The Deal With Names.  

Posted by DJLIM

Names are a wonderful thing, its like a unique (well almost unique) tag that we all use from time to time to introduce our selves to other people. However it can be quite funny at times when you live in an Anglo-centric environment such as Australia. Hence from time to time many of your friends and especially my lecturers have a hard time pronouncing my name especially my family Chinese name. Below are the most common or most annoying MIS-pronounced names that I ever heard when people address me in Melbourne.

Lets start of with my sir name LIM
1. Lamb (WTF surely my sir name is not that hard pronounce)
2. Lee (kinda acceptable but still....)
3. Mil (I still have no idea why some people can pronounce my name backwards)

And now to the part of my name which have given me a heartache for all my life that even my Malaysian peeps have a hard time with...

1. Z (now thats plain lazy, a really bad variation of my name TZE, its the American sound by the way)
2. Zed (Sound alied)
3. Zoo ( Haha my Polish accent lecturer called me that once)
4. Tee ( And people ask me why I hate golf, pronounce the "Z" people!)
5. See ( At least it not that bad..)

Now you see why it can be annoyingly funny at times when I say my full name. Thank god for my Christian name and the nickname that I have been using all this years.

1. Daniel
2. DJLIM
3. DJ

But no worries I have learn to respond to nearly all the weird sounding names mentioned above but do not I repeat do not ever call me especially in public LAMB. Haha!

* The writer lives in an imperfect world where names can't be pronounce properly. =)

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3 comments

Apparently Westerners just can't pronounce our Chinese names properly. Well, if you were to bring your name to China, I doubt if they can, too, because they use "hanyu pinyin" to write their Romanised versions of their names. Therefore, "Tze Wei" is something that not even the Chinese (back in China) can pronounce comfortably.

Even Malaysians get my Romanised Chinese names wrong. I'd love to introduce myself as just "Yew", but then I would imagine myself responding to every guy mentioning the word "You" and that isn't such a good thing for me, too. I'd prefer introducing myself as "Guo Zheng" but they would either butcher the "Guo" (to become "Gua" or "Goo"), the "Zheng" or both.

Therefore, I introduce myself with my pen name, "Henry Yew".

P/S: I can't understand how Lim is pronounced as "Lamb"! Well, be thankful they didn't add an "e" to it and pronounce your name as "Lime"!

lamb?? lol... that sounds so far away from Lim!