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Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

My name (Sam) is useful in that respect: I'm fairly sure it exists in every European language, being Biblical, and that it's spelled the same (in short form) in all of them.

The vast majority can't pronounce it correctly by the standards of my American dialect. But I don't mind.

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Samuel exists as a German name and is pronounced in a German way, but as far as I know the short version does not exist as a German name and I would try to pronounce it as an English name when I see it.

You would probably pronounce it /sɑm/, or maybe /sam/, while I would pronounce it /sæm/.

But again, I don't mind. I kinda like the way the rest of the world says it, actually. æ is my least favorite sound in my native tongue...

Speaking of least favorites I’d propose the glottal stop /ʔ/.

uh-oh!

No, that's kinda my point, there's no reason for me to pronounce it /sɑm/. The German version of Samuel is /zaːmueːl/, so if I'd try to make a short version of the German Samuel I'd use /zam/ but that sounds very, very weird to my ears. Instead I'd probably pronounce it like /sɛm/, which is the German attempt to imitate /sæm/.

In the german Bible the name is actually written: Sem. But I havent yet met a person named Sem.

That’s a different Biblical personage. The son of Noah from which “Semite” derives is Shem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shem), and is quite distinct from the prophet Samuel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel).

>European language Hindi, Persian, Bengali and the likes are all European languages and I don't think those languages have the name Sam.

I think you’re redefining the term european language —which typically means a language that developed in that region. It’s like saying English is a Japanese language because a percentage of people in Japan speak English except it did not originate there.

Indo-european is different but that is ancient family of prehistoric languages and hardly anyone would think this is what people mean.

I didn't visit Delhi, Tehran, or Kolkata the last time I was in Europe.

My mistake! I'll be sure to next time I'm out that way.

> The concepts of Europe and Asia as distinct continents date back to antiquity, and their borders are geologically arbitrary.

Either you call Hindi, Persian and Bengali European or you call German English and French Asian. But saying one is European/Asian while the other is not is simply a racist view.

Haha this is insane

India and Europe are subcontinents of Asia, that's true

Languages from India are Indian and languages from Europe are European, that's also true

Your mom's racist bud

Just to reinforce the point: Those are all part of the INDO-European language group. Emphasis on the fact that European is only half that name, and you're enumerating languages in the other half.

To really flog on it, Hungarian isn't Indo-European at all, and Sámuel is a Hungarian name.

I'd bet you'll find it among Copts and the Ethiopian Orthodox as well, which is also not in contradiction to what I said.

Samuel is really the perfect name as even the spelling is the same in all European languages except for diacritics in some languages. My name, Michal (Slovak), is not too bad, but the local version varies greatly across Europe: Michael, Michele, Mikael, Miguel, Михаил (Michail), Mihái, etc.

Unfortunately, at least in bulgarian Samuel is spelled Samuil (Самуил). Not sure about russian and ukrainian, but they've gotten the slavic translation of the Bible from medieval Bulgaria and a fast ddg shows the family form to exists as "Самуилович".

We have Samuil, but it's more common among Russian Jews than ethnic Russians.

What he's really talking about are Christian or Judeo-Christian names.

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