Name mangling! Of course, very easy and very common out here.

A beautiful name like Nidhi becomes Needy! Anil is Aneel. Vijay is Veejey(almost VJ), Balan sounds like belan(of the roti making fame) and this is just mis-pronunciation. Dont even get me started on Anglicized Indian names.

I hear a lot since we live in the US.
Our cousin Dr.Venkat (a short version of venkatasubramanian)has a name board in front of his desk that says "When-cat" and points it out to his patients telling this is how you pronounce my name. So we now call him Ven-punai (white cat)

Natraj became Nate, Ganesh became Gonza, Samaga became Sam, Ramakrishnan become Ray Krishnan, Shanmugam became Shan and so goes the list.

Siva becomes chee-va, Raja becomes ra-ha
I can go on and on

Saravanan-Sara
Krishnamurthy-Kicha

Well not so creative as Rum and Gin though :)

Yes..butchering someone's name is so common nowadays. My heart goes out to those little NRI kids with un pronounciable names...their names are bound to be doomed.
We live in the US and were quite particular about this when we looked for names for our two little ones. Finally decided to settle for Indian names that were easy to pronounce by the westerners...and so far it is working but who knows.
I just cant stand it when people mispronounce. I have a very traditional Indian name that has been mutilated innumerable times but I am quite vehement about people getting it right!I probably spend a few additional minutes making sure that they get my name right during introductions.....and its worked!

Rum and Gin...hahahah@!
Hilarious!

ahh well.. I have heard but neva thought of it SO much..

Nikhilesh beacame Nick

ahh well.. but smtime.. think of people with toungue twisties in US.. they wud definitely have to use short forms :))

My name iaa prounced as vee-na

:(

hehehe.. thank my parents for the short and humble name!

Great post. Enjoyed it thoroughly.
I remember in one of MGR's films, the heroine was named Kayalvizhi. MGR with his slurring tongue would call her Kizhavi, Kizhavi

Here's a PJ:
At a do in Umrica our man from Madras is being introduced.
"Hi, this is Thomas, Tom to you"
"Hi, she is Catherine, Cathy to you".
Our man says, "Hi I'm Balasubramaniam and balls to you".

Hi Usha,

Gayathri - Gaaydu
Subha - Subbi

Making big names shorter,
Bharath Shankar - BhaSha (Rajni fan perhaps)

In the US, My name is called Sooba, but most of them here ask me if they said it right. But there are people here too like the lab asst who asked me why dont they just name you Bill, Jack, Chuck, Jenny, Katy kinds in a very rude manner.

Recently friends of ours had babies and their strategy for naming was "The name should be easy for the Americans to pronounce", and the other is "Should start with A", so they were cutely named Aarav and Arjun (Ajju).

Now what is the obsession with names starting with the letter 'A'?

-Subha
P.S I have been reading your posts for the past few days, thanks to my friend. You have some interesting topics and most importantly, in very plain words.

Growing up in North India, I've heard plenty of common South Indian names mangled :)

So Dhandapani becomes danda pani (stick and water) while Muruga becomes Murga (cockerel) :)

haha good post.. that was our first criteria when choosing our son's name. It should be easy to pronounce in the US and should not be killed by the American accent. Turns out we chose well. He is called Ananth (Our other criteria was it had to be God's name). Although the a in between expands to a "aa" sound, they more or less get it right here!!

Nice one Usha, On the similar grounds one of our friends manoj was called mango and teja was called tehas.

oh, loved Rum and Gin ! The other day I went to drop of my little girl to school, after hanging her bag at the hook labelled with her name, I saw another Indian name 'Brahaspati' and wondered how the teacher and other kids pronounced it. When I asked my daughter how she says that name, I couldn't understand what she said except the first and the last sound 'B' and 'ti' !!!

Vennila is made Vanilla! That of all the exotic flavors! :)

Hilarious, as fun with names always are.

I saw a brilliant play here in NZ by an NRI actor. The title of the play was 'Candlestick maker' which was how some Americans called our Nobel Laureate Chandrashekar.

My surname Thiruppukkuzhi, a small hamlet near Kanchipuram is the target of some brilliant humour when I open my mails in the evening. A few being 'Thiruppi Kazhi' (reverse and subtract), Thiruppu Kazhi (a turning stick).

However, many telephone marketers struggle to get past Thi...Thi...

LOL. This post had be rolling and doubling over with laughter.

