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HelpWell,
in reply to a message by kmexico
I think that in many cases it isn't a person's fault if they "Americanize" a name - they are just speaking in their natural accent. Isn't it just as rude to demand that a person shrug off a lifetime of natural speech and try to say a name in another language as perfectly as a native speaker does? Sometimes you just CANNOT do it.
My friend Akiko from Japan could not make the "th" sound to save her life, nor the hard "r", so should I have freaked out at her for saying things "incorrectly? No. She just can't do it. Same with us saying her name - in Japan, there's not stress on any particular syllable, so us saying "a-KEE-ko" was incorrect, but trying to force ourselves to interject a tonally flat "akeko" in our conversations with her would have been very difficult, and probably STILL incorrect anyways.
I do try to say foreign names as correctly as I can. I certainly don't say "my god, what an awful name! How un-Canadian it is! I will give you this other name instead, that's better".
And I think being assigned a name from the other culture in a class is actually to teach people how to pronounce the names of that culture correctly, ironically for your arguments.
My friend Akiko from Japan could not make the "th" sound to save her life, nor the hard "r", so should I have freaked out at her for saying things "incorrectly? No. She just can't do it. Same with us saying her name - in Japan, there's not stress on any particular syllable, so us saying "a-KEE-ko" was incorrect, but trying to force ourselves to interject a tonally flat "akeko" in our conversations with her would have been very difficult, and probably STILL incorrect anyways.
I do try to say foreign names as correctly as I can. I certainly don't say "my god, what an awful name! How un-Canadian it is! I will give you this other name instead, that's better".
And I think being assigned a name from the other culture in a class is actually to teach people how to pronounce the names of that culture correctly, ironically for your arguments.
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