Heather Knight and Amy Qin report for the NY Times (archived) on a problem that I wouldn’t have thought of but that’s obvious once pointed out:
In San Francisco, where more than a fifth of residents are of Chinese descent, politicians have long taken a second name in Chinese characters. And any serious candidate knows to order campaign materials in English and in Chinese.
But the city’s leniency for adopted names has frustrated some Chinese American candidates, who say that non-Chinese rivals have gone overboard by using flattering, flowery phrases that at first glance have little to do with their actual names. Some candidates have gained an advantage or engaged in cultural appropriation, the critics say.
No more. For the first time, San Francisco has rejected Chinese names submitted by 22 candidates, in most cases because they could not prove they had used the names for at least two years. The city has asked translators to furnish names that are transliterated, a process that more closely approximates English pronunciations.
That means Michael Isaku Begert, who is running to keep his local judgeship, cannot use 米高義, which means in part “high” and “justice,” a name that suggests he was destined to sit on the bench.
And Daniel Lurie, who is challenging Mayor London Breed, must scrap the name he had been campaigning with for months: 羅瑞德, which means “auspicious” and “virtue.” Mr. Lurie’s new name, 丹尼爾·羅偉, pronounced Daan-nei-ji Lo-wai, is a transliterated version that uses characters closer to the sound of his name in English but are meaningless when strung together. […]
The switch isn’t universally popular. It ends a San Francisco tradition, cherished in some circles, in which Chinese leaders have bestowed names upon their favorite candidates. And it has the potential of resulting in long monikers that are difficult to remember or even cringe-worthy, since the characters that sound like someone’s name may translate into odd phrases in Chinese.
More details at the link (and personally, I think the “cultural appropriation” thing is silly); there’s also a brief excursus into other languages (“Certain towns in Alaska must translate ballots into Yup’ik […] while some counties in Arizona must do so in Navajo and Apache”). Thanks, Dmitry!
I remembered stories how Soviet advisors in early Red China aspired to have flattering versions of their Chinese names (and they probably weren’t the first foreigners there to do so). But of course it surprised me that it’s being used for electoral advantage here and now…
I think it’s common enough to be completely unremarkable — certainly when I was in Taiwan my roommates cooperated to create a suitably pleasing Chinese version of my name (戴士德 Tai Shih-de, or if you prefer pinyin, Dai Shide) with every appearance of considering it a normal thing. And I seem to remember talking with other foreigners who had similar experiences.
Perhaps hat was so principled an anarchist in his years living down here that he never became aware this same practice has long been common among not-ethnic-Chinese candidates in NYC, NYC being another jurisdiction where ballots are also printed in Mandarin. Last I knew the other languages into which NYC ballots were translated were Spanish, Korean, and Bengali, but I assume the latter two just transliterate names more or less phonetically.
I may have known that when I was following local politics back in the Ed Koch (ptui) days, but several decades have sluiced whatever awareness I had right out of my brain.
I was actually surprised when I looked up Paul Linebarger’s grave that his stone does not list his any of his alternative names,* not even “林白樂,” meaning “Forest of Incandescent Bliss.” However, this is probably explained by the fact that he is buried at Arlington (on the confiscated lands of the traitor Robert E. Lee), which only allows standardized markers.
* Amusingly, however, his main entry at Find a Grave is under “Cordwainer Smith.”
It’s not just in Chinese characters or immigrant languages.
My office once ordered Les “Cut the Taxes” Golden off the ballot for flagrant violation of ballot rules. He tried to insist that “Cut the Taxes” was a genuine nickname, but couldn’t provide sufficient evidence that anyone called him that.
(Consulting the journalistic record, I may be slightly misremembering. He made the ballot this way once, was thrown off by a local board once, and then I think we engineered a statutory change that specifically ruled out “nicknames” that were more slogan than name. He apparently did convince a few people at one point to testify that they called him “Cut the Taxes.”)
Here in DC, after candidates got away with ballot nicknames of “Ward Eight”, “Ward 8”, and “TaxFreeDC” in 2020, nicknames got out of control. The 2022 ballots featured “Hope Dealer”, “Washington DC”, and “The People’s Champion”. This year the Board of Elections has cracked down and is only allowing real nicknames. By the way, the only candidates who won with slogan-nicknames were “Ward Eight”, who was the incumbent Ward 8 councilmember (and later lost badly in a run for mayor with the “Washington DC” nickname), and “TaxFreeDC”, who was running unopposed (and hasn’t used a nickname since).
Real-life (no-slogan) nicknames are common on Irish ballots (some examples). Ballot papers are bilingual but a candidate’s name is only listed once; you can’t have both Irish and English (though many are a mixture). This is in contrast to the commemoration of a major public building or engineering project, where separate plaques in Irish and English mark the date and translate the name of the notable who cut the ribbon.
