My own name is a deliberate misspelling, though I did it myself and it’s not my “legal” name anyway. Inspired by Rik Emmett of the band Triumph, I excised the letter “c” from “Rick” in 1983. It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that the “Rik” spelling was a misprint on Triumph’s first album and Mr. Emmett decided to just go with it.
Are "mispelled" names in X on purpose or due to poor education? And if the latter why no correction?
**Simple Linctus **as British cultural ambassador… is that from the Les Patterson school of diplomacy?
No. Les Nessman.
If differently spelled names and pronounced names are easily explained due to poor education, we have a lot of explaining to do for John, Johnny, Jon, Jan, Honza, Johannes, Ivan, Jean, Jonas, Juan, Giovanni, Sean, Ian…
I know a girl named Caitlin (I’m not sure how she spells it), pronounced Cotch-leen, who says that’s the traditional pronunciation.
Holy shit! According to that site my first name only came into existence in the late 1800’s and went extinct about 10 years ago. It reached a peak of 537 per million about the time I got it.
There’s another ‘mishearing’ of that phoneme that I’d forgotten. And yeah, it’s close enough to the original phoneme that I can see a native English speaker who doesn’t know any language that uses it hearing it (and thus pronouncing it) that way.
It’s a palatalized /t/, pronounced with the front of the tongue lifted toward the palate. This makes a t+y sound (like in the RP pronunciation of “tune”) that is close to the palatal affricate [tʃ] (i.e., “ch”), so it’s understandable if Americans confuse the two sounds. In American English, we lack the distinction between them.
How do you know to pronounce the t that way? The unpronounced letter i before the t lets you know in advance that it’s palatalized. The l and n are also palatalized because they’re adjacent to the long í vowel. (Yes, you do have to include the accent on the second i in Caitlín, or it isn’t proper Irish. Yes, Americans, that means you. You want to have an Irish name? You know the saying “Love me, love my dog”? It’s like that: “Love my Irish language, love my acute accents.” They aren’t optional. If you willfully ignore details like that, you desecrate the very language you claim to love.) If you want to speak Irish, you have to learn to palatalize smoothly. Hey, nobody promised it would be easy. My Catholic Ulster ancestors can tell you that it isn’t easy being Irish! But, fortunately, the madness that is Irish spelling does have method in’t and it can be learned systematically.
So the actual, accurate pronunciation of Caitlín is [kat[sup]j[/sup]l[sup]j[/sup]iːn[sup]j[/sup]] in IPA, in other words “cot-y’-LYEEN-y’.” But say it with the y sounds all smoothed into the other consonants so it doesn’t sound lumpy and has only 2 syllables. For excruciating precision, say the /k/ with the back of the tongue raised, to form a strong contrast with the palatalized consonants. You know the /k/ is like that because the only vowel next to it is /a/. In Irish, the letters e and i trigger palatalization of adjacent consonants, while the letters a, o, u signal the lack of it.