What's in a name?

Before I left the US, I made lots of jokes about my plans to buy a diacritic while in Latvia and even posted this modified version of my name.


My joke was actually prescient, but I was a little off in my choices on spelling.  We only discovered this by figuring out that the composers we were hearing were not as unknown to us as we initially thought.  A typical program might feature works by Baha, Mocarta, and Džons Adamss, and if you guessed we were hearing Bach, Mozart, and John Adams, you nailed it. Changing names into Latvian equivalents is standard practice and follows a set of rules.  That means the British conductor we were seeing at the Sinfonietta was no longer Robert Ames but, in the program, was listed as Roberts Eimss.  

So what are the rules for name modification?  I'm still trying to figure it out, but here is what I know so far.  Men's names have an S added at the end. Women's names end in an A.  These endings seem to facilitate the process of declining for the seven grammatical cases, which I'll put in here as a nod to my colleagues in LWJ (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative).  And yes Virginia, that means the crazy man who once occupied the White House is aptly named Donalds Tramps.

How do you figure out your name when you arrive in Latvia?  There's a law for that, the "Regulations Regarding the Written Form and use in the Latvian Language of Personal Names, and also Identification Therof."  Better yet, there is a website you can use to learn the spelling of your personal name in Latvian.  Mine it turns out is Jūlija (I was pretty close), try it out and let me know yours:  Rendering of Personal Names in Latvian.

Meanwhile, now that you've all played my monument identification game here's another game direct from Rīga.  See if you can correctly identify these famous folks whose names I've seen in the news or on movie and concert posters from their Latvian names:
  1. Jozefs Haidns
  2. Moriss Ravēls
  3. Ludviga van Bēthovena
  4. Britnija Grainere
  5. Bejonsa
  6. Frenks Zapa
  7. Djūks Elingtons
  8. Serena Viljamsa
  9. Billija Ailiša
  10. Lebrons Džeimss

Comments

  1. BexMarch 8, 2023 at 7:05 AM

    My fave rendering is #5.
    Thanks for the declension nerdery--much respected. :)

    ReplyDelete

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