there was a guy in the Bush administration whose name was Paul Wolfowitz, and on the BBC they pronounced it VOLF-owitz, with a hard V sound, because that was apparently the “correct” German way, even though it was not the way he himself pronounced it as an American.

[@rom4102]

@@JJMcCullough Yeah! If someone were to refer to me with the correct Filipino pronunciation of my name, my brain would probably have to take a couple seconds longer to process what I heard. lol

[@readjordan2257]

@@JJMcCullough A rose by any other name, still makes JJ lose 💤 sleep 😴 just kidding.

[@ratedpending]

Isn't that the same surname as Domics

[@gstarr3355]

I also have a foreign last name which I don’t pronounce the way it’s said in its country of origin. But for me as an American the Americanized version is the one that I actually resonate with and consider my real last name

[@ancalyme]

What do you mean, we don't transliterate European names phonetically?? My mother's surname is written and even pronounced differently in Hungarian and Romanian. Half my family's first name gets changed completely when going from Hungarian to Romanian and vice versa. One aunt is called Erzebet at home, Elizabeta at work and on her governemnt ID, and she uses Elisabeth in English. It's absolutely common to do this in Europe. And what do you even think Chinese and Japanese people do with western names, leave them in roman alphabet? They get mangled just as badly as we mangle their names.

[@ponirvea]

at 12:46 Arabic is rendered as separated LTR characters, which it isn't. the correct writing is عربي not ي ب ر ع i guess that's an example of the technical challenges of dealing with foreign names

[@DrRiq]

Yup I spotted that too. Good job, Plato

[@Averroes_417]

I spotted it too, it's the editing software causing that problem bcz it don't support Arabic , JJ probably just copied the word from Google.

[@samsowden]

one of the things that might have helped the European Christian world overtake the Arabic Islamic world during the Renaissance could have had a lot to do with the scripts used. Once the europeans figured out printing, the dissemination of knowledge throughout their sphere of influence became a lot quicker and more efficient. On the other hand, Arabic was incredibly difficult and expensive to print, due to its inherently cursive nature. So the islamic world, which had spearheaded the advance of culture and science in the Old World during the medieval period due to their aggressive policy of acquiring and translating texts from all over the known universe, got left behind.

[@Copyright_Infringement]

@@samsowden That does impose a bit of a limitation on Arabic printing, yes, but the Arabic script has other advantages that outweigh its cursive difficulties, like a high number of characters that use the same letter but with different diacritics (eg. ب/ت/پ/ث), and the lack of vowel marking

[@FOLIPE]

@@samsowden Maybe but by the Renaissance the momento was already well on the side of the western world. Maybe that was just another nail on the coffin

[@ronweasley1354]

When starting Chinese class our teachers gave us a “Chinese name” that sounds nice in Chinese and is somewhat based on our real names. At first I thought it was weird but you get a name whether you like it or not, and it’s usually based on the limited phonetics in Chinese. For example Justin Bieber is “JiaSiTing BiBo” 贾斯汀比伯. It sounds gross so I just stick with with my Chinese name my teacher gave me

[@rhiannebyron1889]

I remember picking a "French name" in in school for that class. It was fun since it didn't have to be based on our actual names.

[@chrisweston6908]

I taught English in Korea (20 years ago). Every kid had a Korean name and an English name. I’m not sure how or when their names were chosen, but a lot of them were “Tom Cruise”.

[@anaghshetty]

ohk so in chinese your name would be pronounced Roonil Wazlib right

[@MrAsianPie]

How the fuck you type that?

[@moldveien1515]

Chinese names is a great example, in the game league of legends there are official names for the characters aka champions from riot games but almost no one uses them, instead having nicknames the entire chinese playerbase agrees on, like the character known as hecarim in english being called 人马 (RenMa) meaning centaur, beacuse he is a centaur, or Kha'zix which is a mantis like creature being called 螳螂(TangLang) literally translating to mantis.

[@kenka25101]

This happened in Ireland a lot. The origional name for one of our counties is "Dún na nGall" but the British changed it to "Donegal" to make it easier for them to pronounce

[@ericmaassel9999]

I'd say phonetical transcription does have the benefit of making things easier to remember. Even if you don't exactly know how to pronounce it, it'll still be easier to recognize something important like the name of a world leader if it's written in characters you're familiar with.

[@danielgstohl9993]

I was looking for someone to say this. Even if i can't correctly pronounce (or write) Ceske Budejovice, i can still memorize and (mis)pronounce it in my head. The names in Cyrillic just look like black boxes to me. Even if I can't correctly read a name in the Latin alphabet, it's still a string of recognizable characters and not what is for me arbitrary lines.

[@havokmusicinc]

Phonetic transcription is definitely better than translation. John and Juan and Eóin and Jean and João are all different names, clearly, so we should treat them all differently, even though translated they're all technically the same word in different languages.

[@j.s.7335]

This may be the best comment I have seen. I think it's a good thing to use familiar characters. It makes names more accessible and thus recognizable, helping us to understand the world more easily.

[@MrLucky5001]

is there really such a large number of people bothered by their name being translated in a different writing system or language? personally I don't care if someone translates my name, if that help them in any way to read or memorize it

[@JJMcCullough]

What country are you from?

[@MrLucky5001]

@@JJMcCullough Romania

[@dunk.]

i think its a bit fun to translate names. i tried to anglicise my name to see if it would sound plausible.

[@lesedidlamini7699]

Yes, they are many, it's disrespectful

[@MrLucky5001]

@@lesedidlamini7699 idk. maybe there are. I'm not that attached to the idea of translating names. all I'm saying is that I don't mind my name being translated.

