There are some cultures where it’s very common for people to have very long surnames. People unfamiliar with those cultures often have a hard time pronouncing those names. Not so much that they get the pronunciation wrong (which might happen even with short names) but from reading and/or remembering all the syllables of such long names.
But I’m wondering about people who are themselves from those cultures. Do even they have more trouble with the long names than people in other cultures do with the short ones?
I imagine common long names would certainly be easier than uncommon ones. Also, names which mean something would be much easier than names which don’t. These two factors would/could make it much easier for “locals”, who would be more familiar with the names and would also recognize the meaning, if any, in their language.
An associate of mine just married and changed from a common, 6-letter Anglo surname to a 12-letter Greek surname she’ll be painstakingly spelling out loud for people the rest of her life. (Or at least as long as she stays married to the guy.) She says their invite list “looked like something Monty Python might have come up with,” but her fiance just shrugged and said, “We’re Greek. Get used to it.”
I don’t know… I have a friend with one of those long Greek names- five or six syllables depending on how clearly you enunciate. And it’s not tough to remember or say, honestly.
I think what trips people up about foreign names is when the syllables or dipthongs or whatever, are not in the “common” relationships. I mean, I’m a native American English speaker, and don’t find most European names to be tough to pronounce, regardless of name.
But I sometimes stumble over non-European names, and it’s usually because the sounds aren’t in the usual combinations- it’s almost like my tongue is out of position for the next syllable.
There was a Finnish curler named Markku Uusipaavalniemi. I don’t know what, if anything, the name meant, but he mentioned in an interview that even Finns called him M 15 (number of letters). Curiously, he had a brother, also a curler, whose first name was Uusi.
Many Thai names are like this. And no, Thais have no problem with them. You pick it up easily after a while living there too.
The long Thai surnames you see are actually an indication of Chinese descent. You see them a lot in business, as when Chinese started emigrating to Thailand in the 19th century they tended to congregate in cities and engage in business rather than try to farm. Chinese-Thais are the really high-powered businessmen in the country, owning and/or controlling all the major banks and conglomerates. Back in the 1930s, one Thai statesman notoriously called them the “Jews of Thailand” and ominously pointed at Germany as an example of what should be done with them.
Ethnic Thai surnames are actually very short, no more than two or three syllables such as the Thai politician Surin Pitsuwan. My Thai wife’s maiden name is very long, as her family hails from China. Her parents could not even speak Thai very well, and her mother was never a citizen.
What @Siam_Sam says about some Thai names being very long is true for Javanese and some other Indonesian names as well. At first I stumbled over names like Notowidigdo and Sisingamangaraja but after a while it gets much easier.
In Honolulu, Hawaii in the 1970’s or so, there were two nightclub singers named Boyce Kaihiihikapuokalani and Nina Kealiiwahamanu.
Both surnames, of course, were just contrived stage names, designed to impress the haole malihinis.
However, there really was a world-renowned surfer named Duke Kahanamoku. According to Wikipedia, his full name was Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku.
Native Americans often have native names, but are now known by their English translations of those names. These are often longish names, often entire multi-word phrases that may be written with or without spaces separating the words.
There were several people named Everybodytalksabout who were in the news for some unsavory reasons (trouble with the law). We even had some threads here remarking on the name.
The people in Thailand must find that a difficult name.
Yes, but that’s the way it is in Thailand. In fact, when the wife was born in Bangkok, the youngest of several siblings, her parents were still using their simple two-syllable Chinese surname. When she was about three months old, they changed the family surname to its current multisyllable version. It is very long. This all had to be documented for US Immigration when the wife was applying for her citizenship here. Lots of ethnic Chinese found it advantageous to adopt Thai surnames, but why they’re so long I’m not sure.
Btw, Southeast Asian names like Sisingamangaraja are influenced more by South Asian languages than East Asian ones. Many South Asian and Southeast Asian names are heavily Sanskritized, as with the south Indian surname Venkatasubramanian that Procrustus mentioned. (One of the advantages of studying Sanskrit is that correctly pronouncing most Indian and Southeast Asian long names at first glance becomes a piece of cake.)
Finally, as bump noted, the question of whether a long name is “difficult” to pronounce depends largely on whether it’s culturally and linguistically familiar or not. Hari_Seldon’s example of the 15-letter surname “Uusipaavalniemi” looks impenetrably unpronounceable to most English speakers, but few of us have a problem with the name “Schwarzenegger”, which is only one letter shorter.
Just to add, the wife’s parents changed only their children’s surnames. The couple kept their Chinese surname for themselves. I knew my wife’s parents had a different surname from all the kids, but until we started the Immigration process for her, I had no idea she and her siblings had all been born with the Chinese surname.
Guy on mrAru’s first boat was generally called T13 [something like but not Tegreutenhaus] Not Dutch based, but Finn, but I don’t know enough Finnish names to be able to fake one, I do know enough Dutch and Germans to sort of swot up a fake name. I do remember there were a couple of double vowels in it.
Paavalniemi is a place in Northern Finland. Uuspaavalniemi means “New Paavalniemi”. Many Finnish surnames come from the places the families originated in. Uuspaavalniemi is a longish surname, but easy to say, and to remember.
That Icelandic volcano that shut down air traffic across Europe in 2010 was called Eyjafjallajökull. No one outside Iceland seemed to be able to pronounce it, but it didn’t faze any Icelanders.