Piet Bess
School
is big and scary. Adults will ask kids to do strange things, and
sometimes they will tell them what their name is, even to the point of
calling them names they have never heard before. We, as adults, owe it
to our students to use their given name, to pronounce it as well as we
can with English sounds, and to help the child find their way to using
it in writing, and, in very few years, adding their family name to it to
make their full name.
Notice
I did not use the phrases “first name” and “last name”. These common
terms lead to confusion for all-- for students, for adults, and for
institutions. Here’s what I have found.
Not
everywhere do first names come first. The convention in Asian countries
including Japan, Korea, and China put family names (so-called last
names) first, the way English language conventions list names for easy
alphabetization. They do not use a comma as we do. They don’t write
Smith, John, but rather just Smith John. I do hear a pause in the Korean
dramas I watch: Smith… John, but that may just be me. A failure to heed
this convention led the director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, to address
Kim Jong Un as “Mr. Un” a few years back. (If you have something clever
to say about military intelligence at this point, I’ll let you say it
to yourself. I know I did.) Mr. Mike might have taken heed of the fact
that North Korea had been led by 2 previous Kims, Kim Il Sung and Kim
Jong Il. We have students from Korean families at our school. I assume
that all of them, along with our students from Chinese language
families, use the Jong Un Kim form dictated by our conventions. Except
when entered on forms as Kim, Jong Un.
Asia
may seem far away linguistically, though close in immigration terms and
neighboring our country across the water. There is a country in Eastern Europe that might seem culturally closer to other European-Americans, as numbers of immigrants came to the USA from there in the 1800s. I confess it is the linguistically most distant
European language from English: Hungarian. This society uses the Smith John form. So we would be talking about Orban
Viktor. (I apologize for the use of dictators as examples.) At any rate,
here we are with 2 regions where the first name and last name
nomenclature breaks down: Eastern Europe and East Asia.
Now,
given the fact that German immigrants constituted an immense plurality
of European immigrants to the USA in the 1800s, their naming conventions should
be like ours. Still and all, I have experienced firsthand culture clash
between my name and Germans still in Germany. My full name is Piet
Culpeper Bess. At the German border, I was asked if Culpeper was
Vornamen or Nachnamen-- first name or surname. “Es ist ein
Mittlelnamen,” I scoffed. My direct translation of “middle name” into
German may not have answered his question. It might have been easier if
each of us had used a phrase like “given name”. A miscommunication
between us arose, even though we could be said to be coming from very
closely connected cultures, with my being a fluent German-speaking
descendant of German immigrants long ago.
Let’s
come closer to home. Spanish naming conventions should be familiar to
us because of the presence of so many Spanish speaking members of our
society, but often we struggle with this as an English-dominant
culture. Let me first state that I do not share the opinion of many that
there is an English version of a person’s name. I do not think that
Dah-VEED should be known as DAY-vəd. I may be less strict on this if it
appears that the student does not viably speak Spanish. I try to use the
name the student gives me, but in the case of David, he told me his
family name was Rouis. I draw the line there. Ruíz is not ROO-iss, but
Roo-EECE (This is an oversimplification. It would be more linguistically
correct to say RWEECE, but Roo-EECE is good enough for an English
speaker’s approximation.)
But
back to family names. The basic naming convention in Spanish is
personal name, family name of father, family name of mother. (This is
such as I understand: I think there is about as much to know about
family name conventions in Spanish language conventions as they would
have you know about stressed syllable conventions!) So, Eduardo García
Hernández’s main family name is the patronym García. This can cause
problems. When I asked his subsequent teacher about him they said they
had an Eduardo Hernández. (It would be really nice if we would all say
Air-NON-dess instead of Her-NAN-dezz!) This reliance on the
name-that-comes-last is a source of confusion. If there are 2 family
names, you may use only the first one if you wish, without, as far as I
understand, any negative connotation, unless there is emotional baggage
about the father and the child does not want to use their name. (This is
a true story in the case of 2 students I will not name, who appear to
be disinterested in their fathers.) Students can also be unclear on the
nature of their 2 family names. I had to disabuse one young Miss Gutiérrez Gómez of the misconception that Gutiérrez was her "middle name".
Families
may wish to hold on to that second family name. Perhaps that is the
reason they hyphenate the 2 family names: Eduardo García-Hernández. With
this, they use northern European convention to force both names to be
recognized on forms and in use as one name. This is great! As far as I
know, both Eduardo García-Hernández and Roxanne Lundin-Crittenden, a
friend and former garden teacher in my school district, can be
addressed as Eduardo García and Roxanne Crittenden respectively without
insult. In fact, Roxanne, a wonderfully incisive thinker, referred to
her moniker as “one of those… annoying hyphenated names”. Roxanne may
have been referring to the logistics of a long name, or perhaps to the
use of such names among the upper middle class.
