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.