When you go to a language class, quite often the teacher will give you a name in the language you’re learning, which might be the equivalent of your name in that language, or a name with a similar sound.<\/p>\n
The French and German versions of my name are spelt the same but pronounced differently, while in Spanish my name is written Sim\u00f3n. The Irish equivalent of my name is S\u00edm, while in Scottish Gaelic it’s S\u00ecm. One of my Chinese teachers gave me the Chinese name \u5b89\u65af\u97e6 (\u0100n S\u012bw\u011bi), which I later changed to \u9769\u8cfd\u9580 (G\u00e9 S\u00e0im\u00e9n) – \u4e0d\u78ba\u5b9a\u90a3\u4e00\u500b\u540d\u5b57\u6bd4\u8f03\u83ef\u5f0f\u7684\uff0c\u4f46\u662f\u6211\u731c\u7b2c\u4e00\u500b\u662f\u6bd4\u8f03\u597d\u7684\uff0e\u6709\u6c92\u6709\u4ec0\u9ebc\u610f\u898b\uff1f<\/p>\n
Most of my friends from Taiwan and China have ‘English’ names. Some of them were given these names by their teachers, others chose their own names. In some cases they went for quite unusual names, including Dual, Van (from Van Gogh), Rainbow, Stone and Pencil.<\/p>\n
I suppose if call yourself by a different name when you speak a foreign language, you are, to some extent at least, adopting a different persona. This gives you opportunities to say things and perhaps to do things you wouldn’t normally do when speaking your mother tongue.<\/p>\n
Do you behave differently when speaking in foreign tongues?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When you go to a language class, quite often the teacher will give you a name in the language you’re learning, which might be the equivalent of your name in that language, or a name with a similar sound. The French and German versions of my name are spelt the same but pronounced differently, while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-identity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}