[@merrymachiavelli2041]

One phenomena I find interesting is how foreign names don't 'stick' in the memory as well. When people say this the argument is usually 'oh you're a xenophobe who doesn't see non-culturally-English as individuals!' but it's truly not that - non-English names just _really_ don't stick in my brain. Take Japanese for example, despite years of watching anime and even an earnest attempt to learn Japanese, I still sincerely struggle to remember the names of anime characters (when they have Japanese names). It's bizarre - I'm emotionally invested in a character, I can recite a characters entire life history and story arc, but if you ask me to say _what their name is_ I just can't. I can recognise it instantly if written or spoken, but I wouldn't even be able to write out a romanised version. It sets worse the longer the name is... It might be a dyslexia thing. But it effects other languages too. Honestly when I'm presented with a non-English names all I feel is dread, not just that I'll mispronounce it (although I will) but that I'll repeatedly completely forget it.

[@oo8962]

For me, I could remember foreign name easily as long as I heard how they're pronounced. I might forget those names a few weeks after I'm finished watching but when I'm watching, I probably remember them. I still remember tons of kdrama characters I've watched back then like several years ago

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

And it's not like english is consistent. Ever bin to Leicester? Or visited MacKenȝie?

[@drz1]

When we stop being ego-centric and realize that other cultures have a difficulty in pronouncing our names is when society will progress forward. Your name is not a collection of symbols, rather it's the sound that you have been hearing your whole life. Respect other cultures' attempt at phonetic translation.

[@NarvT86]

He doesn't respect half of his culture your're asking to much of him.

[@abunchofiguanaswithinterne2186]

@@NarvT86 Yes. The entire thing of JJ's channel is the constant sarcasm no matter who's culture he's talking about. I guess it's not really discrimination if you treat all cultures equally (even his own)!

[@BichaelStevens]

I imagine it's a lot easier to read Stolichnaya than Столичная,or Caonima than 草泥馬

[@TallCanDan02]

@@BichaelStevens Not if you don't read in Latin script.

[@BichaelStevens]

@@TallCanDan02 думаю что буд'та более легко читать Гучи чем Gucci или Германия чем Deutschland

[@rycrokosm]

6:05 brief correction here JJ, when British (actually Portuguese) came to present-day Mumbai's location, there was nothing called Mumbai or Bombay. There was only 7 islands there, the oldest name for Mumbai being (if remember correctly) is Kakamuchee or Galajunkja. As for Kolkata, the case is different, back then it was known as group of 3 insignificant villages called Kalikata ruled over by the Nawab of Bengal, under Mughal suzerainty, when the EIC came around for trade, the Nawab gave them a trade license in 1690 and allowed them to have a trade post at Kalikata, the area was then developed as a heavily fortified trading post called Fort William.

[@tankermottind]

"Mao Tse-tung" is actually much closer to the accepted Mandarin pronunciation than "Mao Zedong", but that was also kind of the problem with Wade-Giles transliteration--it was closer to what Chinese words "sound like" in English orthography, but at the price of not really having its own consistent orthography that you could write books in. Hanyu Pinyin was developed by Chinese people for Chinese people, to potentially completely replace Chinese characters (though it ultimately did not) in writing Chinese, and thus making the names sound *almost* right when foreigners pronounce it was much less important than for Wade-Giles, which primarily existed for the benefit of Europeans and English-speaking Europeans at that and its sound choices are now about a hundred years out of date. P.S. Hanyu Pinyin absolutely *does* incorporate tone, it's just that tonal diacritics are often left off when Westerners write Běijīng or Máo Zédōng. You have to do something absolutely wild like "The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den" to break Pinyin.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

I think one of the issues with diacritics is that most western keyboards contain only some or even none of them. for example I can easily write ó ò ô but to get ō I'd have to copy it from a table or type in unicode code-points. And even within the same language there are differences. Just between US ANSI layout and UK ISO layout there are differences in key count and position of some symbols.

[@teehee4096]

石窟里的食狮诗人

[@tankermottind]

@@HappyBeezerStudiosthe compose key should be standard on all keyboards for this reason

[@tankermottind]

@@teehee4096 施氏食獅史 石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。 氏时时适市视狮。 十时，适十狮适市。 是时，适施氏适市。 氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。 氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。 石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。 石室拭，氏始试食是十狮。 食时，始识是十狮尸，实十石狮尸。 试释是事。

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

@@tankermottind since that removes the need of dead keys, I'm all for it.

[@Cooltural]

I'm going to go on a limb here and say that IMO this has a lot more to do with entitlement rather than a matter of honest dialogue. Even if we agree that we all can make the effort to learn how foreing names are spelled and pronounce in their respective languages, it is unrealistic to expect that people from another country with another language will be able to read or say your name the way you like because of some sort of idealistic cling to identity or national pride. For example if i'm speaking spanish and i'm suddenly have to say a french name, i won't be as skilled as a native french speaker to pronounce phonetics that are not natural to my own language and my perfectly cohesive spanish sentence will break into a weirdly sounding mess, not counting the fact that many people are not able to pronounce sounds that have not been practicing for years like a french speaker. Thats why many immigrants keep their thick accents even after years of having moved to a diferent country. Another thing is that many languages naturally embed different limits on their speakers. I speak a regional version of spanish with slightly different pronunciations for some letters as the rest of the hispanic countries, yet any spanish speaker can understand me well, so for me these variations are meaningless, we don't care for long or short vowels, "ch", "sh" and "sch" sounds are the same "b" and "v" are also the same, but this teeny tiny sounds can mean a world of difference in languages like german, but spanish limits our ability to hear and pay attention to them. So rather than expect that people alien to your culture are skilled enough to pronounce and read foreing writing systems or interested in changing their whole language dynamics to accomodate your personal preference for your name pronunciation, maybe individuals should embrace the fact than names can have a diversity of pronuncations and don't be offended by the limits of different speakers that are unintentionally ignorant about your specific desires.

