Friday 29 June 2018

Names came up yesterday

as I had to explain how to spell my name, an acquaintance asked me how I liked the name the New Zealand PM has given her baby daughter, and the fact that "Peta" is not "Peter". 
The New Zealand PM has spelt "Niamh" the way it is pronounced "Neve". My view? It is something I wouldn't do.  If I wanted to call a child of mine "Niamh" then I would spell it that way and then spend the time telling people how to pronounce it.
There is someone I know whose name is "Aine" (Awnya) but people who don't recognise the name call her "Ane" or "Ayn". It's understandable but it is a source of frustration for her.
There is a child I know called "Sadhbh". It's another Irish name. Her grandmother was startled when I knew the name and how to pronounce it. ("Sarv" would be a close approximation - I am not into the business of trying to write things phonetically.) I notice that recently the child has been spelling her name "Sivey" which is what she is often called. 
And there is one of the male staff in the post office. His name is "Jorge" and it is pronounced "Hor-gay" but people called him "George" because that is what it looks like to them.
The odd thing with all of this is that we have an increasing number of "foreign" names in our increasingly "multi-cultural-go-back-to-your-roots" society.  People are being encouraged to find something "interesting" or "different" or "culturally appropriate". I know children who hate their names and insist on being called something else entirely. There are others whose parents called them something which was popular at the time and now they find that they share their name with more than one other person in the classroom. As one boy told me recently, "The teacher yells "Harrison" and it could be me or two of the others." He now refers to himself as "Harry". I can hardly blame him.
Even apparently simple names have their problems. I have a friend called "Ann" and another called "Anne". One has to say "Ann without an "e" " and the other has to say "Anne with an "e" ".
Ms W has an unusual name in that it is a combination of her father's name and her late mother's name. She tells me she rather likes it but it does cause problems. Her father says it seemed like a good idea but "it probably wasn't very sensible". New babies can do that to people.  
And I know two children called "Meg" and "Mog" simply because their mother "liked the books".
Is it any wonder that some people call themselves something entirely different?

2 comments:

jeanfromcornwall said...

You made me chuckle - we parents can be guilty of a lot of things!
Years ago, our local midwife (Irish) told of a sweet young mum who had called her new daughter Siobhan, and wanted to know how to say it.

catdownunder said...

And parents who spell a name the way they think it sounds - causes endless problems for the child!