Quote: My name is Brian. If someone spells their name as "Bryan", and I think that it's a bad way to spell it... Well, I don't try to force them to spell it the way that I like.
Maybe that's dodging the issue a little. What if someone spells your name Bryan. Would you force them to re-write it?
I've had this problem a lot. My name is unfamiliar to lots of people in southern England - shouldn't be but it is. I have years of experience of turning up at press conferences and giving my name, only to see the pretty young things (I'm afraid they are always pretty young things in the sexist world of PR) write down, say, Fairchild, Fairburn, Fairbrother or Fairweather. As these examples show, they are almost certainly not mishearing, but simply showing they don't know how to spell my name and so take compromise with a name they do know (a queue for registration at a press event is often long and busy, so they don't want to get bogged down in spelling names out. Other people with unusual names have the same problem.). Normally I'd accept whatever is written on the namecard and rush off to the champagne buffet. But occasionally, where security is involved, I'd insist on the proper spelling.
I was always struck by the consternation this caused. They just couldn't get a handle on the pronunciation of the second half. But in the far north of England, where I come from, not only is it a normal name (indeed, in the border town of Berwick almost every shop seems to owned by a Fairbairn), but we use bairn as an everyday word for child. I often have the same difficulty in the USA, though there they are much more gracious and actually tend to ask how to pronounce my name - before looking baffled. I haven't this problem in Canada, though, perhaps because the Caledonian presence is strong there.
However, neither Kirby's situation nor mine is at all relevant to a go database. There we are not mis-spelling a name. We are transliterating, and doing so for a (sort of) scientific purpose. We can't and shouldn't worry about individual preferences which would muck up indexing and searches. In GoGoD, however, we do also record the individual preferences where known. They just don't count as the main entry.
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