this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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I truly cannot stress enough how utterly socially unacceptable it is to correct someone's pronunciation of their own name. In this respect, names are different from other kinds of words. Please reconsider this embarrassing position of yours.
"Imperialism is when you respect someone's self identification" 🤡
If you pronounce it with all schwa vowels but you speak in a Hindi accent I'm sure nobody would bat an eye. As a white dude, I would probably sound more like I'm making fun of her Indian heritage if I imitated a Hindi accent to say her name as closely to how you say I should say it as possible. But in an American accent, this pronunciation is not accurate. It makes her name sound like "Cuh-muh-luh", which sounds more like a rude nickname related to semen than an earnest attempt to preserve her name's origin. Even ignoring my own arguments about why I want to say it the way she says it, it's just not
Most people can't control their voice with the precision needed to accurately preserve the original phonetics of everyone's names EXACTLY as they should be said. They can make the sounds they need for their language and very few more. Changes in pronunciation are inevitable, not imperialist. Imperialism would be if I went to India and insisted that everyone there named Kamala pronounced their name the way my Vice President does. Unfortunately the British did basically this, but that's not what's happening when a willing immigrant's child chooses for themselves what to be called.
"It's brain-rot to call someone what they tell you to call them" 🤡
Get fucked. We're talking about a person who has a name and has a preference to how it is pronounced. No one gives two shits or a single fuck how you feel about that.