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My name

2006/12/07 23:31

I grew up with my name, Thomas, being pronounced /’tʌmæs/ by people speaking Danish and /’to:mas/ by those speaking German. These two pronunciations are so different that I accepted it as a fact of life that names vary with the language you’re speaking. When we started going to Italy every year, I therefore found it completely natural to be told that my name in Italian was Tommaso /tom’maso/. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed adapting my name to whatever language I was speaking (Tomás /to’mas/ in Spanish, Фома /fa’ma/ in Russian, თამაზი /tamazi/ in Georgian, Tómas /’tho:məs/ [vocative a Thómais /ə'ho:mɪʃ/] in Gaelic, and so on).

In most places, people have accepted this happily, but in Russia, people often seemed to think it was wrong of me to translate my name. In Georgia, I also often had problems, but that was partly because I picked a frequent name that technically is not the translation of Thomas (which is rare).

I’ve therefore found it a bit odd that many people in this country seem to think it’s wrong to translate names, and they will attempt to pronounce my surname, Widmann, in German rather than the anglicised pronunciation that I’m using myself.

Filed under lang • en • linguistics

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