Well, for what it’s worth, the Social Security Death Index does have a record of an “Abcde B. Mora” who died in 1999.
This is the kind of response that really troubles me whenever we do these name threads. Names are arbitrary in the first place. Reacting with aggressive contempt to someone else’s name choices reflects something unpleasant, especially when you consider that these things can often be connected to arc, ethnicity, or social class.
I have a plush toy on my desk in the shape of a spotted bovine. This is Moohammed, and she’s a sacred cow.
… but “Mahmud” is a completely separate name.
I was under the impression that “Mohd” or “Moh’d” or “Mohd.” is just an abbreviation, not a name by itself.
In case others do not know
J in Spanish is pretty well silent
Or is it the Y?
Well look at Juan.
Isnt Y pronounced E?
A lot I know…I hated Spanish class. If I had know the rules of English is would have been a lot easier to understand the Spanish! :smack::smack:
H is silent in Spanish
J is /h/
Y is like Y in English in some dialects but in a lot of Latin American accents, it’s pretty much like English J.
I agree and yet I don’t. To some extent, what you name your kid is something that they will have to deal with all their life (or until they change their name to Mary). People will make assumptions about them based off their name. They are going to need to go through life spelling their name. And even John has to say “John with an h” - but Knatalye is going to spend hours over the course of her life getting her name spelled properly.
We don’t live in a world where the English Emily gets to trump the German Emilie simply because its most Americans would spell it Emily - and there is much to be said about paying homage to your cultural or ethnic roots when naming a kid. But there is also something to be said for not giving your kid a name that will be a burden. That line isn’t going to be clear, but Knatalye probably crosses it.
Normal for English J-names absorbed into Spanish and transcribed. We also have Yéremi (Jeremy, in Spanish Jeremías), Yasmín (Jasmine, in Spanish Jazmín), Yerái (Jedi)…
WildBlueYonder and Acsenray, Americans tend to turn Juan into what Hispanics would back-transcribe as gu-an or to give it an aspirated h. In our usual pronunciation it’s the /x/ phoneme as in the Scottish word Loch; “the throat-clearing sound” is a pretty good description (Hispanics who speak mainly English tend to lose that phoneme).
I’m picturing Knatalye at 40, spelling her name for the zillionth time.
"Its ‘Natalie’ but let me spell that for you. K…yes, K, I know. n…a…t…a…l…Y…e…no, no, that should be a y. Yes, that’s right. "
Her name on her cup at Starbucks is Anne - with an e - its just easier.
I can tell you that “Chaya” crosses it-- it’s a perfectly normal Jewish name, maybe if you live in the Orthodox section of Israel. But I still harbor a little bit of ill will against my parents for giving me a middle name that has a phoneme that does not exist in English. People in the US just say “Haya.” Actually, sounds more like “Hiya.” So why not just spell it that way?
At least 1) it isn’t my first name, and 2) they weren’t like the parents of a girl I knew named “Michal,” who tried to get gentiles to say her name with the glottal fricative all the time-- the freaking sound that doesn’t freaking exist in English. Every teacher that kid had got a mini-session of speech therapy from Michal’s father.
I’m also a little resentful that they named me Rivkah, not Rebecca, and my brother Joshua, not Yehoshua. My mother gave me a reason for it one. I’m kind of vague on what exactly it was, but I remember not really buying it. It had something to do with gentiles thinking of “Yehoshua” as kind of Jesus-y, IIRC.
As someone with an unusual ethnic first name myself, all I can tell you is avoid hard to pronounce names for your children. Their only advantage is they are difficult to make up nasty rhyming nicknames for.
Also, names beginning with I-L will look like a double LL as in llama in printed materials.
You’d think, but I’m a Rachel and I get Rachael, Raechel, Rachelle, Rachele, Rachal, Racheal and probably some other spellings I’ve forgotten.
My niece is Mikaylah. I’ve seen it spelled Michaela, Michala, Mikayla, Makayla, McKayla, MacKayla, Mykala and so on. I’ve never seen my niece’s particular spelling anywhere else.
And then he gets his name spelled “Jhon”. :smack:
Someone on another board thought someone else was an idiot for asking how “Tom” was spelled. I’ve seen “Thom” more than once, and I suppose there’s Tahm, Tomm, etc.
However, Marijuana Pepsi does exist.
When I was in high school ca. 1980, my area got a lot of Southeast Asian refugees, and there was one girl who asked to be called “Pepsi” because her real name was unpronounceable in English. A few years later, a Thai couple in the same city had a baby, and they named him Ronald Smith. They wanted something he didn’t have to constantly spell or explain for his whole life.
I remember seeing somebody once who spelled it “Bahb.”
I love the new acronym. Made my day. But really, this topic seems to be about just that. I could be wrong. No input to add to the conversation.
Not just in Israel. In Orthodox communities in America, names like Chaya(h) and Michal, and well, my IRL name, are common as dirt. My name still gets misspelled all the time even in our Jewish bubble, but that’s because there’s several legit ways of spelling it. (Amusingly enough, there was a kid this year at the camp I worked at who had the exact same name as me, just pronounced differently).
Outside of specifically Jewish settings, no one knows how to spell or pronounce my name, but I’m used to it by this point.
At my (Jewish) elementary school, I have memories of my gentile teacher telling us to go to the mincha prayer. Except that she would say it as “minka”. So we started calling it “minka” sometimes- not in a mean way, just the way you would imitate a friend’s speech patterns.
True story - my parents were going to call my sister “Michal”, a very common Israeli name, until they heard my (American) grandmothers try to pronounce it. They went with “Talia” instead. English-speakers seem to have no problem with that one.
Incidentally, my own name is Yehoshua/Joshua. I write “Joshua” in English and “יהושע” in Hebrew. A name is a word, and words are different in different languages.
I once knew a woman whose name was spelled Janine and pronounced juh-NEEN, which is the way I would think it was pronounced. But a lot of people didn’t. She was an artist and she took to signing her works “J9” after the way a lot of people initially pronounced it, and then she took to signing her name that way and saying, “it’s pronounced juh-NEEN.”
I’m not a huge fan of highly original name spellings. I understand your child is a special snowflake. But why give an unusual name then get mad if it is mispronounced? This seems to happen with people named Siobhan, for example (which is not an unusual spelling, I realize).
Latinos sometimes like American sounding names such as Jhonny, but I was never sure how intentional this was.
I am glad not too many people are named Qaddafi.