FinnAgain, can you address Alessan’s post #18? are you saying it is not idiotic to say, spell xash’s name as Axesash?
on preview: nevermind. Tracy Lord 1 - FinnAgain 0 __ 
[obligatory]No, no, no - it’s spelt Raymond Luxury Yach-t, but it’s pronounced ‘Throatwobbler Mangrove’.[/obligatory]
Throw another wrench into the thread; pkbites started a thread in here a while back complaining that people kept pronouncing his German surname (Bietz, I believe), “beets”, instead of his preferred “bites”. In a German pronunciation context, they are quite right, but it’s his name. Whaddayareckon?
Ah well, I’m awake and the SDMB doesn’t seem to be hoppin’, so I’ll post a bit more.
Address insulting strawmen about bilingual people having less rights, etc…?
Nope, isn’t worth my attention or time.
(Especially since my name comes from Hebrew, too)
By ‘call him’ I assume you mean ‘spell his name?’
First scenario, his name is in Kanji, thus you’d have to spell the Kanji wrong in order to get his name wrong. He could very well say “That’s not the way I spell my name in English.” and in that case he’d be right. But the way he transliterated his name would be no more ‘correct’ than any other way, it would simply be the way he chose to do it.
In other words, it matters whether we are talking about the way a person transliterates their name versus the ‘correct’ transliteration. You can transliterate the Kanji as “Sahcamotoh.” and you would be equally right.
Would it be rude to spell someone’s transliterated name differently than they did? Quite possibly. Would it be incorrect to transliterate the root word alternatively? No.
Second scenario, his name is in English. Thus, if you write it any other way (in English) you are incorrect. If, however, you transliterate his name from English to, say, Russian, there would be several valid transliterations.
Or,as I’ve said
…whereas a good chunk of my family actually has the last name Léger, which is French and pronounced lay-zhay/lay-jay (something that approximates between the two). NOW I know where all the incorrect pronunciations come from…
Let me just point out that
Only on the Straight Dope would we get involved into such an argument! He wouldn’t care, I hope, he 'd be more worried that you were practicing ahimsa (non-violence).
Also, Hindi itself is written purely phonetically. It’s not even remotely like English, in that there are distinct spellings for everything, often which don’t have anything to do with the pronunciation. So I think it’s Ok to spell it either way.
There once was a man named Gandhi,
Who one day was feeling quite randhy;
So he found him a cookhy
Who gave him some nookhy,
And exclaimed, “Why, that was just dandhy!”
Thank you, I’ll be in town all week.
“gh” is translation for a specific letter/character in the Sanskrit-based languages, though. This letter/character/sound is not the sound in the first syllable of Gandhi’s name. “gh” is a hard sound that is pronounced a little bit like “ghk” as in AnaGHa (very forceful). The “g” in Gandhi is soft and is translation for the character that comes before “gh” (guh,=g and ghu=gh). I think on the Aldebaran thread someone spelled it “Gandi” which is pretty much the same issue. “Duh” is the first character and “Dhu” is the second character and the much harder sound. Therefore, yes, Gandhi is the correct translation, not Ghandi or Gandi. And incidentally, Ghan means “smells like crap” in at least Marathi and Konkani-not sure about Guju which is where he was from.
It would be like saying my name can be spelled either Anagha or Anaga because there’s no “appropriate” translation. The second one is completely wrong-it’s not a soft “g” it’s the hard “gh” character in Sanskrit. Similarly, spelling Gandhi with an “h” after the G makes it a completely different sound because it refers to a completely different character. Ultimately this would be easier if I had a keyboard that typed devnagiri
Since we’re fighting over something so stupid as how to spell a name (and I am in agreement with the OP, however the person who actually has the name chooses to translate it is by definition correct, since it’s their name), I figured I’d address a popular myth:
Indira and Rajiv Gandhi are related, but not to the Mahatma.
Yes, FinnAgain, the transliterating systems are arbitrary. However arbitrary they may be, they’re pretty well established. This is useful because anybody with the slightest familiarilit with Hindi transcription knows the difference between a “g” and “gh” sound as well as the “d” and “dh” sound. The “gh” and “dh” are both aspirated while the plain “g” and “d” are not. Hence the “h.” It’s the closest approximation in English to the aspiration many consonants in Hindi get.
Therefore, in terms of accuracy “Gandi” or “Ghandi” is not as accurate a transliteration as “Gandhi,” which indicates the aspirated “d”. If you ever hear someone speak Hindi, you will clearly understand why “dh” is used to represent this sound. It’s not quite as arbitrary as you may think.
I don’t get all this “transliterative” stuff.
My name is “Brown”. In English, that’s “Brown”. If you spell it “Browyn”, you get ripped a new asshole. However, if I spell it as “Browyn”, then you’d better damn well spell it as “Browyn”, however dumb you think that looks. As it is, I have an unusual spelling of my English name, and always have to correct people trying to spell it and failing.