[@Jack_Stafford]

If I was moving to a country with a different language and alphabet, I would pick or be assigned a name in that language. It's just practical common sense to think that someone planning to move here would learn English and find an English equivalent name. It's been done for centuries, it is just a fact of life that people need not get so worked up about. Like calling someone named Richard "Dick" for short, if that's what they used to differentiate him from his father or someone else or as a nickname, even though it has no relationship to Richard, then who cares.

[@aleksasarai8658]

@@Jack_Stafford Basically every migrant whose name uses a different script already has to do this (it's literally necessary in order to fill in visa applications or any other legal document in your target country), so you're complaining about a set of people who don't exist. Basically every migrant I know (myself included) is incredibly accommodating when it comes to other people pronouncing their name. Funnily enough, the main practical issue arises with names that are written in Latin characters when they have to deal with government departments (or other cases where you are required to give your "Full Legal Name") -- English-speaking governments make many assumptions about names written in the Latin alphabet, resulting in lots of headaches for migrants who have different cultures around names (and governments usually make no attempt to make this problem easier to deal with -- there is no guidance on this issue in Australia for instance). Examples include: * Vietnam, were most people have multiple first names (which are not middle names) and the order of the first name is reversed when compared to English names (LAST FIRST FIRST FIRST -- with the last FIRST usually being the preferred name). But what ends up happening is that the first FIRST name is used as the preferred name, when the person themselves isn't actually called that. * Iceland, where most people do not have last names (though happily I've seen that most forms these days can handle not having a last name). * Russia, where women have different last names to men in the same family (actually the last name is the same, but they are read and written differently, meaning if you transliterated the last name you'd end up with different last names). Luckily Russian is not written in the Latin script, but I imagine some other culture I'm not aware of has something similar. * Many countries have longer names than in English, and plenty of government systems have character limits to their name handling. In most cases, people do have a "shorter name" that they can use instead, but cases like Vietnamese you end up with the persons *preferred name* being cut off (and having your name cut off means that your ID cards will no longer match your record between departments). This really isn't an issue with the people migrating, it's an issue with how badly governments in multicultural nations are set up to deal with people's names. If you moved to a country and everyone refused to call you "Jack" (even though people could pronounce and spell it) but instead said that your legal name must be Droffats Kcaj because they read Latin characters right-to-left -- I think it'd be reasonable to be somewhat unhappy about the situation. (And then one government department calls you "Droff" because they only can handle first names that are 5 letters long, so each time you have to file your taxes you have to explain why one piece of ID says "Droff" while the other says "Droffats" and your passport and visa says "Jack".) This isn't a hypothetical, my partner is Vietnamese and this is a very common occurrence.

[@Sirenhound]

When I'm speaking to a Japanese person, I'll introduce myself as イーサン (iisan), since that's how they'll pronounce it anyway unless they have their tongues around the "th" sound. I'll say "Ethan" if they seem confused, but the goal is to be understood. It would seem rude to expect someone to remember and refer to me using sounds they are unfamiliar with.

[@cocoacoolness]

Exactly, the name Chloe is hard for Japanese people to pronounce to, so I just introduce myself as クロイ (Kuroi). I would never expect someone who doesn't speak English to learn how to pronounce English words just to get my name right. Same with people who speak English as a second language too. As long as it's understandable, pronunciation literally doesn't matter.

[@niccage6375]

I worked at McDonald's and most of my coworkers were Hispanic and most of them Etan instead of Ethan

[@cocoacoolness]

@RanStuff maybe in other countries Chloe is pronounced that way, but I've always pronounced my name with an 'i' at the end, never an 'eh'

[@nevreiha]

@RanStuff I personally haven't heard people pronounce it khlo eh, the e in chloe matches up much better to the japanese イ sound than an エ

[@asherl5902]

@@niccage6375 In Spain the equivalent name is Izan sounding like English Ethan, but it just works for Castilian Spain or otherwise will be pronounced "Isan"... Replacing Z/TH for T sound in Spain isn't something I've ever heard, I had a hard time understanding someone talking me in English about a "tief" while I think if I have heard "sief" instead I might understood beter that it was a thief

[@hammerfist5477]

I love that in Finnish all the kings with the name George are called "Yrjö", an old timey name that is nowadays used more as a noun, meaning "puke".

[@jdmrc93]

My grandfather’s name was Theophilus, and they changed it to Tony when he arrived here in the 30s.

[@goeland4585]

Man that suck. Theophilus is so badass

[@berry.mixxxx]

Why would they change such a cool and easy to pronounce name to something a unshowered cab driver would be called

[@nathanlaoshi8074]

Too bad they didn't catch on that his name meant "Love (of friend) of God." They may have thought twice with that information.

[@rateeightx]

How Rude, Theophilus Is Objectively A Cooler Name Than Tony.

[@eddie-roo]

In Spanish we use pompous, antiquated names like Teófilo, Pánfilo or Petronila as fun lil ridiculous sounding nicknames, so I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit. Sorry about your grandfather, tho.

[@materp7362]

I think there already is a universal principle that addresses the subject. People will translate names into their language if it is not natively written in their alphabet. I think that’s pretty fair.

[@abunchofiguanaswithinterne2186]

Exactly, cause vocal sounds are technically universal but the writing of it depends on where you come from.

[@gabrieltellez8148]

Why are symbols like Ç or Þ or ǁ or Ŋ considered part of their alphabet but not Ξ or Ж or Θ or Л

[@justin.booth.]

