Spell My Name with an "S"/Real Life: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

== Arabic ==

* And then there's the Qu'ran/Kuran/Koran/Alcoran. You'd think that, if anything, the title of the most important book in the Arabic language would have a consistent Romanization, or even one that was more common or popular than the others...but no. Likewise, Muslim/Moslem (the latter, though being a legitimate and older transliteration, is nowadays disliked by Muslims due to its similarity with a word meaning "oppressor").

* For this reason, most Westerners know Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, one of the most famous Muslim leaders of the Middle Ages, as Saladin.

* T.E. Lawrence explicitly made a point of rendering Arabic names as inconsistently as possible in his writings, to emphasize that there's really no good way to do it.

* Qatar is pronounced as though it should be spelled Kuttur.

 

 

* Similar to the note below under Chinese, Japanese also famously has issues trying to render words in European languages. It actually was worse when Japan first started dealing with other countries during the Meiji Restoration; their solution at first was to simply pick kanji that would be pronounced as close to the original word as possible. For the most part, this was eventually abandoned and katakana was pressed into service for this purpose instead, although some remnants still exist - "Bei" and "Beikoku" (literally, "rice country") are still occasionally used in kanji to designate the United States (the kanji for rice, at the time, could also be pronounced "A").

* There's also the ''name of the country itself.'' Usually said "Nihon" in modern Japanese, "Nippon" is the formal spelling/pronunciation, dating back to a time when the current /h/ phoneme was realised as /p/; just to complicate matters further, when the country was first reached by Europeans, the same phoneme was /ɸ/, giving rise to "Nifon". Most linguists trace the English word for the country back to an older Chinese dialect via Malaysia.

 

== Korean ==

** Few Jews would particularly care how you spell it as long as it's recognizable.

* Jesus appears as Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs) in the Gospels (Koine Greek); this derives from either the Hebrew יהושע (Yehoshua) or Hebrew-Aramaic ישוע (Yeshua). Both mean "Yahweh/Jehovah rescues". Most languages derive his name from the Latinised form of Ἰησοῦς, which is Iesus.

* There is often confusion over Hebrew ה he, ח ḥeth and כ khaph. They were three separate consonants in the Middle Ages, but the consonants were simplified in different ways depending on the dialect of Hebrew, or when another language loaned a Hebrew word or name. He and ḥeth were usually loaned into English as /h/, and khaph as /ch/ (pronounced like /k/). In Modern Hebrew, he became /h/, but ḥeth and khaph became chet and chaf, pronounced something like the "ch" in ''loch'' or ''Bach'' and usually spelt either /ch/ or /kh/ (though the modern chet is spelt /ẖ/ in formal contexts). With these somewhat ambiguous pronunciations in English and Modern Hebrew, unless you're familiar with Hebrew spellings, it can be hard to glean which consonant was originally used. To make things more confusing, כ is also kaph (pronounced /k/), which sounds just like Modern Hebrew ק kuf, which was a separately-pronounced consonant qoph in the Middle Ages. Yeah, Hebrew is fun that way. Transliteration of Modern Hebrew spells both of these /k/, and English traditionally uses /c/ for kaph and /k/ for qoph. Though this /c/ and /k/ are pronounced the same even in English, the /k/ was conventionally used to emphasize qoph as an emphatic consonant, audibly harsher than kaph. This may be one of the earliest recorded uses of [[Xtreme Kool Letterz]]. Still, by ''separate'' tradition (loan via Greek and Latin), there are even some Hebrew names with qoph in English that are spelt with /c/, such as [[Cain and Abel|Cain]].

* Hebrew has a few transliteration conventions (possibly in the same vein as Arabic), and none are official. This is most annoying with road signs because the signs can use a different convention than, give or take, a map. And it's not obvious that one street should be another. For example, names that start with a J will have a confusingly different spelling when the convention to start with a Y is used, even though they're pronounced the same.

* In English-language figure-skating fandom, more hardcore fans will use the standardized ''German'' transliterations for Russian names, despite the fact that all the skaters use the standardized English transliterations professionally.

* The Russian translation of ''Ethan of Athos'' transliterates the names in the title (which are respectively Hebrew and Greek) from English, rather than use the standard Russian forms.

* What's more, Khrushchev's name is only ''six'' letters long in Russian—Xрущёв—and is pronounced nothing like how the English-speaking world knows it. For one, the "shch" isn't a "sh" followed by a "ch," it's a "sh" with spread lips that sounds rather like an angry cat.

* For some reason, in English, we use the ''French'' transliteration of Tchaikovsky's name. We could've use Tschaikowski, Chajkovskij, Chaykovskiy, or Chaikovsky, if we wanted (the Cyrillic is Чайкoвский). Maybe the "Tch" just looked better. The same is done with the title of the ''Lieutenant Kijé'' Suite by Prokofiev. This seems to be part of an old tradition of Russian things reaching English-speaking countries by way of France.

* Sergei/Sergey Korolev/Korolyov the rocketeer.

* The many spellings of <s>Chebychev</s> <s>Chebyshov</s> <s>Tchebycheff</s> <s>Tschebyscheff</s> <s>Tjebysjev</s> <s>Chebyshev</s> Чебышёв are a running joke in mathematical circles. Exercise: Set up a computer lab where each computer is named a different spelling of this name.

