Quote Originally Posted by lefty View Post
i say if you want to spell a name strangely, go ahead. my daughter's name is Airianne(pronounced air-e-ann.) i spedded it that way so it was phonetically correct and people would not mispronounce it. she is constantly called everything BUT Airianne. the most common ones are Arianna(are-e-anna) and Airianna(air-e-anna). i dont know how anna comes in to play with a name that clearly does not end in "A" but whatever. spell names however you want, the bottom line is people are gonna muck it up no matter what. might as well be original.


my name is Josh. or Joshua actually. easy, right? change two letters and its not. i have a buddy named Joshem. pronounced Josh-um. no one ever gets that right. he gets a lot of Joe-sheeeeem.
My observation is that when "normal" Americans see a oddly spelled name they automatically think it's foreign and start to try to pronounce it as it it were since many foreign names for some reason are not spelled phonetically. I fall victim to this a bit too since I would with foreign people on a daily basis. If I saw Joshem, I would think Joe-shum because it looks Hebrew.

Also, my wife's name is Chanin (pronounced Shannon). She gets Cha-nin and Cha-neen a lot.