Comment on Why do Americanized names of places etc exist?
Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 months agoBut I wouldn’t call someone named Frieda as Catherine. The disconnect for me comes when involving proper nouns. I understand on a historical level roughly how these came to be, but common decency tells me that I should call a proper noun by its proper name, but that isnt really true.
I work with French people who call me Jos instead of Joe. My girlfriend calls me 周 (Zhou) when we text each other. I’m fine with all of them as they all map to the same conceptual name.
My name isn’t how it’s spelled, it’s the concept of “Joe”. As long as they are calling me the thing that maps to that name, I’m happy. Their brain has its own mapping between language and concepts which is distinct from mine.
That is actually kinda neat and fun :)
Yaky@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
But you would call Alexander or Alexandra “Sasha” or even “Shura” in some Slavic languages. And you call Robert “Bob” in the US.
On the same topic, are “Alexander”, “Aleksandr” and “Oleksandr” the same name or not? What about “John” and “Ivan”?