I'm sorry but this argument simply lacks thought. The idea that those two hypothetical articles would be equally quick and easy to take in is just absurd and there is no way it's true. If you tested full length articles of both types on a large volume of people for comprehension and speed I am fully confident the romanised one would win in a landslide. There are so many problems with this proposed system I'll just list them for brevity - People won't be able to read them aloud without looking up each one and hunting down a pronunciation - It will be much harder for people to tell similar names apart - If you read a name and want to type it later on that would be really hard (imagine trying to Google Mao Zedong without using the romanisation at any point) - Don't even get me started on people with dyslexia, bad eyesight etc. This whole system is very poorly thought through.

[@comradewindowsill4253]

Even as someone who can read Cyrillic and Latin scripts at a native level, I had trouble with all the flipping back and forth that happened. You don't normally need to switch your entire pattern matching template for alphabets on the fly in the middle of a paragraph, and having to do that made me stumble a lot.

[@jpcantor1455]

Love the more linguistic focused video. It's such an interesting topic, and it's always amusing to see people push their way through tough pronunciations. Good job!

[@samuelrauhala5601]

This is a really interesting topic. The craiziest example I can think is the proper Finnish translation of English George, Yrjö

[@thenamegoeshere3393]

And it's pronounced "Ooryé"!

[@anonymousbloke1]

It must have come to Finnish through Russian. Юрий, which is coincidentally the name of my dad, is just a variation of George (which also has a more "proper" equivalent in Russian - Георгий)

[@seneca983]

Those names come from the same root so it works the same as many "translated" European names.

[@seneca983]

@@anonymousbloke1 I think it coming through Swedish from the Swedish name "Örjan" seems more likely, though I've not tried to check the history.

[@anonymousbloke1]

@@seneca983 Yrjo just seems more similar to Yuriy

[@sometwo7429]

Thanks for clearing up that Mao thing. I've always learned his name as Mao Zedong, and was always confused when I saw it written as Tse Tung in older textbooks

[@boptillyouflop]

It's pronounced Maow Tsuhtong. The older romanization gives you a closer approximation if you read it literally. The newer romanization is more systematic but it has a LOT of traps (c,z= ts, ch,j,zh,q= ch, x= sh...), and it's often missing the tone marks usually which you need for the full pronunciation (should be Máo Zédōng).

[@XavierbTM1221]

Mao means cat in Chinese, funnily enough

[@boptillyouflop]

@@XavierbTM1221 Yeah but it's a different Mao :P Meo Zedong's mao is "máo" 毛 which means "hair", Cat is "māo" 猫 .

[@georgeadams1853]

The strangest "equivalence" I've encountered between western and eastern European names is "Adalbert" for "Wojciech". The names are not at all linguistically related, but they became associated with each other about 1000 years ago. The cornerstone of St. Adalbert's church near my home is engraved in Polish "Św. Wojciech"

[@krystofkrejpsky]

I don't think they are equivalent actually. Sv. Vojtěch/Wojciech just accepted the name Adalbert when he was being confirmed. He later became quite well known in the latin West using that name but in Slavic countries was still known as Vojtěch. I don't think any other Vojtěch/Wojciech is translated as Adalbert

[@coleball6001]

@@krystofkrejpsky Saint Adalbert of Prague (birth name Vojtech) took the name Adalbert at his confirmation to honor his teacher Saint Adalbert of Magdeburg

[@royxeph_arcanex]

It reminds me that in Hebrew we call France צרפת (Tzarfát) which probably makes us the only ones on Earth with a formidable amount of native speakers that don't call it anything even remotely related to the name we're all familiar with. I heard once that originally the word was actually associated with a town in _Lebanon_ and that it started to refer to France around the Middle Ages. Spain's name in Hebrew ספרד (Sfarád) has a similar story afaik. We have many other crazy names for countries (and some cities!) that can probably get most non-speakers scratching their heads but these are the only two I can think of at the moment that really don't resemble the names in any other language I'm aware of

[@calliemyersbuchanan6458]

EASY SOLUTION: use authentic name in authentic written language followed by local phonetic pronunciation in parentheses or linguistic equivalent of parentheses. So YES i would LOVE to see those licenses but with phonetic translation below so it is both accurate and accessible

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

That sounds like a pretty good solution that should make everyone at least someone happy.

[@SuprousOxide]

I remember at graduation ceremonies, they would have us write our name on a card, and then write a phonetic pronunciation of the name so that the person announcing the students could pronounce their name in a way approaching correct. Of course, we were still left at the mercies of English's imprecise phonics which doesn't even have standard ways to represent its OWN vowel sounds, let alone those from other languages. Would be nice if we knew the International Phonetic Alphabet (and could count on the announcer also knowing it), but we didn't.

[@Leafyphox]

That is the opposite of easy.

[@gamermapper]

Especially if the nation has no other place to call home and practise their language like the Cherokee people

[@dr.hankins4682]

Easier still. The IPA

[@hughjack5066]

England: John France: Jean Spain: Juan Netherlands Johannes Portugal: João Italy: *GIOVANNI*

[@Synths-n-Guitar]

Portugese: João

[@hughjack5066]

@@Synths-n-Guitargood one

[@nocturne9257]

The idea of having to learn every different writing script from every language just to read names from other languages, instead of just anglicising them, is pretty dumb ngl

[@abunchofiguanaswithinterne2186]

The way you say it is pretty brash, but you do have a good point. I think the easiest way is to just use vocalizations (i.e. say your name out loud), and it should be up to the foreigner to interpret it in writing however they want since vocalizations are somewhat universal but the writing of it is not. This does have the downside of having to have the person either there personally or have a recording of you saying it, but in this modern age of the internet, it shouldn't be too hard.

