Phuc Dat Bich Is Beyond Tired of Getting Kicked Off Facebook
nymag.com
nymag.com
I live in Vietnam and when I showed this to my wife, who in turned showed it to her cousins, everyone was fairly incredulous claiming that there is no way this was a real Vietnamese name.
Bich is not a last name used here, it's actually a female first name. Dat is also not really used as a middle name either.
Bạch is a last name, so the only thing I can think is that there was a mixup in immigration, similar to how european last names changed during migration to the US.
There's also a "Tiffany Luong Thi Bich."
1. gets through
2. spends a few minutes explaining the issue
3. “I’ll connect you to <other department>”
4. spends a few minutes explaining the issue
5. “Wait 24h. Call again if issue persists.”
6. go to step 1
Y U NO WRITE DOWN MY ISSUE FOR FUTURE USE?
I'm transgender, and I've heard of several people in my community who are repeatedly targeted by hate groups who report their profiles for using a fake name, and each time they have to scan their legal name change papers and send them to Facebook.
Facebook really don't care, do they?
Mr. Bich one of over a billion users of their service; no, they really don't care. Even the negative PR from this situation is a blip on the radar, and will be forgotten by everyone except Mr. Bich a month from now.
I find their treatment of transgender folks even more egregious, but again, Facebook can afford to not care. Even if they caused 10,000 people a day to stop using the service, it would take over 300 years for everyone to leave.
There are massive organizational worlds between optimized graph storage and the operations/customer support processes that lead to a bit like this being introduced and maintained. So it's not really ironic at all, because it's almost certainly not a technical issue.
(There's apparently also a Phật Phúc in Ho Chi Mihn City - a Chinese takeaway)
(Odd means point/edge/tip, as in "spear tip/point", and is pronounced fairly close to "odd", "Even" is pronounced with long e-s, like "end" -- and is a variation on Øyvind which is probably from Norse Øy - luck and Vindr (warrior)).
I'm not sure what would be the best common last name to match it with. I suppose the foreign "Moore" would be good. "Even Moore".
A friend of my mother named Gun supposedly had to add an extra N to be allowed on Facebook.
We do have lots of unusual variations in use, though, so I'm not surprised. It was only after World War II that these things were accurately recorded, and so I have an uncle that has one spelling of his name on his birth certificate, one in his passport, but uses a third spelling for everything else. How he's managed to keep that going, I don't know, since e.g. bank records in Norway are keyed to the same central government register used to issue passports.
[Phúc] is pronounced close to Fook in American English. Without the heavy k-ending.
[Đạt] is close to Dac without the heavy c-undertone ending.
[Bích] is kind of close to Bic, but you have to say Bic really fast with very light c ending.
pattern: Vietnamese pronunciation is generally neutral throughout a word. There's no need for emphasis unless emotion is included.
Reality is that nobody will pronounce it right just from those descriptions anyway - Vietnamese isn't exactly a trivial language to pronounce for people who don't know the sounds already -, so they're just going for illustrating that it isn't what every English speaker first think it'll sounds like.
The short version of it is,
The missionaries who adapted the Latin alphabet to Vietnamese were Portuguese, Italian and French. The resulting spelling inherited some peculiarities from the spelling systems of Romance languages.
For example, on the phonology of 'ch',
Among prepalatals, the unvoiced stop CH is taken from the Portuguese and the Spanish, which themselves borrowed this notation from Old French, where it had been created to transcribe a new sound, not found in Latin.
You also might make apparently strange choices so that the romanisation reflects certain relationships between phonemes or within the language's native writing system. For example, the nihon-siki and kunrei-siki romanisations of Japanese render し and じ as 'si' and 'zi', even though they'd be pronounced more like 'shi' and 'ji', because し is usually grouped with さ ('sa'), す ('su'), せ ('se') and そ ('so'), and じ is grouped with ざ ('za'), ず ('zu'), ぜ ('ze'), and ぞ ('zo'). The Hepburn romanisation of Japanese, on the other hand, renders them as 'shi' and 'ji' for better pronunciation by English speakers, but this obscures the relationship to the other syllables. It also introduces an ambiguity when transliterating back into Japanese's own script, as there are actually two other symbols in the same family which can be used to write these same sounds, which Hepburn can't romanise differently as it needs to present clear pronunciation.
Pinyin provides another example. It has the three groups of initials (leading consonants) z-, c- and s-; zh-, ch- and sh-; and j-, q- and x-. An English speaker would pronounce none of these correctly, and they don't match any European language. But there's an internal consistency here within Pinyin: the first group are alveolar consonants, the second retroflex, the third alveo-palatal, and the first initial in each group is an unaspirated affricate, the second an aspirated affricate, the third a fricative. It's providing useful information which is lost if you try to make it so it's pronounced correctly by English speakers - which is rather fruitless given there's some phonetic distinctions in there which don't exist in English.
Well, almost. An English speaker is fairly likely to pronounce sh- correctly, and certain to pronounce s- correctly.
I think pinyin is hard to understand for a layman. Eg how many people said Guangzhou or Sichuan correctly on the first go?!
O and wo are not ambiguous in Hepburn, as they are being explicitly differentiated.
Another thing that Hepburn doesn't help with is は, transliterated as "wa" in the case it's the enclitic particle, instead of "ha".
I did some research on Japanese wikipedia (四つ仮名) and found that most uses of di and du were changed to zi and zu in 1986: ふじ(mountain) and ふぢ (flower) are now both written ふじ.
There is a list of words that have changed and ones that haven't.
The government decided that the particle wa should be written ha in 1955:
助詞のはは,はと書くことを本則とする (an actual law)
I don't really have a point, but I now know a lot about kana usage.
ISO 3602 makes a lot of sense to me because it is unambiguous in principal, but also allows phonetic spelling when necessary.
With the number of variations of romaji I have seen, even in official usage, it's a wonder why they bother.
I have found Japan to be a place that makes a lot of rules, then makes following them optional (then saying "there is no excuse" when you break them and get caught.)
There have been suggestions to evolve the way vietnamese is written. For example, "Y" and "I" are the same sound, and could be changed to just "I" to simplify. However "Thuy" is a common girl's name whereas "thui" is "smelly". There is resistance to change everything to "I" because it would change the name to something embarrassing.