What's in a Name?

[dawn_felagund]

Random note:

Okay, as of five minutes ago, we are going to Bermuda! In March! Bobby and I needed to go somewhere to finish our open water dives for our scuba certifications, and we had promised my sister-in-law Erin to pay for part of a trip someplace cool with us for her 21st birthday. We'd originally considered going back to Puerto Rico, but in

Comments

[oloriel]

Oh my! Now I hope I pronounce your name correctly ;) I suspect I do, because I'm uncreative and just pronounce the vowels the way they'd likely be pronounced in other words with a similar sound pattern, but then, with English, you never know ;)

I don't have a middle initial - my parents decided that it was such a hassle for a child to have a long time as, much later, the kid would have to sign on their driving license with their full name (i.e. first name, second names, last name) and, accordingly, on all other traffic-related documents. Instead, they gave me a 10-letter first name, so if they had named me, say, Anna Lena or Eva Maria or some other fairly common German combination, I'd actually have had to write less.
[By now they abolished the "absolutely full name" rule anyway. And my mother has three first names - Ursula Hedwig Elsa, after her dad's nickname for her mom, her paternal grandmother and her maternal grandmother - AND belatedly hyphenated her name when Germany allowed people to have "husband's last name - birth last name" as well instead of only the other way round.]

And people manage to get my name wrong. They read it as Christine or Christina and get that notion firmly stuck in their head. I was Christine in classes with teachers who had taught me since 5th grade and still called me Christine in 9th grade. I wasn't alone in that problem - a girl called Franziska was called Constanze by our Latin teacher all the time because she was sitting on the same chair that, with another class, was occupied by a Constanze, and there was a memorable occasion, when an English teacher called a girl called Mira Miriam for the umpteenth time, she snapped "MIRA!", he replied, "Ja, yes, who cares". She henceforth called him "Mr Schmidt" (his name was Olberts) - but having company in misery doesn't always help...

As for my last name - one should assume that it's fairly easy. Sure, there's an Umlaut in it, but I'm living in Germany, people know Umlauts here. (When people in Canada or the US mispronounce my last name, I kind of understand.) But here? There is a German verb, können; it means "to be able to", and if you change just one consonant, you have my last name. It rhymes with that verb (but you can't use that to give people a hint, or they'll think you're boasting. Really true!), so it shouldn't be hard to write nor to pronounce, certainly not in this country.
People get it wrong all the time. They make the Umlaut looooong, make the first "n" into an "h" or both the "n"s into "m"s, and so on and so on.
I wish my father had taken my mother's last name instead of keeping his own; probably everybody would get it wrong as well (they did when my grandmother was in hospital), but at least it's a cool name. It means "scribe" in Latin. And then, I have a friend whose last name is Tollkühn (originally a German adjective translated as "temerarious"). She's already said that if she ever marries, the husband has to take on her name, because she won't let go of it. Nothing beats a name of which the anglicized form is Tolkien and the Hungarian, amusingly enough, is Tulkas. Even if people manage to misspell it frequently (the adjective is growing a bit obsolete, whereas everybody knows how to spell the author)...

[dawn_felagund]

You know, I don't mind too much when people simply say it wrong, particularly my husband's half, which is an odd name in the US. But when they decide to simply drop half of the name because they don't understand or don't like hyphenated names, that is really rude to me. Also, I don't really understand how people can get my half wrong, but when I was a kid and it was my full last name, people did, all of the time. You've seen my name, so you know that it's a common noun in the English language! It's kind of like your predicament, in having your name so close to können: It's a common enough word that you'd think native speakers would have no problem with it. Not the case.

Even then--even if I get called "Dawn Balls," which I did once--I can forgive it...but not when people choose not to see half the name. Don't they wonder what that part is, attached to the second bit with a hyphen? (And come on, even in the US, hyphenating is common among professional women! There is an agent I have to email on occasion with a hyphenated name, and I cc her supervisor with a hyphenated name, and nicely sign the email with my hyphenated name!)

Luckily, we have few naming rules here in the good ol' US of A. Which results in unfortunate names for children, at times, but even when Bobby and I got married, we were basically given a free pass to change our last names to whatever we chose.