This is wildly OT and applies to more than romance novels, but it’s something that’s been stuck in my head a while, so here goes:
It kind of bugs me that a lot of authors, especially authors of genre fiction, get the diminutive forms of foreign names wrong or completely ass-fucking-backwards.
This train of thought got kick-started when some co-workers and I engaged in a conversation about my Chinese name.
Yes, I have a Chinese name. My parents, for some reason, inflicted two different names on both the girls in the family. They gave us English names (Honey and Candy) but then put down Chinese names on our birth certificates and promptly proceeded to pretend the Chinese names didn’t exist. This created quite a bit of confusion on the first day of kindergarten, since the teacher naturally went by what was on the birth certificate. I ended up getting into an argument with the teacher over what constituted my “real” name.
My sister’s story is even funnier. She didn’t know about HER Chinese name until she took a math test in first grade. Her teacher had no idea who this “Honey Tan” was, but she definitely wasn’t registered in the class.
Anyway, most Chinese names have at least two parts to them, not including the family name. Some have three, and some have only one, but the vast majority of the Chinese names will consist of a family name, followed by two other names: Zhang Zi Yi, Chow Yuen Fat, Leung Chiu Wai, Mao Tze Tung, Deng Xiao Ping, etc.
This is because one part of the name is usually a name used for a whole generation of kids. Basically, every boy and girl born to a group of brothers will have a name in common. All my brothers’ sons have names starting with Cheng, for example, while all their daughters’ names start with Kim. The second part of their names is what distinguishes the child within the generation: there can be a Cheng Kin, Cheng Leong, Cheng San, etc.
Note that it’s not always the first part of the name that’s the generational name; I’ve seen people switch it around, too, though from what I’ve observed, using the first name as the generational name is more prevalent.
People familiar with Chinese culture know that these two-part names are usually treated as a unit. If you’re very familiar with the person and want to create a diminutive, you drop the generational name, which makes sense; if you did it the other way around, you’d be calling upwards of a dozen people the same name. So, for example, somebody named Xiao Ming who had Xiao as the generational name may be referred to as Ming, Ming-Ming, or Ah Ming.
People here in Portland find my two-part Chinese name horribly confusing. I hyphenate it to indicate that it should be pronounced as one unit, but people still inevitably try to pronounce only the first part. I try to politely correct people who do this, but some people really, really resent this, occasionally stooping to hostile or snippy comments. I don’t see why it’s treated as such an imposition, because there are similar compound names in English, like Mary-Ann.
I also had a hard time pinpointing why I was so bothered by this. A rose by any other name, etc., right? Then it hit me: it’d be like me calling somebody named Stephen, “Phen,” or somebody named Brian, “Ian”—without their permission, and without knowing them very well.
OK, so I’m taking a long time to make my point, and my point is this: different cultures have different methods of creating diminutive forms of names. And when a name from a certain culture or time period isn’t given the proper diminutive, it can really jar on the ears.
Take, for example, my French friend, Edouard. Some of his American friends call him Ed, sometimes even Eddie baby, which makes me laugh, mostly because it sounds so WRONG. On the other hand, a very French diminutive (albeit one that would probably only be used on a little kid), Dou-Dou, makes me laugh even harder. But this is a pretty good illustration of how diminutives sometimes focus on the stressed syllable.
And once you get into the sort of diminutive where letters are added or completely changed in a name instead of merely trimming away syllables, things get a whole lot more complicated. How Daisy became a diminutive for Margaret and Dick for Richard is still something I have yet to puzzle out, but some, like Nicky or Colette from Nicole, are less difficult to figure out.
And as anyone who’s read Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy can tell you, Russians have their own system of diminutives, and they’re not afraid of inflicting four of five different ones on the same person, some of them not resembling the original name at all, therefore making you feel like a right a dumbass when you realize a few dozen pages down the line that this character you totally thought was somebody else was one of the major characters.
I think this is all a very long-winded way to say: if you want to write about a foreign culture or a different time period, try to get the diminutives right.
Yeah, I realize this is nitpicky shit. Most people probably don’t care, but when used correctly, it really adds an authentic flavor to the prose, and when used wrongly, my OCD self tends to pick on it and pick on it and not let it alone, le sigh. And y’all know how much wiser it is to keep me happy.
