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Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

A friend was half-Australian, and grew up there. His name was Brent. He then moved here to Norway, but quickly found that in Norwegian, "brent" means burnt.

So he changed his name to a that of his Norwegian great-grandfather, Bernt, a fairly typical Norwegian name.

Many years later he moved back to Australia, and quickly discovered the exact same problem: "Bernt" gets pronounced as "burnt"... so he had to change back to Brent.

For me the best part is how the "error" is the same both ways. I see "Brent" derives from burnt ("dweller near the burnt land"), but Bernt is a short form of the German name "Berend" or "Bernhard".

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Wait a sec...I named my son Berend...and my last name means “son of fire”. Crap, my kid is going to be a pyro.

You got it wrong, it's a fantastic superhero origin story. Well, hopefully superhero, not supervillain. :)

Now it sounds like an Chinese/Japanese person saying bellend.

Hope they stay away from the UK!

Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese (and presumably most/all other dialects) distinguish r from l. You're thinking of some Japanese/Koreans having trouble due to those languages using a single phoneme that's somewhat between r/l.

Also, it's a bit racist to not point out that it's only some Japanese and Koreans that have trouble pronouncing r and l.

It’s not racist. It’s phonetics. Foreign kids who grow up Japanese have the same issue.

Cantonese doesn't have an r phoneme, just l, and only initially. In casual speech, initial n and l are pronounced the same.

I'm not so sure about the Cantonese/ Mandarin part, since a fair few professors I've had, had those as a native tongue. Hell, even my thesis supervisor was, with whom I communicated extensively. I can't really pinpoint where the struggles lie, but I get the general feeling that for Chinese native speakers there's a three way confusion between n, r, and l, and it's heavily dependant on the placement in the word, as well as the level of stress on the letter.

I don't think recognising phonetic differences between native speakers of different languages is racist. The language I grew up speaking didn't differentiate between w and v, so unless I'm making a conscious effort against it, they will all sound like v's. When someone points it out, I don't find it racist at all.

Re: Koreans - never realised! I haven't had many interactions with people of Korean descent, so it's an oversight on my part there.

So he changed his name to “burnt” twice? lol

That's fantastic. It reminds me of the GNU Hurd mutually recursive acronyms :-)

> It's time [to] explain the meaning of "Hurd". "Hurd" stands for "Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons". And, then, "Hird" stands for "Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth". We have here, to my knowledge, the first software to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms.

Well can't be worse than Russians with a surname of Mankovich having to introduce themselves in Japan as マンコビッチ

Having no Japanese language skills I pasted that into Google translate. Then inserted spaces between glyphs until one part of it (vich) translated as "bitch".

Aside: there are a lot of languages where /b/ and /v/ move around. Eg. Romance languages during the vulgar Latin period. Today in Spanish these are pronounced identically.

マンコビッチ == MA-N-KO-BI-CCHI

manko is slang for vagina. bicchi is borrowed from English "bitch", but is used more like English "slut"

That said, those Russians could've used ヴィッチ WI-CCHI, such as in https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B8%E3%83%A7%E3%83%B3%E3... So why does Mankovich use BI but Markovich uses WI ? Because expecting katakana spellings to make sense is already too much to ask for, let along expecting them to be consistent.

(Bonus: sandwich uses neither BI nor WI. It uses I. SA-N-DO-I-CCHI)

I wonder if Russia's ever offered Japan a better, more central location for their embassy. In Yakimanka district.

You shoulda pasted it into image search.

マンコ is pussy and ビッチ (bitch) is slut. So, it's like "nice to meet you, I'm pussy slut" and then handing someone a business card.

I remember seeing it come up as example of unfortunate foreign names in Japanese when watching some variety program once. I cracked up pretty hard at that one. Though I've encountered a doozy in real life too, though it escapes me exactly what it was now.

That's Arkady Pussy-slut, thank you very much

Which im sure some poor soul will mishear as "Pussy-Slut Academy" once the names are reversed and Arkady is put into Katakana and it's late into a night of drinking at the mandatory after work drinks. Hahaha.

Wait what? To avoid being thought of as "Burnt" he changed his name to "Bernt". Funny!

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