Names We Use
jam-on-toast, Jul 20, 2021
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The left-hand side of the two-pager about words and names... the journaling reads - it's a lot of text, I may have gone a little overboard... but there are def at least seven sentences about my name...
Now, I don't know how many languages Mr. Carnegie spoke, or what his relationship with his own name was, but in our family, where everyone juggles three languages on a (pretty much) daily basis, names are no easy matter. And definitely not the same sound. Often not even the same word. And people get called different names by different people.
Take Katie, for example. Her name in the passport is Kateřina, with the accent above the R which makes it totally unpronounceable to a non-native Czech. She answers to a plethora of names and nicknames, that vary significantly depending on the language and only ONE variant is a taboo: Cathy. I call her Cotangent, my husband calls her Clever Pumpkin… Her brother calls her 'idiot'… she answers to that too…
Speaking of the brother. His name is Michal. Obviously, pronounced NOT the way an English speaker would. But everyone, including small children in our family who don't speak English, calls him Michael. Because he is simply Michael, but without the E. He too has a myriad of name options under his belt, ranging from Mickey Mouse - having been born in the year of the Rat, to Mishcosine - no escaping a mathematical analogy for this one either, to Pocketon - nobody remembers why anymore… all the way to the reciprocal 'idiot' - insisted upon by his sister.
My husband, who has been blessed with one of the most common names in the world - Josef, has seen his name misspelled - and mispronounced - by that world in about a million different ways, from Joseph to Yussup. In his native Czech he goes by Pepa (yep, like the Peppa Pig, don't even get me started here), a bizarre twist of linguistics and history that centuries ago equated Czech 'Josef' with Italian 'Giuseppe'.
And then there is me. Olga. Four letters of a name that doesn't lend itself to many variations. At least not in our family. Or perhaps it's just me. Olga is a sturdy - if a tad bit boring - name that (most) people around the world can remember, pronounce and spell correctly. The English version of it that is. In my native Russian the name has five letters and the L is super soft and the G is super hard… Other than my side of the family, nobody around me can pronounce it right. Not even my husband, who speaks fluent Russian. Well, that's not exactly true. My kids can, if they put their minds to it, but they tend to stick with 'mummy'… for obvious reasons. I don't particularly like my name, it sounds a little too harsh to my ears, but over the years I've come to appreciate its functionality, the way one gets to appreciate a pair of sensible shoes, even though they don't look very glam.
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- Category:
- Journaling Challenge
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- jam-on-toast
- Date:
- Jul 20, 2021
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