name puzzle

[calimac]

So there's this guy on TV a lot who's called Louis C.K. I don't know much about him, but I do know that he adopted that form of name in an attempt to get people to pronounce his Hungarian surname, Székely, approximately correctly.

Which affords me an opportunity to ask a question I've wondered about before: why is it that people so often consider the pronunciation of their name to be inviolate, while the spelling is infinitely malleable to accommodate it? Why is the pronunciation "real" and the spelling is not, when you have to go to a lot of trouble to change the spelling, whereas if Louis had wanted to change the pronunciation of his name to "zeh-kelly" he wouldn't have had to do anything at all.

Then there's this guy.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, because for most people, spoken language is primary and written language is secondary. You learned to know what your parents and siblings called you before you learned to recognize your name on a piece or paper, and that recognition almost surely went through "that set of marks equates to MY NAME" and not directly to "that set of marks equates to ME." And I think most of us carry on whatever internal narrative we have more in spoken than in written language.

The linguistics I've read almost always treats spoken language as language, and written language as just notation. I don't think that's really accurate; we can produce written language structures that hardly anyone would produce in speech, and those surely are language too. (I'm not going to say, for example, that The Lord of the Rings isn't "language.") But spoken language is more fundamental to the human brain; we've had it a lot longer, though the exact factor is debatable.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

All you've done is pushed the question back a stage. Why should they consider spoken language primary? (Not to mention that many of us don't.) That it's older is insignificant; so often age does not equate to authority, or even vice versa. And for every anecedote extolling the spoken word there's another in the opposite direction. The Bible as the written word of God. Authoritativeness described as "carved in stone." Etc.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Because we learn language through speech (or signing), not through reading.

But that's not what I stepped in here to post. Come to talk about the draft (Ahem.)

Got a serendipitous example here, of sorts. As a WikiGnome and a linguist, I took issue the other day with the following comment on Wikipedia's discussion page for the article on Ursula K. Le Guin:

Difference between a pseudonym and a married name
Authors have the right to choose their pseudonyms and even to give them a whimsical pronunciation (for instance, Pablo Neruda used a Czech surname, but he gave it a Spanish pronunciation). However when a woman get married with a French husband, she accepts his last name with its pronunciation, she cannot modify it. I know Ursula K. Le Guin divorced from her French husband, but she kept her married name. So there is no reason for asking her how to pronounce her last name whether it is clearly French /lǝ gɛ̃/.

That was posted by a Chilean lawyer (so he gets a pass from me on his English slips). He has an Old High German first name, "Hlnodovic", which he accents on the first syllable, "Hl" (or possibly "Hlno", I can't be sure from his IPA). If you have any interest in the discussion, you can click on the section title above.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I rather wish you hadn't showed this to me. It's full of errors - Le Guin isn't divorced, and her husband isn't French, he's American - and nobody has corrected them and they've been up there for five years already, and I do not want to get sucked back in to editing Wikipedia.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

That's the talk page, not the article, and the article doesn't make either assertion. But I've linked the biosketch from her own website, and explicitly debunked those misunderstandings on the Talk page: see the bottom of that section and the one immediately following. And many thanks for pointing out those errors.

Do you have reliable source info for his being American?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

UKL met her husband while they were both Fulbright scholars bound for Paris in 1953. "a young historian named Charles LeGuin, a tall, handsome Georgian with a flattop who was studying at Emory University in Atlanta." - Julie Phillips [also biographer of Alice Sheldon aka James Tiptree Jr], in an untitled biographical article in 80!: Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin (Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2010), p. 171. Possibly the fact that they were in Paris when they got married has confused people. It was the French registrar who was responsible for insisting on the space between the "Le" and the "Guin". Later: "In the summer of 1954, the Le Guins returned to the United States ... took the train to Macon, Georgia, Charles's hometown. Charles got a job teaching history at Mercer University in Macon, and Ursula was hired as an instructor in French." - Phillips, op. cit, p. 173-4.

Also, there's his edition of his grandmother's diaries.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's amazing. Thanks, thanks! I've put it onto the talk page, credited to "an acquaintance".

I'm not adding it there now, but the diary and Charles's annotation also tell us the interesting and surprising names of his grandfather, and his parents: Ghu Gilbert Le Guin, second of the seven children of James M. and Cinderilla [sic] Vashti [!!] Bridges Le Guin.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There were some great names back then. I collect U.S. Senators, and two of my favorites, both of that generation, are Xenophon Pierce Wilfley and the crashingly anticlimactic Andrieus Aristieus Jones.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And they're still married.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Yup, got that already.

And I didn't like their listing Annals of the Western Shore as a "novel", so I created a new category Category:Series by Ursula K. Le Guin and moved it to that one.