[@MorgenPeschke]

Shouldn't need to do learn more than 1 extra alphabet. Just learn how to read something like what's used to spell out phonetics in the dictionary and put the pronunciation someplace accessible - under the name on a license, in a tool-tip on a computer, in parentheses after the name on paper, etc. That'll even help people like me who use Latin letters and have weird names, because as much fun as it is to see someone's brain lock up when they get to the part of my last name that forgot vowels were a thing ("schk"), sometimes I just want to pay for my groceries and go home 😉

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

If we all just switch to using IPA we would have no issue to read every text written, because the written text would exactly tell how to pronounce it. That doesn't mean understanding what it means, but at least we would be able to pronounce it correctly. Remember, everything Kennedy said in Berlin 1963 was _[ɪç ˈbɪn ʔaɪn bɛɐ̯ˈliːnɐ]_ or at least he tried, was he read was _ish bin ein Bearleener_ while trying to pronounce _Ich bin ein Berliner_

[@dickiewongtk]

@@MorgenPeschke 'Like what's used to spell out phonetics in the dictionary"? Like æ or ɛ? so you mean IPA.

[@MorgenPeschke]

@@dickiewongtk thanks, couldn't remember the name

[@swisscheeseneutral6820]

So this is why Gaddafi is spelled so many ways in media…

[@mmud95]

The transliteration would be Al-Qadhdhāfī but even a large amount of Arabic speakers pronounce the Q as a G and for the D I guess foreigners didn't know how to pronounce it the proper way....

[@felixpowell3975]

My mother once counted "Gaddafi" spelled three different ways on the front page of a national UK news paper.

[@aa-zz6328]

@@mmud95 why do you write the letter "ذ" in Arabic as "dh" or "D", it's pronounced like (if not exact) the "th" in "there". The sound of the letter "ق" is the hard ome for English speakers to pronounce, and isn't the equivalent of the "Q" in English (but fun fact, it came from the same letter that represented the sound/letter? "ق" in the phoenician alphabet).

[@xjmmjbnqfstjdijoj2044]

For instance in Italy he is known as "Gheddafi"

[@zanews23]

@@aa-zz6328 That’s a failure of English orthography, not Arabic nor its transliteration into the Latin alphabet. If you use for both ث and ذ, there will be no way to tell which sound it is. Seems rather silly to me given the fact that English does distinguish between the voiced and unvoiced sounds, we just write them the same way because of a historical quirk. seems to be a good way to write /ð/ by analogy: t and th are unvoiced, so d and dh should be voiced.

[@noizee05]

Interesting topic and fun video! I have two anecdotes: 1) Once in a family reunion, one of our uncles told us that our last name was originally Santanac, because it was basque but when our first "ancestor" came to Panama, he registered but in registry they were like .."Lets add an H" because the C alone was pronunced as /ch/ and 2) A friend told me how his great-grandfather from Taiwan came to Panama, by rule of the time, they had to choose a Western name but his ended up being chosen for him because the officer seemed to say "Hmm you look like a José" and bam he ended up with a new name. Oh and my name is tricky to translate into Korean and Chinese, while learning them I ended up being called Ka-la hahaha

[@daviddavis4885]

At 12:00 I’m going to have to take a hard disagreement with you… Those Czech names aren’t unreadable to English speakers You could easily tell that they would be pronounced like “Peter Sijarto” “Andre Babis” “Miclos Boros” etc Sure, it’s not perfect, but if you asked a Czech person about “Peter Szijarto” they could probably piece together who you’re talking about If you say “Meanwhile in 日本, the prime minister 新造阿部 went to 大阪 today” English speakers would have literally no reference for what any of those are, and good luck if they’re not in a copy-paste-able format, because you have 0% chance of figuring out how to even search for that Basically, there’s a reason we translate names, and honestly we probably should translate most proper nouns That way the pronunciation is as close as possible but everyone can still understand you

[@RyszardPoster27]

It's 安倍 晋三 haha I love the way you wrote it though. He should change his name to that. The given name in you version means "newly built" or "newly made" as if describing a building or a product XD

[@MrAsianPie]

One place I find this phenomenon in is Mackinaw City vs Mackinac Island vs Mackinac County. Each of three sit right next to each other, and each squabble over the spelling from official government offices to local bars.

[@DrRiq]

The island and county have the same spelling (?)

[@poots605]

you found pneumonia? get well soon

[@MrAsianPie]

@@poots605 Damn typo

[@Alex-zs3kn]

Arkansas and Kansas are named after the same Indian tribe. Arkansas is the French name for the tribe, Kansas is the Spanish.

[@receivedbeans8555]

I actually like that different languages have translated versions of the same name. It adds more flavor to life.

[@tofawil]

Agh, you were SO close to pronouncing Wojciech correctly. The "ch" at the end means actually a breathy "h" sound. At least there was a Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz reference. No tail on the "ę" makes me kinda sad, but still, good job!

[@kittye8340]

Good lord what is that 😭

[@Warriorcats64]

So like... Weu- tchech (Voy- chesch?)...in German? Excellent!

[@przemekkozlowski7835]

Kudos to J.J. for using that reference. It is such a classic bit of Polish comedy. My parents still crack a smile whenever that line is mentioned and they must have seen that movie a hundred times by now. The actor playing the German had the perfect expression of a non-Pole hearing that name and realizing he will have to write it down.

[@daerdevvyl4314]

Hello, this is your bank calling. Is this Mr. Gegorj Bzzbzzzbzzzbzzzt?