In Ireland and the UK a few candidates have changed their name via the totally optional deed poll to incorporate a slogan.
In Ireland Seán D. Christian Democrat Dublin Bay Loftus, later Seán Dublin Bay Rockall Loftus, generally called “Dublin Bay Loftus”, briefly held the balance of power in 1981. William Abbey Of The Holy Cross Fitzsimons was a serial candidate. Pól Báinín Ó Foighil wanted to wear his Aran cardigan in the chamber.
The Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election to replace Boris Johnson had Independent candidates opposed to the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) who were named No-Ulez Leo Phaure and Kingsley Hamilton Anti-Ulez. This even though the UK has almost no restrictions on party labels, so they could as easily have been on the ballot paper as Leo Phaure of the No-Ulez Party and Kingsley Hamilton of the Anti-Ulez party.
I was confused by “daan-nei-ji” but, having looked up the last character, it’s read “er” in Mandarin. So the article gives a Cantonese romanization of a Mandarin approximation of “Daniel”!
My Taiwanese landlady, I suppose impressed by my Yale education, gave me the name 萬聪明 （wan clever guy). I always thought it was a bit cringe, but now I’m wondering if I should run for office in San Francisco.
I’m curious whether mollymooly’s people are commonly known just by the nickname, as in the Gaidhealtachd here, where Costello is a singer otherwise known as Iain Maciver and Pluto is a football commentator otherwise called Derek Murray (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Murray_(sports_presenter)), no doubt among many others.
(The other one who comes to mind at the moment is often referred to as Ryno Moireasdan, so that might be more just using a nickname in place of a first name, as in English.)
@jen
The one that comes to mind is Kruger from the Kerry Gaeltacht.
https://tuairisc.ie/krugers-backside-saves-west-kerry-an-gra-as-cuimse-don-pheil-ghaelach-i-gciarrai/
His real name was Muiris Caomhánach; the article says he was given the name Kruger at school, at the time of the Boer War.
I don’t think any of the Irish politicians are mononymous, with the exception of Dana Rosemary Scallon, where Dana was her pop singer name (under which she won the 1970 Eurovision). Some nicknames replace the forename, while others supplement it to disambiguate where forename+surname is locally common.
Ah, like for pharmaceuticals. Names suggesting effectiveness are not allowed, which is why Pfizer loudly insists that any similarity between Viagra® and vyāghra, “tiger” in Sanskrit, is purely coincidental, honi soit qui mal y pense.
This one is a sort of phonetic approximation, though: in Mandarin, the first two characters read mǐgāo…
Paul Bunyan?
@dm
Bunyan is from Welsh Ap-Einion, where Einion is ex Lat. Ennianus. I think báinín for the gansey is just from the colour white, and Wiktionary agrees, FWIW.
When I worked at the Gest Library at Princeton as an undergraduate, one of my student colleagues took it upon himself to transliterate my name. I think he picked 漢罗克 (hàn luō kè) using fairly common transliterations for each name, but I utterly hated it. It sounded “wrong”, especially since I never use my first name. My counterproposal was to replace 克 (kè) with 夔 (kuí), which, to me, looked more badass and sounded more like Craig.
Over the years, I’ve played with the transliteration several times. I first dropped “luō” in favor of approximating Craig as “kui-ge”. Then I iterated through several meanings like wise, good, etc.
In 2019, I found 快解 (kuài jiě) (quick + solution), which fits my puzzle-solving interests, and in 2020, I found 魁哥 (kuí gē) (chief/stalwart/head + brother), which fit my role in overseeing my parents’ care.
Nowadays, I use 好 to transliterate my surname.
(Of course, I was also the kid in Russian class who insisted that the “H” of my surname be transliterated as “Х” instead of “Г”.)
I don’t mess around with kanji in this context, but when I were a lad I learned out to write my name transliterated into katakana – which of course meant it was less likely to have improbable or fortuitous semantic context. I have no actually retained any hard copy of my childish katakana scrawl, however, nor did the spelling stick in my memory. My first name is easy, but when I look at a modest sample (okay, n=2) of Japanese wikipedia articles mentioning notable Americans with my surname, they use ブリューワー, which definitely seems more complex than I remember, although it’s possible my memory is just unreliable. In particular I’m not following (although my sense of Japanese phonology is very very rusty now) the motivation for using リュ rather than just ル. I also realize that I don’t recall if i worked this out “indepedently” at school with one of the Japanese-language instructors, or if my dad had gotten* a “professionally done” transliteration of his name for business purposes and I just followed his lead for the surname.
