Re: nightmare butchery of lastnames (was Re: Whiteness?)

On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Barry Garcia wrote:

> CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU writes:
> ><laugh>  Well, my "Lee" is an "i".  And my mom's name is Cheon Ok Seon,
> >which is technically the standard transliteration, but most people would
> >probably have a better chance of pronouncing it right if she'd gotten it
> >registered or whatever as Chun Ok Sun.  (The "soft" s, whose IPA symbol
> >I'm completely uncertain of, just doesn't appear in English.)
>
> I know that a many of the Korean kids here have their names
> "Americanized". An example of this was a girl I went to school with who
> spelled her name "Joo Lee Yoon" (when I first heard her name, i thought
> she was called "julie"). And some i'm not sure if their names were
> Americanized or not, like a friend who was named Jun Sun Lee, and his
> sister, Hyun. Some of the parents however decided to just give their kids
> American names, instead of Korean ones.
Yes--I'm often asked by other Koreans in the U.S. what my American name
is.  The answer being, OC, none.  And one teacher in 2nd grade thought my
name was Yoon, Ha Lee--but she rendered Ha Lee as "Holly."  It was
creative if nothing else.

My sister is Yune Kyung Lee.  She's still annoyed about it, because
"Yoon" and "Yune" are spelled the same in Korean, but for some reason my
folks decided to transliterate 'em differently.

And OC phone calls were a mess, because while in *Korean* she's Yune
Kyung (2-syllable given name) and I'm Yoon Ha (two-syllable given name),
in English these are interpreted as first and middle names, so *her*
friends call her Yune and *my* friends call me Yoon, which OC sound the
same, so every time someone called and asked, "May I speak to Yoon/Yune,
please?" we'd have to ask, "Which Yune/Yoon?"

YHL