Dou-Dou. *rolls on floor laughing*
The Russians aren’t afraid to inflict all those names in the same chapter, either.
😀 Very impressive. I’ve given up explaining how the old naming system worked at where I’m from. “If Maili is your first name, why does your driving licence say your first name is Fia?” It gets tiring at times. Thank God the naming system is dying out as it’s ‘anything goes’ nowadays. 🙂
Ah, bless you. If you don’t mind a stupid follow-on question, are you saying that in “Chow Yuen Fat” (god of actors), “Yuen” is the generational name?
In my job I write to authors a lot (editorial assistant), so is it respectful to use the hyphenated name? I usually do it to avoid revealing my ignorance of whether “Mr.” or “Ms.” is the appropriate form of address, but I don’t want to perpetrate a worse insult.
This was a really interesting OT. I learn something new all the time on this website:)You all are awesome.
Yes ! Yes ! Burns me up also !
But Candy is more polite than yours truly and restricts herself ranting about name forms only – my pet peeve is foreign language use altogether. I’ve been known to hurl books at walls and never finish the story because of frustration at people who insist in including words in another language BUT CAN’T BE BOTHERED TO DO SO CORRECTLY.
Please, please, please – if you’re going to go to the trouble of including such phrases in other languages, get a native speaker to check it before it goes to the printers (not just someone who took a few classes in high school) !
O.K. I’ve calmed down now.
Maya
From what I understand, Marguerite is the french name for a daisy, so Daisy became a nickname for Margeret.
I believe Dick was short for Diccon, an English nickname for Richard, but am not sure why Diccon was a nickname for Richard.
Writing all this down…
I have a lot of diminutives, and some are quite long:
Susy, Sue, Zoo, Susan (is that diminutive?) Chuchis, Choo (don´t ask me), Xuxa, Churros, Rubio (my last name, don´t like to be called that because sounds so male).
The worst is that I hate them all, why can´t people just use my name? Is not that long or hard to pronounce anyway; though when I went to Scotland, the taxi driver was waiting for a Susannah Robot.
I completely understand the rage, Candy. My first name, not Suisan, is not pronounced the way it is spelled. I understand the confusion, and I tell people when I meet them that I know it’s confusing. Most people get it. For the ones who don’t, I introduce myself EVERY FREAKING DAY using the correct pronounciation. (Does no one think it’s odd that I’ve worked with you for weeks and am STILL introducing myself?) Some people will not accept how to pronounce my name.
And then they ask me if I have a nickname. No. I don’t. Sorry.
Ugh. It makes me so mad to have my own name screwed with. growl…..
Oh boy! I love learning this shit. I didn’t know any of that except the bit about the Russians.
Almost all of my family nicknames came from Russian and I couldn’t keep track of them all, though Katya Gregorglavna “Kate daughter of George” was the one used most often. (Plus a few others that I suspect were obscenities.)
and i thought it was bad being a female ‘Jamie.’ apparently nothing screws up a boy-girl seating chart faster on the first day of school.
Ah, my first name is a generational name… when I introduce myself, I don’t even include the second half of my name because it complicates stuff too much (plus, most people can’t pronounce it correctly). Although just using my first name is confusing, since my older and younger brother have the same… 😆
I have one of the more common Southern traditions of having been given a Family (sur)name as a first name. It was mispronounced all through school and I often get mail addressed to “Mr.”
The only name info I can chip in here is on Gaelic and Latin. Irish adds the “een” (though it’s not always spelled the way it’s pronounced) to indicate the diminutive. So Micheal becomes Michealin (I sincerely doubt I’ve spelled that correctly, but I believe it’s close) and means “little Michael.”
In Latin, the Romans tended to add an extra syllable or letter. For example, caligae is the word for the hob-nailed sandals/boots that Roman soldiers wore. Caligula means “little boots” and refers to the fact that as a child, Caligula used to dress in miniature soldier’s uniform.
I agree – it ain’t that hard to track down a native speaker to get them to read the relevant bits in exchange for a box of chocolates.
I do struggle with foreign names – I often get emails to my website from various parts of the world, and I sometimes I suspect its a culture that uses the family name first, but because I’m not familiar with the names, I can’t tell if they’ve switched it or not (ie to cater for the western family-name-last) … and as for gender, no clue. So I skirt the issue by writing dear
.