And I can so so so identify with name mangling because - believe it or not - my official name during my school days was indeed Bhagirathy - I had been given my grandmom's name, you see.

So in school there were all sorts of permutations and combinations to my name and in college - oh god - lets not even go there !!!

I used to be called Gauri at home because I was born on Gauri Puja day.

This name mangling got to me real bad and once a major, among the first things I did was to officially and legally get my name changed to what it is now.

Nicely written post!
We had a vizualizer -Loganathan. Along with a brief to design corporate logos came his new nickname - LogoNathan!
@Maami - that was hilarious!
And here is one on USHA. a girl in my college was B.R.Usha which inevitably became Brush A

hahaha, good post.

one of the colleagues here in shortened my name to "ik" And then he said, "it's kinda icky"

So all Krishnas I know are all called "kris".

This nickname business is so overwhelming. Apparently, my father & my uncles had proper formal names apart from their nicks (which surprisingly aren't bad names, but they're just commonplace, like Ajay, Aseem, Arun etc)& it never occured to my grandfather to actually register those formal names in school. And whats more, my uncle did it to his son as well!

Nicknames are way too much fun, though the whole thing about anglicizing them does not sit well with me.

LOLOLOLOL this will aslo join my list of favourite posts of yours. :-D
I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have a dear uncle named Sundaran. What a sundaran name, you might say.. but the cousins and siblings (at least 20 of them) shortened it to Su. When he happened to not hear it, they started calling him su..su.., over a period of time, the name Sundaran got abbreviated to Susu!!!! And we all very affectionately call him Susu maman. And my son calls him chuchu achachan.. :-D
Owing to my surname Krishnan, I used to be called Kittan in college.

rum and gin... wow!!!
i remember one...
vijaya baskar became vb and then visual basic and finally visual baskar...

Just remembered an incident when I was in Chennai a while ago, there is this guy called Rathnavel and who was fondly called Randy, a guy prolly in his 40s said if Rathnavel is Randy then how do u guys call Kumaravel... am sure u got that...

What a brilliant post, Ushaji. The comments got me rolling on the floor esp mammi’s. I know of one official name shortening in hubby’s family-K Subramanian became KS Manian and he is now ‘fondly’ called Manny!!

I cam across two names recently Argha and Swagata, lovely names quite like them would like to have two version of names for my kids.. one for the world and one personal!:D

@ Usha:

I got here from Paul's blog.

Very funny! Names are something that tickle me so much that way back in August '07, I wrote a post about names in general.

You can find it here:
http://laviequotidienne.wordpress.com/
2007/08/23/the-name-game-or-gaming-naming/

I will add your post there as additional reading.

Thanks.

@ Usha: Another thought.

Many names are mangled or mis-pronounced because the names are not spelt phonetically. For instance, British people would emphasise the first syllable which Indians do not. For instance, Bono (U2) is pronounced Bow(as in bow and arrow)-No by Indians and Baw-No by British people.

In my experience, more Indians mangle names than people abroad who are always keen to say them correctly. If you go to Bihar or UP, you are bound to be called 'Oosa' no matter how much you correct them. A 'Mahendra' is a 'Mahinder' and a friend 'Shachi' is invariably 'Sasi' (!).

It boils down to consideration and genuine interest in people we meet. I do draw the line at Czech or Polish names but with practice, they can be managed too.

Thanks.

Ha ha... I like the comment just above mine. Imagine Gujjus... Gujjus don't have an 'h' in their phonetic dictionary. LOL, no offence meant to any Gujjus though (I used to be a pakka Gujju myself until I was eight and I moved to Maharashtra).

Brilliant post if this was meant to be tongue-in-cheek but if it was a serious complaint, I wouldn't quite agree.

I don't think people should be criticised for pronouncing names incorrectly as long as they are making an effort to learn. Without exaggerating, every SINGLE (yes, 100% of) Tamilian I know pronounces John as "Jaan" here. Nobody minds. I don't mind when people here do not pronounce my name perfectly. My name sounds different in Marathi, Konkani and Hindi. All pronunciations are correct in the respective language. The pronunciation of my name by almost any other native language speaker is incorrect i.e. Biharis, Gujratis, Tamils, Malayalees, Haryanvis, Bengalis all have an imperfect way of pronouncing my name but I don't think it is fair to have anything against them for it.