At some point during my boyhood years in Japan I transliterated my name into Cyrillic (because why not?), relying entirely on a relevant article in the ASIJ library’s copy of some children’s encyclopedia and certainly without consulting anyone actually literate in any Cyrillic-scripted language. But I don’t recall the details and I don’t know if I’d come up with the same output if I tried it again now, with or without advice from someone with relevant literacy skills.
*EDITED TO ADD: That was worded poorly: I’m confident my dad *did* get a transliteration done for business purposes, just not whether I deferred to that rather than to my teacher at school if there was more than one potentially cromulent transliteration available.
Ennius, cutter of words and trees…
@J.W. Brewer, I agree that ブリューワー seems really long compared to the American English pronunciation. Based on my pronunciation of your surname, I might go as short as ブルワ.
The Japanese Wikipedia disambiguation page for Brewer has an age contemporary Charles Brewer, a boxer from Philly, whose name is transliterated as チャールズ・ブルワー , but he’s the only one with ル, as opposed to リュ. Maybe it’s a mid-Atlantic thing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%96%E3%83%AA%E3%83%A5%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC
Myself, for the longest time, even while taking Japanese classes, I used ハル instead of ハー for Har…, because I wanted some vestige of my definitely rhotic “r”. Now, I don’t care as much.
@Craig. Hmm, there are a lot of claims people make about what’s distinctive about mid-Atlantic pronunciation, but “yod-dropping after /r/” is a new one on me. Interesting to see that Charles “The Hatchet” Brewer (nickname rendered in Japanese as 斧) is featured in only four non-English wikipedias but that they include both Japanese and Egyptian Arabic.
I always wanted my Chinese friends to give me a name when I was travelling in Taiwan or the Mainland, especially since I’d been given the name “Hasan” already in Turkey.
Finally, some years ago some uncles that picked me hitchhiking to Donggang in Pingtung decided to give me a name over dinner and beers. I’m pretty sure it sounded like “Joe’s Way”. Later on one of their daughters told me it was a joke name and meant something like “Get Drunk”.
I tried to find a way to spell it other than 酒醉 to use as an actual Chinese name but couldn’t decide on one.
In grad school in the Seventies a Taiwanese friend made me into 甘羅傑. I used it occasionally to write my name in my books of Tang poetry etc. TIL that the last two characters have simplified forms.
Counties? Interesting, because the counties of AZ cut across the Navajo and Hopi lands at random – the Navajo Nation covers roughly the northeastern corner of the state, but Navajo County is the second-most-eastern north-to-center strip of the state (and its Navajo name – it has one – contains neither Diné nor Naabeehó).
@David M.: For reasons of administrative convenience, which parts of the U.S. have a federal statutory obligation to make ballots and other voter information available in which specific languages other than English is set up on a county-by-county* basis — with everyone knowing that this does not perfectly match up with the geographical distribution of language minorities but with no more accurate system thought to be workable. On the other hand, my impression is that although New York City actually comprises five separate counties, it complies citywide (probably for reasons of its own administrative convenience) with all of the counties’ various separate obligations. So, e.g., even if there’s only a high enough local quantum of Korean-speaking adult naturalized citizens with imperfect English fluency to invoke the mandate in Queens, they still theoretically offer the Korean-language materials in Staten Island and the Bronx, where Korean-Americans are much rarer. I live and vote in a county with enough LEP Hispanophone adult citizens that Spanish materials are mandated everywhere, even though there well may be zero such individuals who vote at my particular polling place.
That said, the rules for the obligation to offer ballots and other voter information in indigenous languages are supposedly in some respects different from those that apply to what you might instead call “immigrant” languages but I lack familiarity with the differences, so there may be some subtleties in how things work out in northeastern Arizona that I’m not aware of.
*And Alaska lacks counties, like really lacks them, not just calls them something else like Louisiana does. Whether the same “county-equivalent” geographical subdivisions are used for all purposes or different ones for different purposes is unknown to me.
And Alaska lacks counties, like really lacks them, not just calls them something else like Louisiana does. Whether the same “county-equivalent” geographical subdivisions are used for all purposes or different ones for different purposes is unknown to me.
Connecticut used to have historical counties kinda like the English ones, namely state parts with fancy names (mostly borrowed from England) that are used when you want a “county” for the statistics but hadn’t been used for any practical stuff for decades.
A few years ago CT petitioned to have their planning regions, which are of similar size to their ceremonial counties but have actual practical relevance (and more bureaucratic names), declared to be county equivalents for census purposes; this was approved in 2022 and would be fully implemented from this year.
In Alaska most of the state is officially known as the Unorganized Borough, which is divided into “census areas” that for census (and some other statistical) purposes are considered to be county equivalents. I don’t know how the actual government subdivides in that vast area.