* In case anyone was wondering, rendering foreign names into Chinese is at least as difficult. Country names are all over the place, ranging from attempts to replicate the sound (''Xibanya'' for Espana/Spain or ''Jianada'' for Canada), to copying one syllable (''Yingguo'' for England; ''Guo'' meaning 'country'). People and cities typically get called something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the original name.

* Studying Chinese history is a major pain due to this - Jiang Jieshi and Chiang Kai-Shek are two spellings of the same person. For the most part, modern media uses the Pinyin romanisation (i.e. "Jiang Jieshi") because it's ''way'' more accurate to what the names sound like in present-day standard Mandarin, which simplifies things. Unfortunately, either you get some historians keeping the Wade-Giles or Cantonese (e.g. Chiang Kai-Shek) spellings out of tradition, or you have to read old history texts. ''Uh''...

 

 

== Thai ==

** Families are also fond of [[Family Theme Naming|making the English names into a set]]. Almond, Alfie and Alice are three girls; Pimnara and Pattarin are Punch and Pear.

 

 

== Mongolian ==

 

 

== Latin ==

** The C-G confusion began quite early, around the 2nd century AD. Since the Romans didn't have sound recordings they didn't know that "Caius" was originally pronounced the same as "Gaius", so parents who chose to use the old-time spelling pronounced it the way it looked, creating a new praenomen. While everyday Romans wouldn't have noticed the consonant shifts, their scholars did. This is how modern historians know about it, despite the same lack of said sound recordings.

* The English weren't helpful about this back in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thinking that names like "Marcus Tullius Cicero" and "Gnaeu--Cnaeu--(whatever) Pompeius Magnus" were too much in the way of mouthfuls, they "helpfully" reduced a number of famous names to short nicknames. Which have, in the main stuck. That's why we talk about "Pompey" instead of Pompeus Magnus, "Livy" instead of "Titus Livius," or "Vergil" (or "Virgil") instead of Publius Vergillius Maro. Cicero seems to have escaped relatively unscathed -- nobody talks of "Tully" anymore.

== Persian ==

* Algebra and Chemistry were originally Persian words (which are adapted from Arabic ''per se''). Algebra was originally "Jabr" and Chemistry was "Kimiyagarey". Ironically the latter word is re-adapted by Iranians from Latin and changed into "Shimey".

* Renowned Avicenna is actually called "Abu-Ali Sina".

* Iranians themselves have issues with spelling errors. Arabic [alphabet] lacks four commonly used letters in Persian (ch as in chimney, g as in gate, p as in purge and j as in French name Jean). Therefore names containing these letters have two different spells. One with those letters changed to similar letters and one with localized Arabic alphabet with the letters included.

* Ancient Egyptian was written without vowels, and in many cases the vowels that went with each word are unknown. Those vowels known by Egyptologists had to be painstakingly reconstructed using various linguistic methods, from ancient transliterations, cognates, Coptic, etc.

** When Egyptologists want to transliterate a word directly, they can only transliterate the consonants, leading to unpronounceable goodness like ''nb-ḫprw-rˤ twt-ˤnḫ-jmn ḥḳ3-jwnw-šmˤ''. So they make up arbitrary pronunciations for day-to-day use, i.e. turning the above into "Nebkheperure Tutankhamun Heqaiunushema" which weren't actually how his names were pronounced in ancient Egyptian. But there are many different ways to make each word pronounceable, and equally many ways to express a reconstructed ancient pronunciation, depending on the mother-tongue of the Egyptologist. Add to that the sometimes close, sometimes rather off ancient Greek and Roman pronunciations, multiple ways to transliterate those Greek names, and the occasional Coptic cognate or Babylonian transliteration, and you get a complete mess. Most Egyptian names have 5 or 10 different spellings.

*** Oh, and both Ancient Egyptian and Coptic had multiple dialects. Most of the dynastic period dialects were unofficial and therefore rarely written down, making their occasional cameos additionally confusing.

** For example, "Anubis" is the Greek name of an Egyptian god of mummification and the dead. The usual hieroglyphic spelling is transliterated, most directly, as jnpw (or ynpw). That's four consonants and, presumably, three or four unspecified vowels. The evidence is actually that the name was originally pronounced something like *Yanāpaw, and then by the 1st millennium BCE it was more like *Anup. So "Anubis" is really not that far off. It is, nonetheless, a relevant example, because when it comes to Egyptian names we are often forced to chose between one of the many semi-arbitrary Egyptological pronunciations (Anpu, Inpu, Yanupu, etc) and the Greek version (Anubis). Or the reconstructed Egyptian pronunciation (*Yanāpaw, *Anup), but no one seems to bother with that. [[Woolseyism|And the Romans called him Mercury too]].

** For another example, here's how many ways one particular deity's name has been spelled: ḳbḥsnnw.f, ḳbḥsnnwf, ḳbḥsnw.f, ḳbḥsnwf, Kabahsenuf, Kebechsenef, Kebehsenuf, Kebhesenuef, Qebehsennuf, Qebehsenuf, Qebekh-sennuf, Qebesenuef, Qebhesennuf, Qebhesenuf, Qebh-sennu-f. ''None'' of the above is a reconstruction of the actual pronunciation.

 

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