By Any Other Name

My life is not chock full of dramatic reveals or alarming discoveries. My car has never been stolen on the same day that I find out I'm pregnant and the Queen is dropping by for a plot-driven commoner visit. Heck, I've never even been fired. (Guess I better superstitiously knock on wood.) But that didn't stop life from handing me the simplest paradigm-altering three seconds that have since plagued me day in and day out for four years.

My name has been mispronounced my entire life.

Just think on that for a minute. Or two. Or thirty-one million five hundred fifty-seven thousand six hundred and counting. Think of the implications! I have been correcting everyone who has ever mispronounced my name (read: everyone who has ever met me) and now it turns out I was correcting them wrong. Not only that, but my parents have been calling me by a mistake since I was born! How does something this catastrophic happen?

How do I know it's been mispronounced? Let me tell you.

I called for a very mundane bit of customer service and was eventually put through to a representative of Polynesian descent. I could hear it in her prepositions and inflections. I gave her my order number and listened to her type. After a short pause she said, "Ok, Maile" (pronouncing it my-lay instead of my-lee) and then asked for some verifying information. I was speechless. In the merest moment between when she said "my-lay" and the end of her sentence I whirled through a vortex of linguistic argument.

Imagine this playing out in my head: I had been about to politely correct her when her inflections flashed to mind. Her inflections said she was a native English speaker, but one of Polynesian descent, most likely from the Hawaiian islands. Certainly not Maori or from anywhere particularly isolated. Tonga and Samoa could be dismissed almost out of hand. The spelling "Maile" had also not evoked any hesitation, so it was very probable that the word was at least marginally familiar to her. Hawaiian islands are looking really good now.

So. If she is familiar with a Hawaiian noun commonly used as a proper noun, it stands to reason that she is also familiar with the Hawaiian language as a whole. I could argue that "maile" has two pronunciations even among native Hawaiians, but if that is the case, then there's no reason for me to correct her. That calls into question whether I ought to be correcting anyone who pronounces it this way (though she's the first to have done so) if there are two equally accepted pronunciations. But languages don't start out with double pronunciations for a single word, at least not usually. And Hawaiian is renowned as a sort of simple-vowel language, that is, the vowels don't vary in pronunciation willy-nilly like they do in English. The Hawaiian vowels are said the same every time (phonologists, just agree with me for a moment here and don't get all nit-picky, please). No standard variances come to mind, though I admit Hawaiian is not a language I have studied much. The vowel "e" in "maile" should, therefore, be pronounced the same way as the "e" in "ukulele." And of course, by extension, the combination "le" should also be pronounced the same as its double appearance in the latter word.

There it is. Conclusive logical proof that I have been mispronouncing my own name for my entire life. And the customer service rep wants to know about shipping rates? Hang the shipping! I don't know who I am anymore! And the real question here is, what am I supposed to do now?

I could argue linguistics all day long, but that doesn't change the fact that hundreds of people call me "my-lee." It's impractical to think that I'll start correcting all of them and ask them to call me by my linguistically correct name from now on. I wouldn't even know where to start. What's Brian going to do? Start calling me his "my-lay girl"? And what am I supposed to say to my parents? Hey, Mom! Dad! Why'd you call me the wrong name? I mean, it's not as though they were ignorant about it. They didn't walk into a florist and see some random Hawaiian words on the wall and think, hey! That looks cool! Let's call our daughter that! They're from Hawaii! It was reasonable to take their pronunciation as standard. But on the other hand, as a linguist I feel a moral obligation to uphold linguistic standards and not encourage the perpetuation of linguistic errors!

It's just such a dilemma. And to think. If I'd just started out life linguistically correct, my introductions would never have elicited the response, "Oh, like Miley Cyrus?" . . . No. Why would you make that comparison? No. Just no.