Mi nombre es John

Posted by John
March 29, 2007

I really like Amy, our instructor for the non-credit Conversational Spanish class at Motlow. Last night, as we were doing an exercise in which we had paired off and were asking each other questions, she said that when introducing ourselves in Spanish, we should still use our normal English names.

This makes perfect sense, and yet we’ve all either had, or seen parodies of, the over-enthusiastic foreign language teacher who has all the Johns in class call themselves Juan, all of the Peters call themselves Pedro, and so on.

Amy pointed out, correctly, that your name does not change based on geography. If you travel to Mexico and have to fill out a form, you do not write “Juan” if “John” is what appears on your passport, your credit card and your airline ticket. Your name is your name, and does not change just because you travel somewhere where a different language is spoken.

Yes, it’s a fun bit of trivia to know the Spanish-language equivalent of your given name, but it has no practical value. In this context, given our limited time in class and the volume of what we’re trying to take in, it would just be a distraction from the words that do need to be translated.

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  • Yet, in Brazil, they spell it "Brasil." Why don't we just spell it like they spell it? It's not like we couldn;t read it or pronounce it. I never understood other countries' (USA included) need to translate foreign names into their own native language.

    You bring up a good point.

    Cristobal
  • I'm glad that Amy mentions this. Because I was forced to translate my name into Spanish in a high school Spanish class, and I HATED the way "Laura" sounds in Spanish. [If you don't speak Spanish, the au gets slurred into a dipthong, which, when pronounced by kids with deep Southern accents, always came out "Lah-oooooh-ra." Blech.] I kept angling for a different name, Margarita perhaps. [This was long before I drank them. I just liked the way it sounded with the real Spanish pronunciation.]
  • We got to choose whatever names we wanted in high school french and that was the name we used on all our papers, tests, etc. I picked Nadine (pronounced nah-deen) because that was the name of my favorite church camp counselor. :)
  • I have a friend named Curt. Does anyone know if there is a Spanish equivalent for Curt?

    thanx, jfech
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