OK, the title is a “joke on the square.” Who is dumb enough to know me and accept that I would say that seriously. Oh, probably some humorless bot someplace will squeak, but another part of the joke is that it raises some legitimate concerns in a trans-cultural society.
Yeah, I just made up that word. “Multi-cultural” sounds like a permanent
thing, like a half-full jar of green marbles into which your slowly pouring
some yellow, purple and red marble and occasionally stirring. We’re really in the first phase of a
transcultural society, where we live the very beginning spirit of “E pluribus
unum,” that hopeful (yet so far unfulfilled) statement that “out of many, we
make one.”
This little writing started when I was doing a card to a
doctor today. The doc saved my life (by
recognizing some potentially fatal condition and then no-kidding curing it) and
doing so in the kindest manner I have ever encountered. I had to have my PCP write her name down,
because it is obviously a transliteration from another alphabet to
English.
That got me thinking about names generally and “foreign”
names in particular. By “foreign,” I
mean not common in the country I live in. And there has long been in America –
a probably everywhere – a push (or maybe a pull) to have a more common
name. Igor Igorivich Borodin is harder
to spell that John Smith. Oddly, we
expect that when we meet either one, we have different expectations. That’s on us, not on John or Igor.
My surname first appeared with an 7 or8 times great
grandfather who stepped ashore in the seventeenth century at Hampton Roads,
probably as an indenture servant.
Without doing the math[1],
the paternal surname tradition in our culture caused me to bear a surname born
by less than 2% of my ancestors. I could
just as well be named Gates, Smith, Elliot, or Staib or things I don’t remember
as I write.[2] There is a family tradition – totally unproved
– that there is some American Indian name from a foundling in the nineteenth
century. However, the American Indian
naming tradition was/is far different from the Main Line American custom. The
surname I bear is “Curry.” My great
times 1 or 2 grandfather changed it from “Currey.” According to the late Rev. Truman Lawyer and the
late Marilyn Greenleaf, the custodians of family records, it came from “Currie”
about the time when the lowland Scots where chased from Scotland and ultimately
arrived in the Western Hemisphere. The
surname “Curry” is modestly unusual, short and easy tp pronounce, so it serves
me.
When people emigrated from elsewhere to North America, they
often changed their name to something they thought was more American. Part of the reason is that (probably) genetic
us-them thing that leads us to make judgments WAY before we have enough information. In the movie The Untouchables, there is a scene where the old, tough police
sergeant (Sean Connery) engages a rookie officer (Andy Garcia) about whether “George
Stone” (the Garcia character) had changed his name from an Italian one. That was common – and we here in the 21st
century say shameful – practice. It
turns out that Connery was provoking Garcia to observe his behavior under
stress. (It worked.) People have changed names later on in life
for similar reasons. Dwight Eisenhower
came from a paternal family called “Eisenhauer,” and that was changed to “de-germanize”
the name. (DDE graduated West Point – I think[3]
- the Class of 1911. German names were a
problem and it only got worse.)
So what should we do about the practice of changing names.
First, relax. It’s
legal. The patronymic naming system is
part-law and part-custom. It has served
for hundreds of years on the one hand and on the other, it’s not written in
stone. Also, maybe there’s a “who cares”
somewhere in my mind. What you call
yourself if your problem and your business.
Xi Jinpeng defected, his new buddies would have a hell of a time
pronouncing his name correctly. For that
matter, were I to print “Xi Jinpeng” in a Chinese newspaper, the only comment
that would produce is “who stuck some random English letters into our paper?”
Now, back to the doctor.
She is from the Indian subcontinent and her name sounds like the letters
and cadence that names from there seem to me to.[4] I find that some doctors from that region are
referring themselves to patients they meet briefly as “Dr. Dev.” Apparently, the surname “Devabakthuni” is
common in India, sorta like “Smith” and those doctors frequently shorten it to “Dr.
Dev,” which is short and easy to pronounce, without diphthongs, digraphs or consonant
blends.
Back to the jar filled with marbles. That won’t last forever in a truly
transcultural world. The image should be
a jar of especially thick paint. Sure,
you can still see the colors that go in, but sooner or later, everything will
mix. America is STILL the primary place
where people emigrate to. First the
freely possible off-the-books immigration and the current press to reverse the
off-the-books thing have NOT changed the
direction that many people want to move.
We will have more and more “strange” surnames moving to the U.S. Oh, how about not “strange” but “sounds
strange and is hard to pronounce for someone whose milk language is
English.
The answer? Oh, yes,
I have an answer, but it’s not an immediate fix-all. It’s patience. Native English speakers, try to pronounce
someone’s name as they pronounce it. If
it’s tough, ask them. Americans are
largely polite people. “XI Jinpeng” knows
that an English mouth has a rough time wrapping itself around his name, probably
as much as a Chinese mouth has trouble pronouncing Donald Trump or Marco Rubio.
We will have more names to learn how to pronounce. Do it patiently. But do it.
[1] It’s
late. I’m sitting up in bed. I’m lazy.
Do your own math if it bothers you.
[2]
And, again, am too lazy to look up.
[3]
See above reverence to my being in bed and lazy.
[4] A
grammatical note: A preposition is a
terrible thing to end a sentence with.
Unless you don’t have anything else to end it with.
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