Spelling names

[Mike Salovesh]

Tom Kysilko wrote:

> When I was in grad school, we imported a prof from U of Chicago to teach a
> course on J. L. Austin.  On the first day, he pronounced the name "Helmici"
> as if it were Italian (It's Hungarian, according to its bearer.)  My friend
> corrected him, but with an arrogance I considered typical, the prof tried
> to tell him that he was mispronouncing his own name until he mentioned his
> ethnicity.  "In that case, I will have to defer to your pronunciation,"
> came the reply.  I was too timid to point out that he'd have to defer to my
> friend if he told him it was pronounced Smith.

Mebbe so -- But I remember getting into similar trouble over a Hungarian
name. In grad school, I had a friend named Hattula Moholy-Nagy.  She
corrected me, gently enough, for imagining that there was something holy
in her name, and something about nagging, too.  I asked her how the name
should be pronounced, listened with my semi-trained phonetician's ears,
and got it right on the first conscious try.

In my second year of teaching, I had a student named Nagy -- and I still
took attendance, besides.  The first time I called the name Nagy I got
no answer, and I couldn't figure out why.  When I got to the end of the
list, I asked if anyone had been left out.  Sure enough, someone whose
name was spelled Nagy asked if I might have a name pronounced "Nag E".
I said:

"Whoa, all I did was pronounce that name as if it were Hungarian: is
your name from someplace else?"

"How did you know I was Hungarian?"

At that point it came to me that I might have some trouble with this
student.  I was right.  It took one helluva lot of work to see that he
learned anything at all from my class.

The whole exchange was long enough ago that Imre Nagy had recently been
in the news as the head of government in Hungary.  My student hadn't
connected that fact with his family's name, either.  I suggested that he
ask his parents about the name.  When he did, he came back and asked if
I happened to be Hungarian, too.  Nobody else would know how to
pronounce the name correctly, he said.

When he asked that I call him Mr. Nag E, I guess I had no choice . . .
but I swear he habitually mispronounced his own name!

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh at niu.edu>
PEACE !!!