
Phuc Dat Bich Is Beyond Tired of Getting Kicked Off Facebook - percept
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/phuc-dat-bich-kicked-off-facebook.html
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jawngee
I don't think his name is real.

I live in Vietnam and when I showed this to my wife, who in turned showed it
to her cousins, everyone was fairly incredulous claiming that there is no way
this was a real Vietnamese name.

Bich is not a last name used here, it's actually a female first name. Dat is
also not really used as a middle name either.

Bạch is a last name, so the only thing I can think is that there was a mixup
in immigration, similar to how european last names changed during migration to
the US.

~~~
aceperry
Vietnamese names can be a little strange. In college, I had a professor whose
first name was usually given to women. All of my Vietnamese friends thought
the prof was a woman when they first heard the name.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I know the feeling. My name is Simone and I am from Italy. In most of the
world, they think it's a female name (usual guess: French lady) until they see
me :)

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cgtyoder
One would think FB would have in its data store a "This account has been
flagged in the past and it has been reviewed and approved no need to review
again" checkbox by now

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SimeVidas
Reminds me of customer service:

1\. _gets through_

2\. _spends a few minutes explaining the issue_

3\. “I’ll connect you to <other department>”

4\. _spends a few minutes explaining the issue_

5\. “Wait 24h. Call again if issue persists.”

6\. go to step 1

Y U NO WRITE DOWN MY ISSUE FOR FUTURE USE?

~~~
Gracana
I had terrible issues with Comcast, and after the fourth or so call I made
sure that the agent wrote down all the necessary details, and I would tell
agents in later calls to read the details. Not that my problem was ever
resolved, but at least I didn't have to explain it every time.

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vidarh
Reminds me of the Vietnamese noodle bar in London named "Phật Phúc" which
translates to Happy Buddha (Vietnamese puts adjectives after the noun so it's
the "Phật" that translates to Buddha). I presume they thought about the likely
English mispronunciation when they picked it...

(There's apparently also a Phật Phúc in Ho Chi Mihn City - a Chinese takeaway)

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e12e
I wonder if the Norwegians having the fairly common first name(s) "Odd
Even"/"Odd-Even" have any issues. "Odd" is of course also a great first name
on its own, especially if English is your second language: "Hello, my name is
Odd". "Odd, how?". "No, it really is just Odd" (etc).

(Odd means point/edge/tip, as in "spear tip/point", and is pronounced fairly
close to "odd", "Even" is pronounced with long e-s, like "end" \-- and is a
variation on Øyvind which is probably from Norse Øy - luck and Vindr
(warrior)).

I'm not sure what would be the best common last name to match it with. I
suppose the foreign "Moore" would be good. "Even Moore".

~~~
kristofferR
Another problematic Norwegian name is Gun.

A friend of my mother named Gun supposedly had to add an extra N to be allowed
on Facebook.

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vidarh
Gun is so rare that as a Norwegian I still had to look it up to see if anyone
actually used it. Apparently there are about 350 of them vs. about 9000 with
"Gunn".

We do have lots of unusual variations in use, though, so I'm not surprised. It
was only after World War II that these things were accurately recorded, and so
I have an uncle that has one spelling of his name on his birth certificate,
one in his passport, but uses a third spelling for everything else. How he's
managed to keep that going, I don't know, since e.g. bank records in Norway
are keyed to the same central government register used to issue passports.

~~~
p0ppe
19 407 people named Gun in Sweden and more than 1 000 in Finland.

~~~
dalke
There's even a 'Gun Berlin' and quite a few 'Gun Persson's in Sweden. As well
as 'Rune Fart', and a 'Shit' who lives in Angered, though that is not a
traditional Swedish name.

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tempestn
Now I'm curious whether the differences in name (and more generally, language)
sounds are essentially just based on the fluke of whatever sounds happened to
start being adopted in various regions millennia ago, and then slowly
evolved... or if there is actually a genetic difference between people of
different races that causes some sounds to be slightly more pleasant-sounding
and/or more easily pronounced than others, which had some influence on the
sounds that were more likely to develop into language (and to be picked for
names).

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clay_to_n
The article points out that the name is pronounced "Foo Da Bic"

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hugh4
Why, when romanising their alphabet, did the Vietnamese do it in a way that
didn't line up with any European language?

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TazeTSchnitzel
No romanisation system _quite_ lines up with a specific European language.
After all, no European language has the same phonology as the language you're
romanising.

You also might make apparently strange choices so that the romanisation
reflects certain relationships between phonemes or within the language's
native writing system. For example, the nihon-siki and kunrei-siki
romanisations of Japanese render し and じ as 'si' and 'zi', even though they'd
be pronounced more like 'shi' and 'ji', because し is usually grouped with さ
('sa'), す ('su'), せ ('se') and そ ('so'), and じ is grouped with ざ ('za'), ず
('zu'), ぜ ('ze'), and ぞ ('zo'). The Hepburn romanisation of Japanese, on the
other hand, renders them as 'shi' and 'ji' for better pronunciation by English
speakers, but this obscures the relationship to the other syllables. It also
introduces an ambiguity when transliterating back into Japanese's own script,
as there are actually two other symbols in the same family which can be used
to write these same sounds, which Hepburn can't romanise differently as it
needs to present clear pronunciation.

Pinyin provides another example. It has the three groups of initials (leading
consonants) z-, c- and s-; zh-, ch- and sh-; and j-, q- and x-. An English
speaker would pronounce none of these correctly, and they don't match any
European language. But there's an internal consistency here within Pinyin: the
first group are alveolar consonants, the second retroflex, the third alveo-
palatal, and the first initial in each group is an unaspirated affricate, the
second an aspirated affricate, the third a fricative. It's providing useful
information which is lost if you try to make it so it's pronounced correctly
by English speakers - which is rather fruitless given there's some phonetic
distinctions in there which don't exist in English.

~~~
rangibaby
The ambiguous characters in Hepburn are zu (ず) and zu (du) (づ) and o(お) and o
(wo) (を). They can be quite confusing to new learners.

I think pinyin is hard to understand for a layman. Eg how many people said
Guangzhou or Sichuan correctly on the first go?!

~~~
_delirium
I don't think pinyin is _that_ hard to understand as a layman, at least no
harder than a typical Latin-alphabet language other than your own. It's not
great if your goal were a phonetic transliteration into English, but even most
European languages would fail that test. For example Polish has quite
unintuitive spelling for an English speaker. Same with Portuguese and Danish
for that matter. If you put pinyin alongside those languages as just another
Latin-script-using-language, I don't find it especially weird, basically in
the normal range of variation. An English speaker has to learn specific rules
to pronounce it (approximately) correctly, but not an unusually large number
of them.

~~~
rangibaby
Good point, like "Ypres" or "Orleans". Thanks

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percept
Faked:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10626761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10626761)

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madengr
Back in grad school there was a guy named Fuk Yun.

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aceperry
He should rename his profile to, "the Notorious PDB."

