I don’t change the spelling of my name, but when I’m in a group of francophones I sometimes use the French verison of my name - it just helps keep the rythm of the conversation going.
It depends where I am. My surname has an “e” in an unexpected place which confuses foreigners, so I generally translate. I’m rather pleased with the fact that my name in Russian is Aleksandr Ivanovich Kolmanov.
I was to have been named “Rose,” but since my father was at the time of my birth engaging in the Normandy invasion, I got a French name, Renee. i have no problem with Renee in European and Latin American countries. My Hebrew name (Shoshana) and my Yiddish name (Reyzl) are closer to the original meaning of Rose and I use them in appropriate contexts.
I learned during a short stay in Turkey that my surname Kaplan sounds like the Turkish word for “tiger.” I liked that.
Kyla I wanted to name my first-born daughter after my grandmother, whose name was pronounced like yours, but spelled “Kajla” on her Polish passport. I had resistance from my husband and chose to name her “Carla” sort of as a left-field homonym. Her Yiddish name is, however, your name.
Why not call yourself T’chiyah, “rebirth”? (Sorry, my Hebrew’s not good enough to figure out the adjectival form meaning “reborn.”)
Ahem…
<-------------]=[–>John
i have spanish-speaking relatives and its kinda stuck that they pronounce my name “yay-sohn” instead of “jason”. if they were to say my name in spanish, it would sound like “ha-sohn” which ticks me off.
My name is Jonathan but almost everyone I know calls me Juan in the US because I’m always talking spanish and its the closest to a translation most people know. The only time I ever hear my name untranslated is when I’m in a spanish speaking country.
Talk about coincidences. Does anyone know what the rules are for converting Chinese names (written in Chinese characters) into Roman characters and how these rules arose. The reason I ask is that the conversions seem to be without regard for how an English-speaking person woould pronounce them. Some examples: my friend who pronounces her name “ee-pie” spells it Yih-pai. Another friend who pronounces his last name “Wong” spells it “Wang”. The name pronounces “Shao” is sometimes spelled “Xiao” other times spelled “Hsiao.”
I realize that some of this may represent an effort to represent sounds not present in English. But why not choose spellings which are close to the sounds?
As much as possible, they have tried to choose spellings that are close to the real sounds. (To object to “Wong” being spelled “Wang” when it’s not pronounced like the “Wang” in “Wang Dang Doodle,” when most of the rest of the world pronounces the letter A as “ah,” is frankly rather provincial.) The trouble is that, a lot of the time, the real sounds are so far-out.
There are two leading systems of Mandarin Chinese transliteration, Wade-Giles (old) and pinyin (new). (Cantonese words and names are spelled using other systems.) The Wade-Giles system was an overt attempt at phonetic faithfulness, but of course certain accommodations had to be made, such as the hs in hsiao (“small”), the j in jen (“person”) and the e in jen and he (“what”). (He might also be spelled ho. The vowel is pronounced like “uh,” but way in the back of your throat.) It’s easy to get confused with Wade-Giles, mainly because of the apostrophes (the sounds in kou “mouth” and k’ou “dog” are distinctly different) and the use of the same letters to represent completely different sounds (the retroflex ch in ch’ih “eat” vs. the palatal ch in ch’i “air”). Also, as time went on, people began to object that the Wade-Giles letter combinations – intended to communicate that its spellings were merely approximations – had the effect of making Chinese look more inscrutably foreign and basically scared people off.
Pinyin was an attempt to make the differences between distinct sounds more obvious, at the expense of some obviousness of pronunciation. So “mouth” and “dog” become gou and kou, and “eat” and “air” become chi and qi. Because pinyin uses j for something closer to an English j (as opposed to Wade-Giles’ j, which was closer to “zh”), the letter r was brought in as a substitution, so “person” is now ren. That leaves x, c and z, which are pronounced as a palatal “sh” (that’s the “hs” under Wade-Giles"), “ts” and “dz.” The latter two usages make more sense when you consider how those letters are pronounced in Polish and German.
Aside from those, there’s also the Yale system, which borrows from both, but it’s used mainly in academic circles. Its main virtues are that it looks less archaic than Wade-Giles but makes pronunciation more intuitive than pinyin.
That, in a nutshell, is how the same guy’s name can be spelled Mao Tse-tung, Mao Zedong and Mau Dzedung. (He’s still luckier than Qaddafi/Khadafy/Ghadafi.)
The word you are looking for is ‘homophone’.
Another cool category of homos are the homographs.
An example is the word minute and the other word minute. Both are spelled the same, but are pronounced differently, and have different meanings. I just love seing signs that read ‘minute car wash’, and read ‘my-newt’, implying that you wash very tiny cars there.
The longest homograph in English is ‘unionization’. If you are at a loss as to what the other pronunciation and meaning is, think chemistry (ionization).
I thought that was always the problem with Wade-Giles. I’ve been told, perhaps erroneously, that the creators of the Wade-Giles system (I believe they might have been “Wade” or “Giles”) were German. Considering the pronunciation differences between German and English, it’s no wonder that the Wade-Giles system was imperfect for English speakers.
Speaking of courtesy towards peoples of other countries, why do we use the English equivalents other countries’ names when we speak of them? After all, there is no country called “Germany” - there is a country called “Deutschland.” That’s what the residents call it, and I think they oughta know. IMHO, this is particularly condescending when it’s really just a difference in pronunciation (think “Mexico”)
Well, since my name is Jodi, I’ve never had the luxury of choosing to translate my name into the native language of the countries I’ve visited since, to my knowledge, none of them (Europe and Mexico) have an equivalent to “Jodi.” I mean, I could reason that “Jodi” is likely derived from “Joan” and that “Joan” translates in Spanish as “Juana,” but I never saw the point – my name is not Joan, it’s Jodi. This left me (in Spain and Mexico) with the choice of being called “Cho-dee” or “Ho-dee.” I chose Cho-dee. I never really liked it, but most native Spanish speakers just can’t pronounce the American/English “J,” and I realized they were doing their best to pronounce my name correctly. I’m sure I butchered some of their names as well, since my Spanish isn’t especially strong.
Actually, Santiago is the accepted translation of Jacques into Spanis. It has most famous connotation is the Chemin de St. Jacques one of the most important Middle Age pilgrimages. In Spanish it is called El Camino de Santiago, as the City where the Apostol Santiago (Jacques, James) is buried is Santiago de Compostella (Spain).
For more info see http://www.xacobeo.es/
Spanish is what I meant.
depocali, if I go to the site to which you provided a link, I see the following:
O Camiño de Santiago
El Camino de Santiago
The way of St. James
Le Chemin de St. Jacques
etc…
From the above translations, my guess would be that “Santiago” means “St. James”, not just “James”.