I found out recently that OpenStreetMap (for whatever reason) officially does not give Alaska’s census areas recognition as county equivalents, and corresponding borders on the map; in practice it varies, with some of the areas getting the borders and some not.
@J.W. Brewer: Interestingly, Jim Breen’s popular wwwjdic lists “ブルワーズ (n) (org) Milwaukee Brewers” but offers “ブルワリー; ブリュワリー (n) brewery (esp. of beer)”.
@Jan: some other New England states are like Connecticut in that regard (i.e. the county-as-such has no remaining officials/employees of its own or administrative/governing role of its own), but I think the feds for “do-you-have-to-have-Spanish-or-whatever-ballots” purposes treat the aggregate of towns and cities within the historical county line as the relevant unit, and if the answer is “yes” that imposes the statutory obligation upon all political entities within the county line.
campaign materials in English and in Chinese
It might not be surprising that the Chinese-language materials still have the candidate’s English name on them, but the reverse is also true: almost everything has their Chinese name. Even the signs people stick in their windows with little more than the name and office. (There aren’t many front lawns.)
A number of Chinese-American candidates had their Chinese names rejected, so I suppose that means the standard was applied consistently. See here for instance.
The “which dialect” question seems complicated. As noted there, Zecher’s rejected name 艾伯特·“奇普”·澤徹 aibote qipu zeche needs Mandarin. His shorter name is reported there as 李煒澤 with traditional characters, but the form he submitted has 李炜泽, simplifying two of them.
There are a lot of campaign mailings for the two Superior Court judgeships, because there is a lot of “tough on crime” money involved.
The ballot language statute is extraordinarily inclusive, >2% of people speaking English “less than very well” if I remember. At any rate, the outcome is interesting.
This threshold may be useful in catching small ethic groups with large numbers who aren’t comfortable in English. But it also brings in large ethnic groups with normal numbers of self-effacing people who think they speak English “well” but not very well. We produced vast numbers of Hindi ballots but were hard-pressed to find takers even in precincts where an ancestrally South Asian population rose to 6 or 8%.
The activists said that the problem was the voters, for instance, a man who the activists described proudly rejecting a Hindi ballot, preferring English, though in their estimation his heavy accent suggested he should have used the Hindi.
I would suggest lowering the threshold and raising the definition — for instance, >=1% who speak “less than well”.
I’ve never met a Welsh speaker who didn’t also have L1 competence in English (unless you count elderly* relatives who gave up speaking English in their old age), but you certainly do still come across bilinguals who are genuinely more comfortable in Welsh than English (as opposed to just making a point.)
In Wales, that’s basically all it takes (indeed, you may end up communicated with in both languages even if you don’t know Welsh at all.)
* Two generations above me.
My experience is that heaviness of accent isn’t a particularly strong indicator of a Hindi speaker’s competency in reading English.
@Ryan The activists said that the problem was the voters, for instance, a man who the activists described proudly rejecting a Hindi ballot, preferring English, …
@Jonathan … reading English.
The ballot is a (purely) written document? Then competency/heavy accent at _speaking_ is irrelevant. It’s perfectly possible the Hindi-speaker couldn’t read Hindi, or at least could read English more competently for ballot-filling purposes.
a man who the activists described proudly rejecting a Hindi ballot, preferring English, though in their estimation his heavy accent suggested he should have used the Hindi.
Robbins Burling writes about the Punjabi-speakers of Delhi, who insist that they still speak Punjabi even though what they actually speak differs from Hindi only in a few markers, such as (IIRC), Punjabi kaa for Hindi kii
I’ve never met a Welsh speaker who didn’t also have L1 competence in English (unless you count elderly* relatives who gave up speaking English in their old age),
Also youngerly[*] relatives who are growing up speaking Welsh and have not yet gone to English-speaking school, I suppose.
[*] This word is obsolete, unfortunately.
Only if they don’t watch TV, I suppose.
I find it hard to believe there are more than a handful of such deprived Welshlings.
There will also be some who are only allowed to watch Welsh-language television. In many genteel families, television, like junk food, is strictly rationed for younger children. It works quite well until they are old enough to see how good the neighbour’s kids have it.
Maybe I mentioned that already, my parents did even go further; we didn’t have a TV at home at all, on principle. So my brother and me got our occasional childhood TV intake at friends’ places and at our grandparents when we spent our vacations there. Our parents didn’t object to that – maybe they thought that our intake was sufficiently limited, or that preventing us from watching TV at all was a battle they couldn’t win.
Me too — until my grandmother moved in with us and brought her TV with her. That was the year I was nine.