I met someone with a weird name on a few occasions who I had to keep asking – I couldn’t resolve the spoken word (and my hearing isn’t great) with the written one. She got quite angry that I asked again, but I figured, heck, at least I’m trying to get it right!
dear -full name- that was. can’t edit posts…..
Very interesting post. Back in the old days families and individuals coming through American immigration ports, most notoriously Ellis Island, had Customs officials who inflicted names on them that sounded like an English version of the foreign name. And immigrants wanted American sounding names to blend in, so you had situations like my father, who went from Alexander to the diminuitive Sandor in Rumania to the Americanized Sidney.
But you’re right, people using foreign phrases and names in their writing should make an effort to say it properly.
I totally get your peeve about the names. My name is not easy to pronounce, however because people who are highly intelligent and have gone through training and can describe major medical problems that are truly tongue twisters are forced to use Nikki, well, let’s just leave that alone. I think it would be interesting if authors used foreign names more, but I think in order to do so at least have the basic courtesy to use them appropriately.
My peeve isn’t so much on names sometimes even though I have been known to toss a book or two. What about how in so many books they use pet terms, like a grah, ma petite this etc etc. I am admittedly not a native speaker but there are other terms you can use in the language, come on! Of course I especially noticed this especially in the Harlequins but that is a discussion for another day.
Has anyone else noticed this? Or am I just odd?
Since my hubby is Chinese, we gave our kids English first names and Chinese middle names—both are on the birth certificates. So hopefully we won’t have these kinds of issues when they go to school! 🙂
But because of my husband i do understand the Chinese naming system, however I still have much trouble with pronounciation. *sighs*
I love foreign words and phrases in my novels, except for French. For some reason all that “ma petite” stuff really gets on my nerves.
taekduu, yeah, the pet terms…. with you on that one for sure. Gabaldon did it in her first of the ‘Outlander’ (was that the name? the scottish series?) books – where the hero calls heroine ‘mo duinne’, but it isn’t idiomatic at all… at least though, she has the grace to admit her error and fixed it in her second book.
Its a bit like all the Aussies who call everone ‘mate’. Actually ‘mate’ is used in particular ways that are really hard to explain, (for example, ironically, when you go “Look mate, you’re a complete dickhead.” but at any rate, whenever a non-aussie writes it, it almost invariably jars.
Candy, this is really helpful information. I knew a little about the names, at least the japanese style, so I understand your peeve. Authors if you skimp on research you will be found out!!
This explains so much about a girl I went to school with. (Names changed to protect the innocent, so sorry if these names are obviously made up, but the concept is there.) Her full name was Mei Jun, but we all called her Mei. Then her identical twin sister, Mei Lin, came to visit. Confusion abounded.
My sister’s name is Dell, but we live in the Midwest, so about half the people pronuce it as Dale. Most people get it right after she corrects them, unless they used to live in Texas.
Moses is a nice name…*hehheh*. Although I was hoping for Strudel or Kumquat.
More OT from Candy’s very interesting OT, but vaguely related:
Something that’s always struck me as odd is the way characters who speak otherwise fluent English use their mother tongue for basic words and phrases like yes, no and “The pen of my uncle is in the pocket of the Rear Admiral”. Most non-native speakers I know are deservedly pretty damn proud of their command of English and would eat their own dictionary rather than avoid using a word if they knew it. To save my sanity, I pretend it’s a way to indicate accent rather than realistic dialogue.
Then there’s the way these characters huskily croak foreign-language endearments to melt hearts and nether regions. I’ll skip lightly over the translation minefield (I know this, ‘cos I suck big-time at translation, btw). But a lot of couples I know who come from different language backgrounds often do the reverse. In other words, they use pet names or expressions in the other person’s language rather than their own when speaking to each other. But they use their own language to address their children.
I always hated my name when I was growing up. Mary Beth. Mary is my first name and Beth is my middle name, but my family ALWAYS called me Mary Beth, also I grew up Roman Catholic and went to a parochial school where there were 10 other Mary-somethings (Mary Ellen, Mary Sue, Mary Agnes) in EVERY class so I was Mary Beth all through my childhood. Then along comes my older years and I am Mary cuz that is what it says my first name is on my birth certificate. My drivers license, my diplomas, my wedding license- EVERYTHING says Mary. Just Mary- who is some person I don’t know cuz my name is Mary Beth. Then I make the mistake of marrying a man named Miller- et voila- I am now Mary Miller. How much more boring can you get? So I insist all my friends and coworkers call me MB (embi- get it?) so I don’t feel like so much white bread and mayonnaise.