Incidentally,
2 online resources used by our students at my school display this kind of error. They list students by the name that comes last, rather
than by their main family name, their patronym. This is annoying
because, a) it puts them in a different order than our roll sheet, and
b) it displays cultural insensitivity or ignorance. The hyphen removes
the error! Both names occupy one field. This is an issue with coding as
well as with culture.
Here
is what usually happens when I ask students what their family name
(singular) is. Instead of García, or similar, they write Aurora and
Juan, or sometimes “mommy, daddy, Cecilia. They have not heard the
phrase “family name” before and instead write all the names (plural) of
the people in their family. If more of us would use the phrase, it might
be easier for students to understand it.
Some
cultures have members who only use one name. This includes, to my
limited knowledge, Indonesia, smaller island states in the Pacific from
which my school has students, and, Afghanistan. Incidentally, Burmese
uses 3 names, usually, but all of them are unique: there is no one of
their names that is shared among all or most family members. Our
bureaucratic system, including the State Department states, “The visa will be issued as follows: Given Name: FNU; Surname: [John]”. FNU
is an abbreviation used by the Federal government and our school system
to mean “first name unknown”. Note that they use “given name” and the
slightly more accepting “surname”, which, though it does mean the name
that comes afterwards, is not so barefaced as “last name”.
IF YOU HAVE A STUDENT IN YOUR CLASS LISTED AS FNU, PLEASE DO NOT CALL THEM “FNU”.
Here
is an example of how alienating it can be. I asked a student what their
name was and they said “Bnu”. They were listed as FNU on the roll sheet. I looked up the student’s language and
found that their language does not contain an F sound. Here the student
thinks that the school has the privilege of naming them-- we do not!!--
and is attempting to say the word the school says is their name. This
is sadder than Dayvid Rouis’s case. FNU is not a name. It is a misnomer.
In fact the family name is missing: we should say LNU. The child’s name
is the other name besides FNU. Please use the student’s name
in every case. After all, we would hardly deadname a trans student.
That would be just as rude. To “deadname” someone means to use and/or
insist on using their often heavily gendered birth-name despite their
demonstrated desire to express their self-perceived gender. Henry would
hardly want to be addressed as Anabelle. If you doubt this, put on the
typical clothing of the opposite gender and go shopping for groceries.
You will probably not be comfortable. Neither is Henry comfortable with
their deadname.
I
noted a method Spanish-speaking families can use to retain their
student’s matronym: using an English-convention hyphen. There are 2
other things students can do to hold on to the features of their names.
Sadly, bureaucratic systems will continue to obliterate the accented
vowels and the Ñ. I ask that students with characters in their names not
recognized on computerized forms use them every time in writing. Often, I need to use Wikipedia (wikipedia.es for Spanish-language content about people from Hispanic culture) to look for famous people. Yanez is just not the same as Yáñez:
one would say yon-ESS, the other, correctly, YON-yess. (Again, I am
using approximate pronunciation to cater to English speakers, on the
model of BBC radio’s effort to say all the sounds of a word in such a
way as to approximate its sounds using English sounds.)
The Ñ case is fairly clear. The student may tell you that it is Yáñez,
or you may ask their family, or you may use Wikipedia.es. The case of
accent marks is a little more complicated. First of all, I have a real
example from my friend David Cooper. On the first day of a Spanish 1
class at Shasta College in Redding, he called roll. When he came to a
student whose family name was Pérez, she loudly and angrily corrected
him: “It’s Per-REZZ”. It would stand to reason that her family had been
in the English-dominant culture for long enough not only to assimilate,
but also to forget their name’s pronunciation, PED-ess. They are not
alone: I was taken aback when Kamala Harris announced that her running
mate would be Tim Walls. His name, Walz, clearly should be pronounced
Valtz, being as it is spelled in German. Here is what Spanish-speaking students can do to
hold on to their accent marks.
First
of all there is a matter of nomenclature. In García, the “accent” is on
the Í, but in David the accented syllable is the the I. David does not
need an accent mark
because syllables ending in -D, -L, -Z, or -R do not need one. So,
rather than saying the accent is on the I in David, we would have to say
that -VEED is the “stressed syllable”.
While
García has an accent on the Í, it has both an accent and an accent
mark, I find it best to use the phrase “accent mark”. Oddly, this can
also confuse students. When I asked a young Ms. García, a second grader,
to put an accent mark on the I, she dutifully crossed it out. She heard
that I wanted her to “put an X on” the letter. Along with “Bnu”, and
Dayvid Rouis, she found it acceptable to comply with the bizarre
requests teachers make of students. Her reaction shows that she was not
accustomed to writing the Spanish language characters of her name.
So,
to recap: first name and last name are confusing, and should, in my
reasoned opinion, be replaced by given name or personal name, and family
name. Students should understand that the reason they have a family
name is that other members of their families have the same name.
Students can retain the orthography of their names by enforcing the
orthography of accent marks and the Ñ. And teachers must respect their students’ names as their parents named them.