-PeAcE
--WiTh
---GuNs

I have lived with bathma long enough to relate to your post and my daughters were Piiriaa and parsanna to my dismay.I thought Rahul was a North Indian name good enough to survive in Jamshedpur but the south indians started calling him Raghul and to my daughters he was Rahula and to my Bihari friends of the 80s he was Rahulva.I dare not shorten names but we too had a Savi (Where is the pootu? we'd ask)but spelling Megha as Meha was the ultimate.Good post as usual.

Altoid:I think we should have have a set of global names - easy on all tongues like Tom, Dick and harry. Or better still implement that "idea" from the idea advertisement and call people by numbers ( 'What an idea sirjee!')

Pooh:Vellai poonai - poor Venkat! heheh...chee-va ( cheep po madiri)

S.praveen: Yes Rum and Gin are brilliant although they have a different opinion!

Sbora:The thing is most parents labour over the selection of names for their kids only to have them mangled completely. That is the irony. So we might all as well be plain janes rather than be names achintya and calles assIndia or assunta!

Veena: Vee -na , you are lucky na!

Raj: yes! I remember that film - wasn't it adimai penn? keyaviyee keyaviyee. And MGR of course was famous for dialogues like "ungalukku pipeu irundalum pumpu illaiye" (nothing about agriculture - padippu irundalum Pannbu illaiyam!)

Maami:achacho...sardarji jokes ippo madrasis pathiyum vandacha. hehehehe.

Sooba: Yes I have heard of this preference for A names too. Someone sadi that it gives them an edge when the schools decide on alpahbetical order. So these parents not only wanted it to start with A but wanted the second letter to be A or B. so the firl was named AAkanksha and boy Abhyudhay or something!!

Lekhni: Yes, I have heard of Tanda Paani which is actually surprising considering that Dandapani is actually Samskrit.

Preethi: Ah so nanthu is Ananth! So he must be becoming Anand in the American version.

Sumana:Mango, heheh. I think I am also discovering some names to apply on my friends ( wicked me.)

2B's mommy:Poor Brihaspati!

Seren:Poor girl - really doomed to be plain witha name like that!

Bala: Even thinking of Thiruppukkuzhi I am ROTFL. I am sure north Indians will have trouble even here. Ange naar naar a kizhinju poidume!

Gauri: I love the name Bhaghirathy - it was my great grandmom's name too. So did they make you Bhaag every time they called you?

Justpathe: They did that to the ushas in my class too - we were called Rusha, Susha, Kusha, Pusha and so on...

S: Ik huh! poor you!! Why not Sho?
Ya, the anglicising started in IITs and IIMs I suppose?

JLT:aiyo eeswara! Susu mama! very bad girl!

Inder: ya sometimes the short name becomes so popular that we forget the real name. One of our friends was always called by his petname - something like Gullu or pillu. The day after he completed his P.Hd there was a call and they asked to speak to Dr.gautam Roy" and our man put the phone down saying "wrong number"!

Praveen: hehehe...Yes I got it.

Lavs: so mama became manni?

Antara:How are you dear girl? Long time... Yes it is nice to havr those kind of names - one for family and other for official purposes. Isn't it always done among bengalis? I am reminded of Namesake.

Shefaly: Will check your post now. Yes names fascinate me too. In face sometimes I form my first impression with names - too bad!
Thanks for adding this to the links.
I agree about the spelling causing trouble BUt...some sanskrit names and Tamil Names are difficult to transliterate. See what happened to Indian names in places like Muritius? When we visited the island one of our favorite pastimes was to decipher the original name from the current spellings.
Raajcoomar, Sunnasee, Treebhoovan etc.

GUns: It was meant in alighter sense. No offence. There is mutual mangling so no problem. Only wonder why parents take so much effort to find beautiful sounding names only to have them chopped to pieces by outsiders. :)

Bathma: I was thinking of you when I wrote that line. Poor you. Yes, Meha is a natural version no? meha, mogan, ahila - that is how it works! Hehheheh

My heart bleeds - my older daughter was named Srinanda which stood her in good stead till she went to college and friends shortened it to Srin .. I cry everytime someone calls her Srin and the less said about distortions to poor Mallika , the better .
As for Bathma - she's lucky no one called her Padamva in Jamshedpur !

Hilarious Oosa!

