If One is Good, Two Must Be Better

If I’ve not mentioned it, although I call my wife Irene, her actual given name is “Chu-Wan”, romanized from the original Chinese using the Wade-Giles romanization system.

Someone born in China today with the same name would have it spelled “Zhuwan” using the Pinyin romanization system.

The fact is, when spoken in Chinese, to my ear at least, the first sound in her name is a wholly foreign and unnatural sound that an English speaker just isn’t trained to say. It’s somewhere between “Ch”, “Zh” and “Jh” although rather slightly more towards “Zh” in most cases.

An interesting things is that when my wife is speaking Chinese, or others are speaking to her or about her, he name sounds much more like “Zhuwan.” On the other hand, if she’s speaking English, she pronounces her name more like “Chu-Wan” (phonetically, “Chew Wahn”). It is an interesting example of how when speaking different languages, the same words’ pronunciations can get altered by the words around them.

In any case, that’s just background to the actual story.

This evening, Irene was teaching Michelle about names. We’re at that stage where we’re trying to get Michelle to understand that, just like her, we have names other than “mommy” and “daddy.”

Upon explaining to Michelle that her name was really Chu-Wan, Michelle announced (and continued for the rest of the evening) that she was “Chew Two.”

I’m reasonably sure Irene didn’t find it as hysterically funny as I did.

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