Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 January 15

= January 15 =

Spelling of non-English names--who decides?
A Chinese man who name is more or less pronounced "Shee" and an Arab whose name is pronounced "Cutter" immigrate to the US. Who decides how their names will be spelled on official documents? 24.72.82.173 (talk) 22:50, 15 January 2024 (UTC)


 * You seem to be asking about names written in writing systems other than the Latin alphabet. In many cases, the individuals themselves will decide, based on how they fill out the necessary forms.  For people coming from the PRC in recent years, many of them would just use the standard Pinyin transcription of their names.   For Arabic, there are a number of sounds which do not occur in European languages, an indefinite number of local Arabic colloquial dialects, even some national variations in the pronunciation of Modern Standard Arabic, and also the issue of French-influenced conventions for transcribing Arabic into the Latin alphabet vs. English-influenced conventions, so the possibilities are almost endless... AnonMoos (talk) 00:58, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * This is not directly related, but I have a last name in Polish that can be declinated or not (Polish grammar is heavily inflected) when used in various grammatical cases. I choose not to be inflected. It's basically always the person who has the final say in how their name is written or pronounced. --Ouro (blah blah) 13:07, 16 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Ouro -- In the Russian language, a name not inflecting for case is often a sign of a foreign name, and apparently in Soviet times, people sometimes wrote the names of their enemies, which theoretically should inflect, without such case endings as a subtle (or maybe sometimes not-so-subtle) way of implying that they were Jews! AnonMoos (talk) 14:37, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Well Polish is Slavic and has certain relations to the language you mentioned, and my last name technically isn't Polish - it's Ukrainian (grandparents from the Kresy on my father's side). However, this is my choice, I feel when my last name is inflected it just sounds weird. --Ouro (blah blah) 16:24, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Conversely, when Anna Karenina is rendered as "Anna Karenin", on the basis that that's probably how she'd have been known had she been born to Russian immigrant parents in the West, that looks super-weird. -- Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:31, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Varvara Komarova-Stasova chose the masculine pen name Vladimir Karenin. She wrote a four-volume biography of George Sand, so she may have been gender fluid, like her biographical topic. --Lambiam 10:50, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Even at the time she started writing (late 19th century), I could see the advantage of taking a male pen name to increase the likelihood of being accepted by a publisher.Naraht (talk) 15:53, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Synchronistically, last night I started reading Alex Beam's "The Feud" (2016), about a decades-long friendship between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov that turned sour. On page xv of the Introduction I read: [Nabokov] inveighed against the feminization of Russian family names, and insisted on teaching Anna Karenin, never Anna Karenina. Nabokov was a great writer, but a very perverse human. -- Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:00, 19 January 2024 (UTC)


 * In Greg Bear's "Eon", there's a character named "Joseph Rimskaya" who emigrated from the Soviet Union with his grandmother when he was a young boy, and got her surname because U.S. immigration officials weren't able to understand the two having slightly different name variants. Also, Czech-language Wikipedia adds fake feminine suffixes to women's surnames: Michelle Obamová etc.  Katie Ledecky, who has a masculine version of a Czech name (analogous to hypothetical Anna Karenin) gets the feminine form of it: Ledecká... AnonMoos (talk) 21:23, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * In Latvian, declension endings are added to foreign names, which are themselves respelled phonetically according to the Latvian alphabet: lv:Baraks Obama, lv:Džordžs V. Bušs, lv:Antuāns Lavuazjē, lv:Dmitrijs Mendeļejevs. Double sharp (talk) 18:49, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Not only will people from the PRC today choose to use Pinyin they will likely have little choice. Their passport, an official document of the PRC, will have their name in Chinese and Pinyin. So when filling in visa/immigration forms, buying airline tickets etc. they will likely feel obliged to use Pinyin. Doing anything else will likely result in confusion, delays and possibly being unable to travel/enter.
 * Once in the US, or another country other than China, they can call themselves whatever they want and many do adopt English names perhaps related to their Chinese one. But they might still feel it necessary to use their proper name, and use Pinyin, on official documents. --2A04:4A43:907F:FE10:7C89:51C9:85B7:E016 (talk) 16:14, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * the real answer is US immigration but this is a language question, right? Elinruby (talk) 12:11, 18 January 2024 (UTC)