Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Pascal MacProgrammer)
Subject: Pronouncing your name in another language
Message-ID: <D2H67L.79C@indirect.com>
Sender: usenet@indirect.com (Internet Direct Admin)
Organization: Grammar 'R' Us 
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 1995 01:45:21 GMT
Lines: 24

Not so very long ago, deb5@midway.uchicago.edu said...

>One factor that complicates matters in the US is the existence of
>a large pool of "naturalised" family names that are no longer pro-
>nounced like their antecedents.  One cannot describe these pronunci-
>ations are wrong because, regardless of their origins, they are the
>ones preferred by the bearers of the names themselves.

  And then there are the names that get changed by the US Department of 
Immigration as people enter the country.
  I saw the name "Goodenough" once.  Do you think that might originally 
have been a Russian name:  Gudenov?
  A friend of mine had some trouble at Customs when visiting Ireland.  
His last name is "O'Green", and since that looks like an Irish name, but 
there's no such name in Ireland, they delayed him while they checked out 
his background, in case he was a terrorist trying to pass himself off as 
Irish.  It's actually an American name, created when his grandfather 
immigrated from Denmark.  Granddad's name was "0gren".

-- 
                              ==----=                    Steve MacGregor
                             ([.] [.])                     Phoenix, AZ
--------------------------oOOo--(_)--oOOo---------------------------------
            "A tautology is a tautology" is a tautology.
