What's in a spelling?

Bill Poser is feeling his oats on account of some people's onomastic typographical oddities. In particular, he's motivated by a correspondent of Geoff Pullum's who goes by "zeiran r'ei", which as written, violates both English rules of punctuation and capitalization. While it's not entirely obvious from reading the posts as linked, suffice it to say that Mr. R'ei's name was spelled conventionally in an initial draft, and later amended to note that "he writes his name as zeiran r'ei, the lower case and apostrophe being apparently mandatory". In response to the notion that unconventional typography can be mandated by personal insistence, Prof. Poser writes:

People are entitled to choose the name that they go by, subject to a few constraints, but how that name is written is not, for the most part, up to its bearer. That's because names are part of a language, and the way a language is written is governed by socially accepted conventions. Just as a name must conform to the phonological system of the language, so the way it is written must conform to the orthographic conventions of the language.

Prof. Poser also lays out a few conditions for alternate spellings that seem to him to be reasonable rules:

It [a hypothetical alternate spelling of Bill] uses only letters that are part of the English inventory, the correspondance between letters and sound is canonical, and it is capitalized according to the rule that says that proper nouns are to be capitalized.

Your host is mindful that this can be a sensitive topic, so he'll just throw out a few challenging cases.

In 1994, the Ohio State Buckeyes sent a running back to the NFL named Butler By'not'e. As SC recalls, he insisted that the last name be pronounced "bin-NOTE". Mr. By'not'e happened to be African-American. Would it be a sign of racial tension to spell his name "Bynote"?

Although SC feels guilty for picking on him in the past, Redskins receiver Laveranues Coles pronounces his name as though it was spelled "Lavernius". This pronunciation can hardly be said to obey conventional sound-spelling correspondences in English. The situation may be different in African-American Vernacular English (your host is not familiar enough with literature in that regard to say), but assuming it isn't, what would it mean for someone to insist on holding Mr. Coles' name to the usual relationship between letters and sounds? What would it mean for a newspaper to spell his name "Lavernius"?

Similarly, professional sports are particularly rich in variants of Antoine. Antawn Jamison would appear to have a name best pronounced as though it was "Anton", but he insists on a pronunciation as though it was written Antwan. The University of Arizona formerly had a running back named Ontiwaun Carter, who also claimed that his name was pronounced "Antoine" (or so SC recalls it being pronounced by broadcasters), despite the apparent extra vowel, and the general failure of "o" to be used to write the vowel at the beginning of his name. The Pittsburgh Steelers have a wide receiver named Antwaan Randle-El, who also insists on "Antoine", although the orthographic sequence "aa" isn't typically how most English speakers would write that sound in that context. Would it be disrespectful to pronounce these individuals' names as written?

And speaking of that "aa" sequence, the San Diego Chargers had a running back in the '90s named Aaron Hayden, who asserted that the "aa" in his name should be pronounced to rhyme with the vowel in "may", rather than the vowel in "cat". Like the various Antoine derivatives, this pronunciation plays fast and loose with Prof. Poser's expectation of a canonical sound-spelling relationship; would it be inappropriate for Mr. Hayden to take offense at people who pronounced his name in the usual manner?

Finally, in this vein, what to make of the jazz musician variously known as Sun Ra and Le Sony'Ra? Since that apostrophe violates English conventions of punctuation, and he clearly endorsed a spelling of his name where "Ra" was separate, should a magazine that referred to him as "Le Sony Ra" feel obliged to run a correction? Does the fact that he appeared to be deadly serious in claiming that he was from Saturn change your opinion? Is the opinion of anyone at Language Log impacted by Mr. Ra's statement that "To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia, which is death's headquarters"?

At least all of these individuals stick to using characters from the standard English keyboard. Prof. Poser makes an interesting assertion about the hypothetical unfairness of insisting that people write his name with a particular non-English character sequence, which is well-supported by the fact that it displays as two hollow squares on my screen. In that light, we're virtually all familiar with this symbol:

which cannot reasonably be claimed to correspond to any English phonological sequence. Of course, it's the name that was adopted for a while by a gentleman popularly known as Prince. After adopting the aforementioned symbol, he became generally known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, sometimes rendered with parentheses as The Artist (Formerly Known As Prince), and often as TAFKAP. Names don't usually include parentheses, but as a generic noun phrase, there's nothing terribly unusual about them as they appear here. Does Prince have a right to expect the rest of us to include parentheses in his name?

