• 🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Never knew anyone with a weird spelling but I knew a dude who had the unfortunate name of Harry Butt. Already bad enough your family name is “Butt” but his parents did him hella dirty naming him Harry.

    Was always funny getting a sub thinking he was just fucking with them tho.

  • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
    28·
    4 days ago

    I would like to provide a counterexample. There are plenty of these people in the US intermountain west, but there are at least some cases where there is no one at fault. Next time you see one of these names without context (though we clearly have the context in this case), before judging, consider Nariaw:

    I am a teacher, and one year I found that my roster included a student named “Nariaw”. As a public school, we register your student based on what’s on the birth certificate. I ask all of my students to pronounce their names for me when I first meet them, for the reason we see in so many of the replies here and with shit like “abcde”. However, when this girl came to my class, she said her name was pronounced “Miriam”. I spent a good twenty seconds looking at my roster, and had to ask her to spell it for me. I didn’t ask any rude and impertinent questions at that point, so it wasn’t until a few months later that I got the full story:

    Her mother, an immigrant from Ethiopia, was still unfamiliar with Latin script when her daughter was born here in the US. So when she attempted to write out the name, which she wanted to transliterate as “Mariam”, she ended up writing only half of the first M, and wrote the second one upside-down. Whoever did the data entry for the government records dutifully recorded the child’s name as “Nariaw”. Was the mother at fault for being expected to write a name which, while she knew how to represent it in Amharic, she was forced to write in a language in which she was illiterate?

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
      9·
      4 days ago

      Wow. Yeah, definitely good to be gracious in that situation!

      Another is, some cultures, not too far from home - like Irish and Welsh - have names written in ways that look Traighdiegh to English, but are the correct/traditional way to spell it for that culture.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
      8·
      4 days ago

      That’s super frustrating. The hospital should have easily been able to get someone who had at least a basic grasp of a common language to help ensure they understood the forms and got them filled out correctly.

      The fault is 100% with the hospital.

      • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
        82·
        4 days ago

        I would argue that at least 15% of the blame lies with the racist expectation in the US that all names need be anglicized, when we have fucking Unicode. If someone whose second language is English can be expected to be able to pronounce “Rayleigh Monaghan McTavish”, then the least that the anglophone people of the US could do is learn to pronounce things in a few other common languages. There is, quite simply, no excuse for the government of the united States, in which there is no official language (even though a traitor, invalidated by the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment, had some fuckwit draft a document trying to declare it without congressional approval), to mandate the use of a single language.

    • Tonava@sopuli.xyz
      61·
      3 days ago

      The downside is, neither can any adult. I think the first name limitations should only apply to kids; legal adults should be able to change their names to whatever they want, no matter how stupid it is. It could only hurt themselves after all

  • adhocfungus@midwest.social
    49·
    5 days ago

    There’s a girl in my kid’s class named Eighmee. Pronounced “Amy”. I thought it was weird but there’s a street in a neighboring town named Eighmee Street.

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    83·
    5 days ago

    “Breighdone” (Brayden) is probably the most egregious one I haven’t brain-bleached yet.

    My friend works in the billing department of a local hospital, and she will occasionally text me some crazy spellings she comes across.

    • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
      31·
      4 days ago

      yeah that’s literally a HIPAA violation lol

      esp if the spelling is that unique, it’s definitely identifying info

      • rhombus@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        3 days ago

        It probably would get her in some hot water, but a first name alone is a gray area. It becomes a definite violation if it’s combined with health information, even as simple “a baby was born here with the name X”. If she just says “I saw a name spelled X” then it may not be a violation of the law, but the hospital would probably still can her for it.

  • jaschen@lemm.ee
    252·
    4 days ago

    I named my son Jaxin because my wife wanted Jax and I didn’t want my son to have a dog’s name.

    I regret not just naming him Jackson because nobody in Taiwan knows how to pronounce Jaxin.

  • SnarkoPolo@lemm.ee
    8·
    4 days ago

    I was at a medical appointment, and the (very cute) nurse was named “Kaelea” pronounced Kaylee.