My son's American pre-school teachers had a hard time getting their (mostly Indian)students' names right. But to their credit, they really made sure they learnt how to, really made the effort. Yet with names like "Thamizharusu" they are still struggling. Of course, there are other Indian parents who call "Rohan" as "Rogan"...reminds me of the Almond Oil, Badaam Rogan Tel!
Oh, and as name-mangling goes, Aarthi becomes "Arty"...and when I wanted to correct my son, he insisted that his classmate was "Arty".

We spend months to select a good name and maul and mangle it in minutes. A name is like a beautiful flower and one needs to admire its looks and enjoy its fragrance.

My mother's name is Bhageerathi ( a name which you love) and she was called Pagi (Ba is unknown in Tamil as Tamil is not a phonetic language).

Everywhere Mahatma Gandhi Road is M.G.Road. We fought and changed Victoria Terminus into Chhatrapathi Shivaji Terminus. Today it is known as CST.

In shortening names, brevity is certainly not the soul of wit.

Usha:

Thanks for your comment on my post.

On "Raajcoomar, Sunnasee, Treebhoovan etc.", I would submit they are phonetically accurate spellings of the said names in English. The BBC has a reporter called James Coomaraswamy. You will be amazed that virtually nobody mangles his name, but Sarah Mukherjee is always 'Muck-ur-gee'. She should spell it with 'OO' instead of a 'U'.

Similarly, I have been advised by a friend to start spelling my name with an 'R' after 'A'. Bugs me because that is not my name, but I recognise he is right. I tested it and found fewer mispronunciations. However I continue to take the shortcut and correct every mispronunciation of my name without fail. Few, if any, now say my name wrongly.

I am also told - source forgotten, can locate - that the sounds 'L' and 'M' are seen as lilting and warm respectively and therefore names where a dominant syllable has one of those sounds are seen as beautiful names. This may be a typically western perspective but interesting, isn't it?

On the P-B confusion: how about Pompeii and Bombay? :-)

Great Post !!
Here are the name distortions I have come across:
Nirmala - Nimmi (also became Nirma when the washing powder became famous)
Laavanya - Laav (thank God, it did not become Laava)
Ashwini - Ash
Jayathirth - Jerry ( I can only imagine a centipede here)
Priyadarshini - Pri
Pradyumna - Paddy
Aniruddha - Andy
Bharadwaj - Barry
Sakuntala - Sakku
Lalita - Laloo (This was the pet-name for the daughter of the family. When the DIL with the same name arrived, she was nicknamed Lalit)
Gomati..Gomu
Jyotsna .. Jo
Another observation : In some of the families I know, there is always a 'BABY', a lady in her sixties or seventies..of course, she will be refereed as baby-athai, baby-paati, baby-ajji
-Nikhila

Rum and Gin is sooo hilarious..
Have come accross a few like

Jyoti : Jo
Nidhi : Nids
Sandeep : Sandy
Arun : Anu
Rajesh :RJ

But nothing is that innovative ofcourse

Good ROFLing post!

My name is simple - or so I thought until I got in college. A few friends of mine mangled it in very imaginative ways. So "Charu" became "Char Hoon" (char = 4), "4u" or "Four-oo", "Jharoo". I enjoyed this name mangling too because they only did it for fun.

Here, in the US, my name has become "Ch-rooo" and even "JHA-roo" or "SHaroo". Some people do make the effort to ask me the correct pronunication and use it. Most don't. And some ask me, then forget it and proceed with the wrong pronunciation.

I am a Network administrator by profession and am responsible for creating network accounts for new employees joining our company. I always make sure I have the correct spelling of their names and ask them how they pronounce it if I have any doubts. A few have commented how they liked it. A few people in my company consistenly mangle the simplest of names (even American) because they don't have the patience to look at the names carefully for 5 seconds.

I think people mangle unfamiliar names most of the times because they don't want to make the effort of learning the pronunciation or don't apply their reading skills. Most of the times it is as easy as sounding the name out to know how you should say it. Some people really are limited by their accent but as long as they make genuine efforts, I am OK with the name mangling.

Strangely, I have seen that Hispanic people (or people who speak fluent Spanish) have no trouble pronouncing my name. Even my boss, who is Russian, pronounces it correctly.

Just wanted to add soemthing after reading Shefaly's comment: the short "u" sound and the long "oo" sound are different. So "MooKherjee" is not the same as "Mukherjee". Same way, "Coomar" will be read and written differently (in Hindi) from "Kumar". Most Americans pronounce my name as "Cha - roo" instead of "Chaa-ru" and that still makes me cringe.