The point of all of these questions isn't to pick on any particular group of English speakers, although readers cannot help but notice that, by and large, these examples are drawn from the African-American population. For the most part, they violate conventional relationships between sound and spelling, and this may be as true for their own dialects of English as for mine, yours, or Bill Poser's. In turn, this raises an interesting question: if someone goes by a name that violates their own dialect's rules as much as your own, is it racially or culturally insensitive to ignore their preferences? And if we aren't consistent about applying our intuitions in this regard across minority groups, what justifies the exemptions?

Comments

[Neal]

I've sometimes wanted to correct people who introduce themselves as "Sheila," when I happen to know their name is spelled "Shelia." "No, not Sheila. Your name is /sheel-ya/! Can't you even pronounce your own name?"

[Janes_Kid]

This comment may be related.

The current tennis season started in Australia yesterday. I have it from a highly reliable source, the internet, that the professional tennis association has an official list of spellings and pronunciations for the names of players. It is reported they even sign a contract to use these names. It is further reported that the official names of several of the Russian players are officially pronounced differently than the "real Russian" because of the official contracts.

[wolfangel]

It's not racially insensitive or culturally insensitive, it is personally insensitive and discourteous. Call someone what they want to be called. Spell it the way they want you to spell it, including whatever quirks of capitalisation they want. (Or do you dislike the iPod etc, too?) Not capitalising some proper names because the owner (designator? whatever) prefers not will not tumble down the edifice that is English orthography, and it's just common decency to respect people's wishes about their names where it's possible: this is certainly a place where it's possible.

[Semantic Compositions]

Neal: She has two names. That's the problem.

Janes_kid: Barbara Partee submitted some comments to Language Log on tennis player names. You're quite right about it.

Wolfangel: I think your quarrel is more with Prof. Poser than myself. I don't necessarily have answers to all of the questions I raised. My instinct is that personal wishes should be respected in general -- but also that there are limits to what people may reasonably be claimed to be offended by.

In the case of "zeiran r'ei", we may assume that Prof. Pullum got a note regarding typos (hence Prof. P's comment about the capitalization and punctuation being "apparently mandatory"). But surely this then calls for circumlocutions like making sure that zr's name never leads a sentence, in order to respect the common understanding that the first word is capitalized. In response to your comment about iPods, I had a look around -- some news organizations do insist on making it IPod in headlines, if not in body copy, to conform to their standards. Usage is similarly mixed for Qualcomm, a company which tries to enforce an all-caps spelling of its name. I'll post some more on those findings in a few days.

I see something of a control issue in this as well, which is why I raised the questions of what levels offense is being given at. By demanding that Prof. Pullum correct a sentence to start with a lowercase character, Mr. r'ei is asserting a right not merely to demand that his name be spelled as he chooses, but also that other people change the structure of their sentences to conform to his wishes (i.e. by not putting his name at the beginning). If I choose to write Qualcomm because QUALCOMM disobeys capitalization rules, is it less offensive to do so because no individual named QUALCOMM exists to actually take offense than if I capitalize Zeiran? I think Prof. Poser's "ethical" framing of the issue was too strongly worded, but that he was reacting as much to the assertion of a right to control other people as to any specific issue about orthography.

[wolfangel]

I agree that I am mostly disagreeing with Prof. Poser, not you. And in my post about this, I said that I think it's reasonable to capitalise a first name when it's the beginning of a sentence, even if it's not otherwise capitalised, just like most words are. (I don't know what I'd do in starting a sentence with the word iPod: I would probably avoid it, but that's because of the caps in the middle, not the lowecase i.) But the real question is how people who refuse to lowercase (for example) bell hooks write things like iPod. If they say Ipod and Bell Hooks, then we can disagree about this; if they say iPod and Bell Hooks then there's something more than just "don't want to use non-standard capitalisation".

Yes, I think you cannot be courteous to a company, and you can (and should) be courteous to a person, so there is a distinction between QUALCOMM and r'ei. Qualcomm is not offensive, while Rei is.

[Qov]

Names are names, and yes, it's rude not to pronounce them the way the owners do. That's why reading rollcall on the first day of class is such a treacherous business.

I remember a first day of Russian class when the professor effortlessly negotiated the pronunciation of every sz, ce, and shch in my classmates' Slavic names, then came to a dead halt at mine: Stewart.

It's also a little rude for people to repeatedly change the way they want their names represented, but your mother didn't teach you to answer rudeness with rudeness.