{"id":228,"date":"2006-12-07T23:31:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-07T22:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=228"},"modified":"2006-12-07T23:31:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-07T22:31:00","slug":"my-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/my-name\/","title":{"rendered":"My name"},"content":{"rendered":"

I grew up with my name, Thomas, being pronounced \/’tʌm\u00e6s\/ by people speaking Danish and \/’to:mas\/ by those speaking German. These two pronunciations are so different that I accepted it as a fact of life that names vary with the language you’re speaking. When we started going to Italy every year, I therefore found it completely natural to be told that my name in Italian was Tommaso<\/i> \/tom’maso\/. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed adapting my name to whatever language I was speaking (Tom\u00e1s<\/i> \/to’mas\/ in Spanish, Фома<\/i> \/fa’ma\/ in Russian, თამაზი \/tamazi\/ in Georgian, T\u00f3mas<\/i> \/’tho:məs\/ [vocative a Th\u00f3mais<\/i> \/ə’ho:mɪʃ\/] in Gaelic, and so on).<\/p>\n

In most places, people have accepted this happily, but in Russia, people often seemed to think it was wrong of me to translate my name. In Georgia, I also often had problems, but that was partly because I picked a frequent name that technically is not the translation of Thomas<\/i> (which is rare).<\/p>\n

I’ve therefore found it a bit odd that many people in this country seem to think it’s wrong to translate names, and they will attempt to pronounce my surname, Widmann<\/i>, in German rather than the anglicised pronunciation that I’m using myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I grew up with my name, Thomas, being pronounced \/’tʌm\u00e6s\/ by people speaking Danish and \/’to:mas\/ by those speaking German. These two pronunciations are so different that I accepted it as a fact of life that names vary with the language you’re speaking. When we started going to Italy every year, I therefore found it completely natural to be told that my name in Italian was Tommaso \/tom’maso\/. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed adapting my name to whatever language I was speaking (Tom\u00e1s \/to’mas\/ in Spanish, Фома […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}