@ GTN -Mukherjee and Mookherjee are basically the same but spelt differently . Now if it were Mukhopadhyay which is the purist's way of spelling "Mukherjee"the mangling would be a delight .

rofl :) at rum and gin!
This was hilarious.
Now that makes me wonder at the fate of the names of my girls..cos I went the ethnic way too :)
Lavanya and Sharanya!
I hope they dont become Ravan and Sharon!

Eve"s lungs: And the bengalis have the most musical sounding names which they don't bother to use. They use pet names like piyuli, shiyuli and so on. Come to think of it these are pretty too.

Chox: :)

Rajk: even arty is better than when it is prononuced like AH tea!

Mahadevan: Yes I think my kollupaati was also mostly called Paagee or paahee.

Shefaly: We may solve the problem for some foreigners by using phonetic spelling but we will still have people who'd insist on calling usha OOsa and padma Padamva or bathma - we just like to add our regional flavour to the names, thats all.

Nikhila: and don't people call you NIHILA?
baby athais and baby paatis are a 'must' in every family.

Swati: Arun into anu - now that sounds like sex change!

GTN: I love the name Charu and shed tears when it becomes saaru which means Rasam in kananda!
Spanish people get our names correct? hm, try asking them to pronounce Ezhilarasi amd Poongkuzhali - :)

WIN: Lovely names. Would be interesting to know what happens to these names once they get into college - Laa and shaa may be?
I know 80myear olds calling their 60 year old sons "kozhandai"

Alls good if this wasn't meant to be a wagging finger :)

I have a friend whose name is probably the most beautifully dissected by us.

His name is Saju. Yup that's it. Thats his formal, real name. Short and snappy. He's a Malayalee.

WE don't like it do we? So we add an "r" after the "a" to make it Sarju which is a perfectly valid Marathi formal or a pet name.

Someone then decided the seemingly phonetically incomplete Sarju to a "Sir John" thus blessing him with knighthood on our football ground.

With more sense prevailing, the name was then shortened to "John" and then "Johnny" and then "Johnny-da" or just "Sir".

Beat THAT! :)

-PeAcE
--WiTh
---GuNs

guns:

//Sarju ... a perfectly valid Marathi formal or a pet name.//

I don't know where you got that one. The "formal" Marathi version is Sharayu (a variant of the standard NI version Sarayu) and it is a feminine name.

A male Sarju (NI colloq for Sarayu) in the North would normally be abbreviated from Sarju Prasad. Often these shortenings of conjunct names often end up in a sex-change operation (e.g. Radhakrishna becoming Radha), and no one seems to realise it.

A couple of other oddities:

"Gajanana" (gaja+aanana = elephant face + Ganesha) is often illiterately split in the North into "Gaja Nand", which would means "son of an elephant".

The River Brahmaputra, in Assamese and other NE traditions, is masculine (son of Brahma). In Maharashtra it becomes feminine, Brahmaputraa, even though etymologically and philologically the word "putra" cannot be feminised (I won't go into the reasons for that here) -- a rule that is traditionally observed in Marathi.

And when it comes to Indians adapting their names to assimilate into American society, the one that really takes the cake is Ikshvaku shortened to Icky.

mmm...i had a friend gopi. they sure got that right ...go-pee...and never failed to roll on the floor with that.

I am so thankful for this post! Perhaps someone will be patient enough to respond to my comment.

I am American and my husband is South Indian. As I have his last name (no hyphen or using my maiden name as my middle name) I would like our children to have beautiful Indian names. I have an unusual pronunciation to my first name and my name has been butchered all throughout my life. I feel rude correcting people, so I usually don't. Even when I do, it is to no avail. My husband also has his name butchered daily (NRI).

Are there any Indian names that Americans can pronounce quite easily? I don't want my children's names butchered in school. The nickname thing seems unavoidable.

The only one I could think of was Rajiv (Raj is easy for people here) but my husband doesn't like this name.

Thank you.

Hi Usha,

Very nice post about name mangling :D
Forget about the foriegners.. My name is such a common name in Indian names, but Indians do have problem in pronouncing my name.

One bihari manager used to call me "Lechmi"!!
Speak to a malayalee.. he makes it "Letshmi"????

I always wonder is my name such a tongue twister!!!!