Stoopid name.
To save my sanity, I pretend it’s a way to indicate accent rather than realistic dialogue.
Oh, thank-you, EAP! You’ve saved my sanity, too. I’ve often wondered why non-English speakers in books have no problem with the most complex words and phrases, but switch to their native language for the simplest terms. A book I read recently had a German character that had der (yes, in italics) substituted for every “the” in his dialogue. Really, really pitiful.
Back to the name diminutives—one that really distracts me is shortening a name based on how it’s spelled, not how it sounds. Like calling Ro for Robert or Kel for Celeste (not real examples, just that sort of thing). I end up going through the rest of the book saying Roe-bert and Kelest over and over again in my head.
Hmm. I suppose it was too late for you to save my sanity after all. *sigh*
My problem isn’t nearly as drastic as other’s, but my parents named me “Susan Lynn” but insisted on calling me just “Lynn”. Something about my mom hating the name Susan but my dad not being able to spell the “Michelle” in the “Lynn Michelle” my mom wanted and thinking I’d end up being “Lynn Michael” all the time.
Anyway, I can’t tell you how many receptionists and nurses I’ve ignored when they’ve called for Susan last-name to come into the office, since I’m Lynn and ignored whoever this Susan person was. Not to mention all those first days of school when the teacher and I did the “call me Lynn” dance. And then there’s the credit cards that don’t match the driver’s license, which affect the plane tickets which must be in my official name…
Most frustrating thing is that my father went through this as a kid, so you’d think he would have had some sympathy for me. His family called him by his middle name, until he went off to college and adopted his first name as his “real” name. So now my mother has to go back and forth between his first and second name depending on the crowd they are with.
How about having a name that everyone ass-u-mes is a diminutive? I get asked constantly, “What’s your name short for?” Grrrrrr. Or the even more fun fact that American brains instantly convert the D in my name to a Y and I become Tonya (a name I’ve come to despise and won’t answer to).
And don’t get me started on the whole “is it a boy’s or a girl’s name†thing. I had to send a certified letter from my doctor to the Army when I was 18 to “prove†that I wasn’t a guy and didn’t need to register for the draft! A copy of my freaken birth certificate wasn’t sufficient for those ass hats.
Coming from a library that serves a HUGE Vietnamese population, I totally get this rant. I encourage anyone with a traditional Vietnamese name to write ALL their names on their library card application. Typing in “Tran Nguyen” just about overloads our computer system. It’d be like looking up “John Smith” in an Iowa phone book 😉
My niece is Chinese and adopted. My sister and BIL decided on an English first name, and a Chinese middle name. That why Stupid Americans wouldn’t be butchering her name for the rest of her life……
My first name is Rochelle but I have always gone by Rocky. That’s what my family decided to call me so that’s what I answered to. I also had the yearly arguement with the teachers over what my name was, but at least my parents always backed me up. I spent a year in school being called Rachel which is NOT my name because the teacher refused to call me Rocky since I was such a “sweet” little girl. Thing was there was a Rachel in the class who would respond and I would ignore her until she came up with some version of my name that I recognized. I can be very stubborn.
Found this when searching for the Dick dilema…
From Google answers
I used to work in a call center environment and there were frequently situations when we had to use the customer’s name while speaking to them. I always cringed when I would see a name that looked like it could be Chinese because I didn’t know if they had adjusted their name to conform with American customs (reversing the order of their names), or if they had stayed with tradition. I found that if I asked them – something along the lines of “I’d like to avoid addressing you incorrectly, if possible, since I know that some cultures do not have their names in the same order as many American families. Would you mind sharing with me the name you would like me to use while we’re speaking?” – I could avoid confusion on my part, and my customer was usually quite happy to avoid having me sound like an “ugly American”.
I wonder, does wanting to avoid this sort of confusion lead to authors not writing about characters that are from different cultures than their own?