[@ludwigr]

@@Warriorcats64 actually it's Voy-che-h. The last letter is the "h" sound as in "hey", but in English there are no words with "h" sound at the end, which is why it's so difficult to explain the pronunciation.

[@PanieIdzPanStad]

15:08 The name Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz (perfectly fine in Polish, although made up for a comedic purpose) comes from a Polish comedy about WW2: kzbin.info/www/bejne/d5eui5aigryGZ7c

[@rezajafari6395]

interestingly enough it also touches on the topic, portraying the extreme challenge German troops had writing it town

[@madisonm1310]

I got really excited seeing that name come up. I love that scene.

[@redere4777]

The weird thing about "Zedong" is that the "Tse-Tung" spelling is actually closer to the Standard Chinese pronunciation. The IPA for his name's pronunciation in Chinese is [tsɤ̌.tʊ́ŋ]. With "Peking" vs. "Beijing", it based on how "Peking" comes from an older Chinese pronunciation or dialect. Though "Beijing" still seems like a weird English spelling since the pronunciation is [pèi.tɕíŋ], the Wade-Giles spelling is "Pei-ching" which is closer to its pronunciation. It's also important to remember that these are the Standard Chinese pronunciations, you'd get different spellings if you used Cantonese, Hakka, Wu, etc. pronunciations, for example.

[@Liggliluff]

Do note that Chinese uses aspiration-distinction for sounds, so they use /p/ and /pʰ/, while European languages tend to go with voicing-distinction, so that is /b/ and /p/. So taking /pei.tɕiŋ/ which is the aspirated mode; and changing it to the voicing mode, it will become /bei.dʑiŋ/ instead, and now we see why English has it as Beijing. - If you don't change /p/ and /pʰ/ to /b/ and /p/, then you can't tell them apart.

[@joaofelipegueiros3743]

Wow! My name is João Felipe, and I "suffer" with this daily lmao. Everyone that I meet that doesn't speak Portuguese is not able to pronounce my name, I generally explain my name to people saying it's John in Portuguese, and I prefer people calling me Felipe, it actually pains me to hear the pronunciation of João hahaha. When I lived in the U.S people just called me Phil/Phillip( Which was great)I currently study in Israel and my Portuguese name being written in Hebrew is one of the funniest things, I think I might ask the faculty to change my name to the Hebrew counterpart.

[@FOLIPE]

My name is Filipe and I think it's a name that travels fairly well in the western world. Of course people have different accents but it's not as hard for them as João, and usually by changing the local version of that name they can get pretty close to our pronunciation. Spelling however is a mess (even in Brazil though as there are Felipes and Filipes and Filippes etc). But it's fun to see those differences.

[@AL5520]

In Hebrew we are pretty good in "translating" names. The Academy of the Hebrew Language has rules on transliteration from "Latin" alphabet (and Arabic alphabet) into Hebrew and the first and most basic rule is that you write it as it sounds, not as it's written. Since there are people from all over the world in Israel it is important to do that. Your name should be written like this ז'ואאו פיליפה The problem is that Hebrew does not have vowels (some letters act some times as vowels but not always) so we can mispronounce an unknown word. For that you might want to use the "Niqqud" which replaces the vowels, which will look like this ז'וּאָאוּ פִילִיפֶּה

[@realhawaii5o]

I feel you João. - Gonçalo.

[@guilhermecastilhos3885]

I don't even try to explain how my name is spoken in Portuguese anymore. I just use the Pope/King translation way, it's way easier. "You can just call me Guillermo/Wilhelm/Guillaume/William..."

[@hydrogen3266]

My last name is portuguese and since I’m an American nobody seems to know how to say it correctly, even the “English” pronunciations. Always misspelled or mispronounced to the point where I would almost rather use the English translation

[@knightrider585]

I have no problem with Japan using Japanese characters for foreign names on official documents as this is practical for most people in Japan. By the same token official documents in English speaking countries should also use latin characters. Introducing non-latin alphabets would mean most people in english-speaking countries, including clerical workers and police, could not read, write, or type names. Right-to-left, or vertical scripts introduce severe practical difficulties for documents. And finally allowing any unicode character in official documents could introduce security issues. But on the other hand, for sure if you run a business that is online and has customers around the world it could likely be in your best interest to allow for unicode characters for customer account data.

[@williamwaugh2004]

ah yes that's why everything written in Chinese gets hacked constantly /s

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

That makes french and german names already modified just because english uses neither accents nor umlauts. And not all languages and cultures use the same sorting for names of [first name] [family name] For example I have two first names. (and a friend of mine has four) Trying to get that into any sort of US papers without it being changed into a middle name (a concept that doesn't exist here) would already be hard enough without the fact that my family name has multiple letters that aren't used in english. In fact since a spelling reform a few years back, (which didn't included names), I have trouble getting people to pronounce the name right in our native language.

[@PashPaw]

Having an Anglicized last name that's been in America for over 300 years is always fun. Thankfully, since mine was Anglicized from German from Esch to Ash, it still means the same thing either way. But, it makes genealogy interesting because I've seen people in the family tree that wound up around the same time using Esch instead. It's still silly though.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

But ash like the tree, not the stuff that is left when you burn things.

[@owenbillo5513]

JJ: *switches Russian names to cyrillic* Me, who can read cyrillic: 😎😎😎

[@karlovisttimes8271]

ez pez

[@Hand-in-Shot_Productions]

Я могу́щий читать русский алфавит та́кже!

[@madisonm1310]

Сэйм

[@justmerc1642]

Me, who can get by on context:

[@SylviusTheMad]

You can watch this transition of Slavic names in Albertan cemeteries. The oldest headstones are labelled in Cyrillic. The next oldest have been transliterated to the Roman alphabet, but are still unapologetically Ukrainian. But after 3 generations, the names have had their spelling radically simplified.

