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Awgu, 34, said the reality is that long, foreign-sounding names do not stick. "The practical effect of this is that no one calls them that," he said. "So they end up with a truncated name that's anglicized anyway."
The problem for some people, however, is to make an effort.
Marwa Balkar, who works in the humanitarian field, is from California but has a circus heritage. On the first day of a job that she has already held, she communicated to her manager her name, which is pronounced phonetically, exactly as it is presented. The manager asked her if she had another name.
"My perfectly phonetic five-letter name is too difficult for you," recalls Ms. Balkar.
In other cases, Ms. Balkar said that people simply shortened her name or gave her nicknames they invented, such as Mars or Mar. "I think it's a combination of physical appearance, foreign name and for fear of pronouncing it incorrectly, "Ms. Balkar. , 25, explained why people were reluctant to call him by his own name. "It does not bother me at all to pronounce badly. What I love are just efforts, whether you do it or not.
During a recent conversation with a radio host, Anand Giridharadas, a writer, said that the host was still misleading his name. He finally tried to correct it.
"You know, you have no problem saying Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky," he recalls. The host responded that he had learned to pronounce Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky because they were famous.
"The reality is that a lot of this is not about names but about whiteness," said Giridharadas, 37. "Many complex names of Polish, Russian, Italian, German origin have become second nature to Americans." The "unusual" names mentioned in the Dear Abby column are not unique in their complexity, he said. They just tend to come from places where people are not white.
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