Don’t even get me started on difficult names. My name is Caryle, but it’s pronounced Carol. (Freaking silent “e”, compliments of my dear father :))
You’re absolutely right about the Russians! After six weeks of living with a Russian host family, I had so many nicknames that I’d stopped keeping count. I did notice that they seemed to vary according to how I was being spoken to. If I appeared not to understand something (i.e., why eating an extra helping of kasha was vital on extremely cold days), I was “Milanya.” If I’d brought them a gift or done something nice, I was “Melichka.” After a while, though, I was pretty much just “Lichka,” which has nothing to do with my actual name and took a lot of explaining to non-Russian friends.
This is a brilliant rant/lesson. I love learning about other cultures’ names and naming conventions. It’s interesting to see the variety of pitfalls caused by people simply not paying attention.
Nothing gets under my skin faster than people who automatically assume it’s okay to call me Liz. There’s nothing wrong with Liz as a diminuitive, but it’s not mine, and total strangers should use the name they’ve been given. If I introduce myself as “Elizabeth,” that means call me “Elizabeth.”
This is a great OT. I have a lot of first-gen friends who have exciting names to pronounce. My Chinese friends all have American first and Chinese middle names. The person I felt sorry for was the Polish guy I went to school with—Andrzej (Andre)—whose brother had a totally normal name, Brian. You could always tell where the substitute was in the role when the froze for a while.
On the Dick/Richard thing, I knew an English Richard who went by Hitch. This is apparantly a common dim. over there.
I was thinking about this and how you don’t see so many Chinese romance novels with the sweet nothings. Then I thought of Amy Tan’s novels. She has a smattering of Chinese spelled out in them, but you can totally tell what it means. It’s usually used in anger or frustration, which is when I have seen my friends’ parents break out into their mother tongue. My dad has always yelled up the stairs at me to “hurry! hurry! we’re leaving!” in French.
Minimal language inclusion is okay as long as it’s correct. How awful is it when you can tell it’s wrong with your long-abandoned semester of whatever language? I want to ask, did you do this with BabelFish? For some reason, the French is okay with me, but the Scottish totally squicks me out. Mel Gibson’s face and voice inevitably meld with the hero’s. Sometimes, it’s Fat Bastard’s voice. Ew.
I get easily amused by romance writers who get period diminutives wrong. There’s one writer who named her medieval hero Randolph, RAND for short. In the Middle Ages, the diminutive of Randolph would be RALPH.
And don’t get me started on her medieval heroine Joscelyn, when Joscelyn was still very much a masculine name during the period…
My grandmother (and I think all 7 of her siblings) were caled by there middle names. It wasn’t until she and my grandfather applied for their wedding liscence that she looked at the birth certificate and saw Ruby when she’d been called Jane all her life.
I get easily amused by romance writers who get period diminutives wrong.
Come on, many of them can’t even get the clothes right, let alone something like this. LOL!
And if you’re talking Medieval romance here, I’m way more put off by the hair being wrong (I know bowl cuts and paige-boys aren’t exactly attractive, but that doesn’t mean you should just go with the flowing Fabio-locks). It’s like the books are set in the same “world†as A Knight’s Tale.
i like having a unique-ish name, except when people turn it into the dreaded Shania. i freaking HATE that name. grrrr…and jeez, AI is aaaay as in rAIn, people…but its such a good name, it means pretty, and i like it anyway.
oh, and j-me? try being my bro—he’s jaime. not james, or jamison, just jaime. he often gets mail to “ms.”. ha. ha.
i heart names. my kids are going to have weird, biblical names where they’ll be the only ones in their class with it. they can suck it up. it rocks being unique!
Try being born in a Latinamerican country with French first and last names -my given name is spelled wrong in my birth certificate because the clerk decided on his own that my mother could not possibly have the spelling right. It all went downhill from there…
Personal foreign language peeve are authors (or editors, or whomever checks the galleys the last time before printing the book), who insist on using ‘cajones’ for testicles. Quick and painless lesson in Mexican Spanish slang, people:
cajones = drawers (as in, “a chest of drawers” = cajonera)
cOjones = testicles/balls (as in, “you have some balls!” = mira que tienes cojones!
Tonda wrote: How about having a name that everyone ass-u-mes is a diminutive? I get asked constantly, “What’s your name short for?â€
I get the same thing all the time. Once someone asked me, “Is Jeri short for Geraldine?” and I gave my usual answer (“Eww, no, thank God.”), and they said, “Oh, I was wondering, because my mom’s name is Geraldine.”
I felt like such an asshat.
Tonda’s a great name, BTW.