I would like to provide a counterexample. There are plenty of these people in the US intermountain west, but there are at least some cases where there is no one at fault. Next time you see one of these names without context (though we clearly have the context in this case), before judging, consider Nariaw:
I am a teacher, and one year I found that my roster included a student named “Nariaw”. As a public school, we register your student based on what’s on the birth certificate. I ask all of my students to pronounce their names for me when I first meet them, for the reason we see in so many of the replies here and with shit like “abcde”. However, when this girl came to my class, she said her name was pronounced “Miriam”. I spent a good twenty seconds looking at my roster, and had to ask her to spell it for me. I didn’t ask any rude and impertinent questions at that point, so it wasn’t until a few months later that I got the full story:
Her mother, an immigrant from Ethiopia, was still unfamiliar with Latin script when her daughter was born here in the US. So when she attempted to write out the name, which she wanted to transliterate as “Mariam”, she ended up writing only half of the first M, and wrote the second one upside-down. Whoever did the data entry for the government records dutifully recorded the child’s name as “Nariaw”. Was the mother at fault for being expected to write a name which, while she knew how to represent it in Amharic, she was forced to write in a language in which she was illiterate?
Wow. Yeah, definitely good to be gracious in that situation!
Another is, some cultures, not too far from home - like Irish and Welsh - have names written in ways that look Traighdiegh to English, but are the correct/traditional way to spell it for that culture.
That’s super frustrating. The hospital should have easily been able to get someone who had at least a basic grasp of a common language to help ensure they understood the forms and got them filled out correctly.
The fault is 100% with the hospital.
I would argue that at least 15% of the blame lies with the racist expectation in the US that all names need be anglicized, when we have fucking Unicode. If someone whose second language is English can be expected to be able to pronounce “Rayleigh Monaghan McTavish”, then the least that the anglophone people of the US could do is learn to pronounce things in a few other common languages. There is, quite simply, no excuse for the government of the united States, in which there is no official language (even though a traitor, invalidated by the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment, had some fuckwit draft a document trying to declare it without congressional approval), to mandate the use of a single language.
X Æ A-Xii . I could not resist. I apologize.
Apology not necessary.
I once had a student named Dominca. It was supposedly pronounced Duh-mawn-i-ca. She would get very irritated that people “didn’t know how to read” when they pronounced it doh-minca
A girl named Abcde
tbf, it supposed to ve pronounced Absedee. which isn’t ugly phonetically, but being named Abcde???
The solution is to put all of the uniqueness in the middle name. Then you still get to feel “special” while not forcing your kid to go by “tragedeigh” or whatever.
When I chose my name - I made my first as milquetoast and appropriate to my age as possible. My middle I went balls out - I guarantee I have a cooler middle name than you do.
How dare you. You dont beat me, Faustus
I named myself after two scientists, whose work I share with the world regularly 😉
Dunning-Kruger, as an example case?
I knew a guy so ghetto he got his first name as his Xbox Live Gamertag.
Congrats to my brother Jerry and his stepdaughter!
💀
Omg I didn’t even notice that at first
Can we just start using cosmic horror entity names already? Reighfyl is definitely something I could see being some sort of Lovecraftian alien
Think they’ll name their next daughter Cheaughtgeughn?
Maybe Caoilfhionn?
Forgive me… is that supposed to be shotgun?
Hah, maybe. I am gunning for just going full tilt and naming their next daughter Shub-Niggurath
Wonder what his wife thinks of this pregnancy
“Heulyn” pronounced Hay-lynn.
That’s spelt 100% correctly in Welsh.
I named my son Jaxin because my wife wanted Jax and I didn’t want my son to have a dog’s name.
I regret not just naming him Jackson because nobody in Taiwan knows how to pronounce Jaxin.
Sorry, you are not legally permitted to name your son Jackson unless you carry the name Jack yourself.
Hate to pile on, but could have done Jackson and then called him Jax for short just as easily. Hell Dick is short for Richard, short names don’t have to be spelled the same.
Could have named him Jacob and called him Jax.
Or basically any J name, honestly.
Jacob was just the most basic I could think of
Jay.
Joseph, shortened as jax
A girl in highschool whose name was Nazanine went by Nazi (Nah zee). Like, why? Your name was beautiful.
I don’t have an issue with that depending on where you are. It’s a nice name but lends itself well to a shortening of nahzee. In my area of the US and in the UK they often pronounce Nazi as Naht-zee so I don’t think it’s as bad as it could be.
Toneigh 🐴🐴🐴. As in Toni or Tony.
Ptoughneigh
Brothers with Phteven
Full name, Toneigh Lynne Groan.
Damn why don’t they have a toe emoji.
Brayden, Hayden, jayden, tayden, kayden, rayden, shayden, cayden, pretty much the whole alphabet ending in den. And yes I met every single one of these
Most of these are normal names tf 💀
None of those are bad. It’s when it’s when it’s like Breighleigh or stuff that it’s bad.
Welp found taydens mom
It is unusual and I don’t like it, but I wouldn’t say it is bad. If I liked the person I would probably come to like the name.
I have no interest in having children, and if I did I wouldn’t name them Tayden, but if somehow both of those things were true, I certainly wouldn’t spell it Teighden.
Breighden.
The guiness book of records had an entry for the worst spelling in the old days before the book was dumbed down. Trying to spell ‘usage’ the incorrect attempt was youzitch achieving only one correct letter.
Does using French count? Then I nominate “eau”. Impressive 300% bloat, 0 correct letters.
I present to you the plural : eaux 400% bloat still 0correct letters
A kid whose name is said “Akelah” phonetically, but is spelled “Akleah”.
The parents probably pronounce “nuclear” as “nucular”.
I had a customer once at an old job whose name was spelled Deborah. Seems completely normal until she got super mad at me for calling her “Debra” because I was somehow supposed to know her name was pronounced “Deb-Or-Ah”. With the “Or” being stressed.
Tell debdeb to calm down
