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walburgablack replied to your post “csevet replied to your post “subversivegrrl replied to your post: …”
also I assume [b r short-i dz e-so-short-it’s-closer-to-i t] is how your name goes? is that not it?
It is! The two vowels wind up being identical, it’s just that the first one is stressed, so it seems sharper. And it seems, on the surface, like, no big deal, it’s two syllables, how hard is it? And to fluent English speakers, to be fair, it isn’t any big deal. But I have separately discovered every time I’ve interacted with speakers of basically any other language that it’s impossible for them to say it, and if they haven’t encountered the name before (it’s uncommon here– my next door neighbor has the same name, but that just means I get her mail every day because we’re the only two women with that name on the postman’s entire route, I’d bet– it used to be a very common name but it’s a little old-fashioned and sort of the un-hip kind of “ethnic” nowadays, if you’re Irish you’re going to pick one of the ones with wildly unexpected hunks of consonants due to archaic spelling rules [like my middle name Siobhan, i know like four women with my middle name, which used to be a party game to get people to pronounce but now it’s just a normal name] because those are way cooler-looking) then they usually stare at me in bafflement.
I lost myself in those parentheses, there, hang on a minute. LOL.
So if you’re a Roman engineer, you come to a river and you– bridge it! That’s my name. Easy! It’s a common word!
But it’s objectively hard to say from a phonics standpoint– a friend has a tiny daughter with the same name who currently (2? 3?) calls herself Bitchin’ and I love that so much. (On the other hand, Farmbaby could pronounce her name, Willa, at like, nine months of age, because it’s dead easy to say. However she is going to spend her entire life being called Willow, which she already gets mad about.)
I think it’s mostly that the combination of syllables is unexpected. That was my difficulty with Kyrgyz– it wasn’t that the words were hard to say, or people’s names were crazy complicated, it was just that I had never combined sounds in that order before and really struggled to put them together. The only person’s name I could remember and pronounce was a guy whose name was phonetically identical to saying “Big Jim” in English, because I could make those sounds and remember them. It was terrible, I was awful at it. (I did meet Nazgul; the “gul” part means “flower” in Kyrgyz and is a really common women’s name element. It sort of unpleasantly highlights a few things about Tolkien’s biases in what he considered beautiful language, doesn’t it?)
(Your picture was not posted)
walburgablack replied to your post “csevet replied to your post “subversivegrrl replied to your post: …”
also I assume [b r short-i dz e-so-short-it’s-closer-to-i t] is how your name goes? is that not it?
It is! The two vowels wind up being identical, it’s just that the first one is stressed, so it seems sharper. And it seems, on the surface, like, no big deal, it’s two syllables, how hard is it? And to fluent English speakers, to be fair, it isn’t any big deal. But I have separately discovered every time I’ve interacted with speakers of basically any other language that it’s impossible for them to say it, and if they haven’t encountered the name before (it’s uncommon here– my next door neighbor has the same name, but that just means I get her mail every day because we’re the only two women with that name on the postman’s entire route, I’d bet– it used to be a very common name but it’s a little old-fashioned and sort of the un-hip kind of “ethnic” nowadays, if you’re Irish you’re going to pick one of the ones with wildly unexpected hunks of consonants due to archaic spelling rules [like my middle name Siobhan, i know like four women with my middle name, which used to be a party game to get people to pronounce but now it’s just a normal name] because those are way cooler-looking) then they usually stare at me in bafflement.
I lost myself in those parentheses, there, hang on a minute. LOL.
So if you’re a Roman engineer, you come to a river and you– bridge it! That’s my name. Easy! It’s a common word!
But it’s objectively hard to say from a phonics standpoint– a friend has a tiny daughter with the same name who currently (2? 3?) calls herself Bitchin’ and I love that so much. (On the other hand, Farmbaby could pronounce her name, Willa, at like, nine months of age, because it’s dead easy to say. However she is going to spend her entire life being called Willow, which she already gets mad about.)
I think it’s mostly that the combination of syllables is unexpected. That was my difficulty with Kyrgyz– it wasn’t that the words were hard to say, or people’s names were crazy complicated, it was just that I had never combined sounds in that order before and really struggled to put them together. The only person’s name I could remember and pronounce was a guy whose name was phonetically identical to saying “Big Jim” in English, because I could make those sounds and remember them. It was terrible, I was awful at it. (I did meet Nazgul; the “gul” part means “flower” in Kyrgyz and is a really common women’s name element. It sort of unpleasantly highlights a few things about Tolkien’s biases in what he considered beautiful language, doesn’t it?)
(Your picture was not posted)