My name is “JianQiang” (in Chinese characters). In English letters, I spell it as “JianQiang”. I take that as my given name, and it appears in all my identity documents in that exact formation, in English characters. If you spell it “Ji anne Chiang”, you can be pretty sure I’ll correct it. If you spell it that way on a legal document, you can be damn sure I’m going to correct it, and rip you a new one for making up your own spelling when there’s a perfectly normal and commonly used transliteration, that I myself have adopted and used on my own identification documents.
I wouldn’t call people that spelt it wrongly “idiots”, though, it seems a bit harsh, especially when it’s not a native language of the other party. If you consistently spell it wrongly as according to me, after repeated reminders on how it’s supposed to be spelt, then at the very least you are being offensive.
Persist, and I may call you an idiot. For sure, to all the bilingual speakers of Chinese and English, that transliteration sure looks annoying.
FinnAgain, is “Howthe” your new and unauthorized transliteration of “Howth”?
And re. the OP, somebody had to say it:
It’s “Traci Lords,” not “Tracy Lord.”
So it was, thanks for pointing that out. I’m a bad speller to begin with… attempting to write bits of the Wake from memory is tricky! Correction accomplished.
Finn, you are fighting a losing battle here. Quite simply, while your premise, that any transliteration system is arbitrary and not mandatory, is valid, the point is that it is a system. The first consonant in “Ghandi” would represent either a voiced guttural fricative (think “Hannukah” or “ach du lieber” and then voice the first consonantal sound, so that it comes out more like a “g” instead of a “k”) or an aspirated “g” sound; the last would come out an unaspirated “d” sound, much like Gandhi is pronounced in American English. (I usually hear it rhyming with “Don D.”, with some people sounding it to rhyme with “Randy.”) Instead, the initial sound is a soft unaspirated stop like the G in “gone” and the final sound is, I believe, an aspirated d, so that the word rhymes with “blonde he” – the alternative would be the /dh/ sound of “then and there.”
In short, while your premise is correct in generalized terms, what you end up with is a “ghoti” (you know the silly explanation that that is how to spell “fish,” I’m sure). Gujurati and several other Indic languages distinguish between aspirated and unaspirated stops and the related fricatives, and all Roman-alpahbet translations use “h” to make that distinction – you will occasionally see “-dhh-” in words to show the aspirated dental fricative.
And in any case, how someone fluent in a language spells his name is the proper way to spell that name in that language. My surname is “Wilbur” – while “Wilber” is the more common spelling of that surname, it is the wrong way to spell my name. When I started studying Russian, I created a Cyrillic spelling that does not match the English translation but suits me as how my name is spelled in Russian: “BbI^b6yp” is the closest I can come in Roman script: Veh - bI - el - soft particle - beh - oo -er, written out in Romanized transliterations of the letters. Attempting to render it more phonetically, with a Y- starting it, as some people trying to write it in Russian have done, is wrong – that’s not how I spell it, and my choice is what counts.
I will grant that your principle is valid – contemplate how many ways those two Siamese resort islands hit by the recent tsunami have been rendered. Until and unless the Thai government determines that the proper Roman-script rendering of them is Phuket and Phi-phi (or whatever), nobody is wrong. And I grew up knowing that West Uzbekistan was Karakalpakistan – the new version with the three Q’s is deformed in my eyes. But if a graduate of a British university certified to practice law in three countries (which Gandhi was) elects to use a spelling that conforms to a standard transliteration scheme, then that and no other way is the proper way to spell his name. If “Erh-ungh Li” and “Irrung Lee” are both accurate ways to render the name of a non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese man who does not sread and write any Roman-alphabet language and has not indicated his Pinyin preference, then you get the choice of which way you prefer. But when someone has made his preference regarding his name known, that’s mandatory for others to use. And when he has not, one should consistently use one’s preferred system of transliteration – if one represents 6Q in another language’s script by “bhk” in Roman script in one context, one should continue to do so in other contexts, barring unique circumstances (e.g., Tchaikovsky’s name consistently begins with a T in English, by longstanding usage, despite the fact that the 4 is normally transliterated “ch” in other contexts, as in Chekhov).
Who the fuck really cares whether it’s spelled Ghandi or Gahndi?
Marc
Look, people, if Gandhi spelt it Gandhi, we should spell it Gandhi, right? Right.
Now, where’d that leftover holiday spirit go?
Not a strawman, just some extrapolation with a dash of hyperbole. Chalk it up to my aversion to smilies. I *certainly[/] don’t believe you’re any sort of bigot, and I apologize if I insulted you. No offence meant - and I hope no offence taken.
Anyway, other people have more or less covered whatever else I meant to add to this thread, so as they say around here, yalla bye.
Naw, no offense was taken.
Thanks for apologizing, that’s always a sign of a decent fellow (or gal).