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Comment by themartorana | Hacker News Reader

"Shakespeare was the most commonly used spelling in his day, but by the 18th century, the version most favored was Shakespear, and only in the 20th century did Shakespeare become the standard. Interestingly, of the six surviving signatures the great man himself left behind, not one is spelled Shakespeare."

He must have gotten it wrong. Thank goodness we've corrected it for him. Not like he was particularly good at English.

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Of the six signatures, three are abbreviations, and the other three don't coincide among themselves. Besides, he did use the modern form when he wrote his name in print, just not in his signature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_Shakespeare's_name

Oh be quiet with your logic and evidence.

In the Romantic and Victorian eras the spelling "Shakspere", as used in the poet's own signature, became more widely adopted in the belief that this was the most authentic version.

I guess I lean this way. (I do acknowledge what you said about the man himself spelling his own name differently, makes me wonder why...) But I have always been perplexed about different spellings and pronunciations of proper nouns. My name is Dave in every language, I assure you. Sounds like the Elizabethans were all kinds of lax with spelling!

> My name is Dave in every language

No it most likely is not. For one it is a short form of the name David, so it has already been mangled, and then like any other written word will change how it is written to attempt to show the sounds in the written rules of that language. This can lead to additions of letters or some very strange changes to the spelling of the name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_%28name%29

"Hebrew: דָּוִד, Modern David, Tiberian Dāwîḏ ... In Christian tradition, the name was adopted as Syriac: ܕܘܝܕ‎ Dawid, Greek Δαυίδ, Latin Davidus. The Quranic spelling is داوُد Dāwūd."

So just around the Mediterranean, where the name originated, we have (in the English alphabet) Dawid, David, Davidus, Dawud. All for the same name.

I wouldn't respond to any of them. Do you understand my point? I am "Dave" (or David to my mother). That's it. You can spell or pronounce it however you want, but you're speaking of or to someone other than me.

I wouldn't respond to any of them.

I take it you haven't lived in a country where pronouncing "Dave" is tricky. If I was to not respond to everybody who didn't pronounce my name correctly when I lived in England it would have been some very lonely and infuriating years. At the end of the day I accepted that the exact pronunciation of my name wasn't that important as long as everybody understood who we where talking about.

I've travelled to plenty (I used to work for a large multinational and travelled to all parts of the world) and people I interacted with across many disparate cultures made the effort to pronounce my name as I was introduced (or introduced myself) to them. I also made every effort to pronounce their names as they pronounced them. Accents being what they are, it wasn't always perfect, but they never decided to call me a local translation of "Dave."

But again, I think we should call Italy "Italia" because that's how Italians spell and pronounce it. When I ask a local something about Padua and they look at me confused until I ask them about Padova, we should all be making the effort to call it "Padova."

they never decided to call me a local translation of "Dave."

I had a German friend in England called "Peter" and everyone always called him the English pronunciation of "Peter" no matter how he introduced himself. Maybe it's different with an English name in a non-english speaking country, since the 'correct' pronunciation is often known thanks to TV and movies.

That would have been considered disrespectful in my company, and to me personally. That said, I spent some time in Germany working with Germans, but we would only call someone "Peter" if he (or heck, she) asked to be directly.

I suppose this boils down to identity for me, having had hours to reflect on this conversation now. My name is a huge part of my identity. How it can be changed in any way without my consent is bizarre to me (respect to the untold number of immigrants that had their names changed at Ellis Island and elsewhere on a whim).

In any case, yeah, unless he asked to be called Peter, WTF?

That would have been considered disrespectful in my company, and to me personally

Me, I quickly realized it was about picking my battles. I could fight every day I lived in England to get people to pronounce it correctly or I could accept a reasonable best effort approximation and move on with my life. I found that most expats/immigrants with strange names took the same approach. These days when I'm in England or North America I've even started to pronounce my own name slightly wrong to speed up the whole process. Hell some people I know even preemptively changed their names to something easier to save everybody the effort.

Mispronunciations where (almost) never due to malice and my friends converged on a good pronunciation fairly quickly, and that was good enough for me. Spending a few years of your youth with most people getting you name wrong quickly desensitizes you to such minor details.

What if you move to a country where the language doesn't have one of the sound in your name. Like 'D' or 'V'? And you have to transliterate your name to fill forms.

It's a common problem for at least Russian and Chinese names which can't be spelled accurately with the roman alphabet.

As a concrete example, Japanese doesn't have a native 'V' sound, so your name would be slightly mispronounced.

As I mention above, I'm not so obtuse as to have a negative reaction to someone making an effort to say my name as I introduce myself, because of a non-native sound.

Different alphabets do introduce unique challenges, but across all languages using the same Roman alphabet, it's spelled D-A-V-E. (Or D-A-V-I-D if you insist.)

But then, I've never had anyone in any culture besides my high school language teacher tell me my name was something different.

> I wouldn't respond to any of them.

This is a difference in era and culture, I think, rather than only one of spelling. Look at all of the "other names" listed on the Christopher Columbus page of Wikipedia. In Italy he was Cristoforo Colombo, in Spain he was Cristóbal Colón.

You're right, and I'm sure globalization and the Internet make me more stubborn about the whole thing.

It's been a while since my last Greek lesson but isn't Δαυίδ actually 'Danis' and not 'David'?

That's an upsilon in the middle and a delta at the end.

Dawei in Mandarin.

Everyone were all kinds of lax with spelling. If you ever get involved with genealogy you will likely learn to hate the extreme levels of inconsistency there will be in written records covering the same person. It's not unusual to e.g. find church records written by the same priest spelling a parishioners name differently in different records, and these were official records.

That's because spelling was sort-of-phonetic. If it made the sound of the word you wanted, it was okay.

In fact there was no concept of standardised correct and consistent spelling.

> My name is Dave in every language, I assure you.

My name is David in English and French. Which brings up the awkward question of whether it's Дъйвид or Давид in Bulgarian.

Well, you know, Prince changed the spelling of his name, too. [1]

[1] http://milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html

In Japanese, your name is デイブ, which sounds more or less like "deibu".

I am sure there are languages in which your name is Deivas or Дэйв.

Judging by those spellings, we've also been pronouncing it wrongly. A pronunciation like "shax pear" does seem to have more of a early modern English ring to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

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