[@info_bot]

Just have the pronunciation written down after a particularly "foreign/difficult" name, i.e. Vojtěch (Voy-chek). It's obviously not perfect, but it's better than just staring blankly at a name. With time, the curious ones among us would learn to pick up on some of the more common "foreign" names intuitively, just how many of us learn difficult English words that mostly appear only on print, such as obfuscate.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

At that point we should just learn IPA and write names phonetically

[@mollyweasley6723]

12:39 The word हिन्दी/ हिंदी is written incorrectly, the little line below the letter "न" making it " न् " makes it loose it's vowel sound (all hindi letters have an 'a' vowel sound),due to which you cannot put a matra (here, इ) (which would be somewhat similar to the accent points in Roman letter, for example the accent grave in the word "mère" in French changing the sound of the letter "e")on it which is there to change its vowel sound.

[@dennisfischer7676]

You speak Hindi, English and French?

[@mollyweasley6723]

@@dennisfischer7676 Hi, I am currently learning French so, I can speak a bit of it. Je parle un peu français, mais aussi trois autres langues :)

[@dennisfischer7676]

@@mollyweasley6723 bravo, moi je parle seulement les deux :(

[@mollyweasley6723]

@@dennisfischer7676 C'est bien ! Pas tous les mondes parles beaucoup des langues, et c'est beau que on parle plus que un langue !

[@belg4mit]

@@mollyweasley6723 Il faut des contractions, "qu'on parle plus qu'une langue". (Mais le sexe des mots m'emmerde, c'est débil.)

[@V1CT0Rc001]

Speaking of the Trebek story, the father of my dad's cousin had his name changed, probably for the same reason as Trebek's father. His original surname was "Pappas", which for those that don't know, is a Greek name. The name he got it changed to was "Pepps", the reason being is that the judge, or whoever was in charge, told him that "he seems like a real ""peppy"" guy"...

[@mintjaan]

I find it interesting that when I was talking to some Chinese classmates about a Japanese celebrity they didn't know who I was talking about. I wrote his name in Kanji on the broad and they understood who he was but said that they usually pronounce Japanese names as the characters are pronouned in Chinese. So other writing systems outside of Latin letters have this same problem.

[@bedrock6443]

It makes sense for that to happen because for China they are the originators of the hanzi writting system more connomy known as Chineese charicters. Through trade this would go to Korea and Japan the latter of which would call it kanji. They use the chineese charicters to this day and when over many genorations there is now famous japaneese celebreties and their names are written in kanji it is natural for people in China to say their name in those Chineese charicters. But it is a problem many countries share in lying to oneself they can pronounce a name from an exotic foreign land.

[@aotoda486]

6:40 I get the feeling that just like the name change from "Swaziland" to "Eswatini" not a lot of folk'll really care much for taking up the new one

[@Noschool100]

The only clear solution is to regress back to only oral communication.

[@aartie1999]

yes

[@Plasmathedeathjester]

Ok grandpa

[@Noschool100]

@@Plasmathedeathjester nah, I just made a meme for the likes.

[@alanho6814]

This sounds like some ancient Greek philosophers would say. My dudes even complained about how written words would make people lazy and so be intellectually weaker for the reason that people no longer need to memorize an entire volume of a book in spoken words just to store information. Which might have a point, I mean, when was the last time we memorized an entire book? The fact that Buddhist teachings were written down for the first time hundreds of years after the Buddha's death makes those orally inheriting monks look like superhumans. It'd be crazy (and definitely unnecessary) if someone did something like that today.

[@Costlee_14m]

My friend is from Eastern Europe, specifically Romania. His name is Andrei and he is known by his American friends as Andrew

[@csucskos]

Szijjártó Péter is actually a Hungarian minister (of Foreign Affairs and Trade). Anyways, onto the topic. I'd say, a great practice could be to write out the original name and in brackets the pronunciation (in the language of the paper). People would catch on with the most important people's name pretty fast I think.

[@csucskos]

@@Ugly_German_Truths I don't say they will memorize everyone, but when you read: 習近平 you know who this represents. In speech, everything would be the same.

[@yousifosama4414]

12:38 Arabic is written backwards. It took me a second to get, but those are the correct letter, they’re just written left-to-right as opposed to right-to-left, and in Arabic that looks even weirder than just hsilgnE (English backwards) since the letters don’t even connect.

[@puffin20]

Here's my story. I am Russian and my name is Artiom (in Russian spelled as Артём), though Greeks always struggled so much to prononce it right and it usually hurts my ears when they do it wrong (Artum, Artyim, Aryom), like guys, it's so freakin' simple. But the name in Greek sounds as Artemis [ Αρτέμης ] (yeah, just like the godess of hunting, but the accent falls on "e" instead of "a" as in female version of the name). All Russian names came from Greek though (going back to Cyril and Methodius when they brough alphabet, religion and etc to Russians). Though I really dislike that name and so, since in Greece it's really common to shorten names (for example someone can be called Akis but it might come from various names since it's the ending. Dimitris - Dimitrakis - Akis. Or Thanasis - Thanasakis - Sakis or Akis, just like Sakis Rouvas, the singer, who's full name is Athanasios or Thanasis), I shortened mine to Tim, and after doing a bit of research, Artiom actually translates to Tim (just take away a, r, m from the name). But Timur and Timofey (Timothy) can also be shortened to Tim. The whole thing with the names is so crazy though, the more I look at it, the more it fascinates me.

[@karlpoppins]

Eh, Artyom is actually a transliteration of the Greek name Artemios (or Artemis in Modern Greek). So, no, it has no relation to Timofey, which is instead a transliteration of the Greek name Timotheos.

[@matko3502]

As someone who is Croatian and who has a lot of extended family in the french and english speaking parts of the world it was always funny to me when I would hear my cousins pronounce our surname, french speaking ones especially. If I were to move to the US for example, I would anglicize my name and surname ASAP. I spent enough time already spelling out my surname to various clerks and bureaucrats in Croatia to want to explain what diacritics are to someone who will never need them. Keeping it simple seems to be the best thing to do.

[@urvagrawal2358]

I still remember the day when an Indian news reader was fired for reading Xi Jinping as 11th Jinping 😂😂😂

[@susankay497]

That's lol funny!!

[@phildragonbleu]

Someone in Québec called the north Korea dictator Kim Jong Il "Kim Jong 2"

[@SuperKing604]

Is there a clip of that!

[@Hand-in-Shot_Productions]

Haven't heard of that! I thought it was bound to happen eventually, but I didn't know it did! I can imagine that the news reader would wonder what the other 10 Jinpings are! Can you find the clip? Here's an article about the "11th Jinping": www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-29274792

[@urvagrawal2358]

@@SuperKing604 I can't find it. I think they tried their best to remove it. It was kind of seen as national embarrassment as it was on government owned Channel...

[@EAGauss]

In my opinion, the best solution would be putting the name in the native language and following it with a phonetical transcription in square brackets. So that, it would not offend the foreigners and enable the rest of the people to pronounce the name properly.

[@junjunagbayani4792]

Maybe the final solution to this is to teach everybody the international phonetic alphabet used by linguists so we can all write our names in our preferred script followed by a phonetic equivalent every time.

[@samuelsamuelson8695]

"final solution"? dude.

[@admiraloscar3320]

The IPA is a bit to complicated for general use, so a simplified version might be better

[@mirabeaux851]

6:05 actually this is not true. What usually the case is that you get names that people here and the overtime they morph into other forms. It’s like a game of telephone rather than a conscious effort to dehumanize otherwise they wouldn’t even use the names in the first place and they were just use their own, e.g. “Screw “””mumbai”””! It is “GEORETOWN!” “.

[@andreageuna6649]

When I applied for a Visa for the Russian Federation, my surname was written in two different forms. The first one, made by the Russian Consulate in Milan, with the corresponding letters "D+J" to reproduce the sound "J" (the same of J.J.) as it is correctly pronounced in Italian. The second one, probably made by an immigration office in Russia, with the corresponding letter "G", as it is translittered between Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, even if in Russian the letter "G" is never pronounced as the English word "Germany" but always as the English word "Guatemala".

[@benlime1235]

I saw a news story in Ireland a while ago about how a polish driver had racked up loads of citations for driving offences and it turned out the name recorded by the police was actually the polish for 'driving licence', not the drivers' names.

[@Liggliluff]

Sounds like a myth. Polish and British licenses have the same design. Blue at top saying it's a driving license, followed by: 1. Last name 2. First name 3. Birth date

[@jstrandquist]

Hmm. When you consider that names in many languages (even ones as relatively familiar to English speakers as French or German) contain phonemes that simply *aren't* in English (to say nothing of Asian or African languages) even an alphabetically faithful rendering of a name isn't going to ensure proper pronunciation. For example, I can read the Cyrillic alphabet (albeit slowly) and so could decipher the names written in that theoretical NYT article you showed. However, if I say those names, I'm still going to sound like an American attempting to pronounce Russian. Just as your Japanese hosts approximated your last name as "Ma-kara", the vast majority of people are still going to have to twist a foreign name into something they can actually pronounce. Now, there are certainly ways to make this closer to the original, as with "Beijing" superseding "Peking", but at the end of the day you still have to translate it if you want readers to understand and comprehend who you're talking about. In short, for names which are foreign but fully pronounceable by speakers of a certain language, one ought to learn to pronounce it properly and render it in one's own alphabet accordingly. For names which contain unpronounceable phonemes, one ought to get as close as linguistically possible, render the modified pronunciation accordingly, and call it good.

[@Schoritzobandit]

Agreed. Likewise, no reason an English speaker can't say the Spanish name Jose or the French name Martin, as every sound in both names exists in english. Throw in a sound not in English and unless it's close friends who are willing to work at it over time, an approximation is necessary.

[@리주민]

I remember seeing maps with direct translations into English and names the same way (especially for native American names): sitting bull. His name was actually Lakota Tatanka Iyotake. Imagine if we did this with all names. George would be Farmer, Takahashi would be High-Bridge, and Xi Jinping (president of china) would be Dawn Near-Peace, Joe Biden (president of the US) would be God-will-increase Button-Maker. 😋

[@jstrandquist]

@@리주민 New plan: we do these direct translations, but only for politicians. The news will become so much more fun to read.

[@RaymondHng]

@@리주민 And what will 唐納德·特朗普 translate to?

[@adrianblake8876]

@@Schoritzobandit Actually they do have sounds nonexistent in english. Spanish J is a velar fricative /x/, and french n, while unpronounced, nasalises the vowel in front of it to /ã/

[@burnin8orable]

One of the technological difficulties with printing in different scripts is that unicode (the international standard for character encoding) came a little too late. Some older software that might still be running on government computers will not display certain scripts correctly, and governments tend to be slow to adopt new software.

[@judobigdog7683]

I remember in elementary school Spanish class, all of us kids would ask what are names in Spanish were. Looking back, since my name is Keegan, its obviously still Keegan. Our teacher would just say a weird 'Spanish-y' version of our names to keep us entertained.

[@MCDreng]

Quegán :D