...to expect the school to spell my child's name correctly?

[QueenofKelsingra]

DS1 has a name that uses an accent on one of the letters. to be clear, this isn't some stupid attempt to make a name 'modern' or whatever, we are a bilingual family and DS1's name is from my husband's country. The accent is important, it changes the pronunciation of the name. His name is similar to an English version barring the accent and the change of one other letter.

everything that comes home is missing the accent, at least half has the wrong spelling completely (so the English spelling, not the foreign one).

I have spoken to the school twice and they just look at me like I'm making a fuss over nothing. AIBU to expect them to make the effort to get his name right?? i like to keep his school things - nativity programmes etc - in his memory box and it is annoying me that it all has his name spelt wrong!

So AIBU??

as the owner of an accented name it pisses me off when people miss it off. none of my school docs (or my bloody degree) ever have the accent on

Most databases are developed to only deal with one character set. There are exceptions, and multi-lingual support is best practice. However, the sort of cheap tat that schools are saddled with, developed on the cheap on top of either amateur-hour stuff like Access or as quickly as possible on top of a grown-up database like SQL Server, Oracle or one of the free alternatives, will almost certainly not be internationalised. That means that either it will only be able to represent American English (ie, no diacritics) or someone might have chosen one set of diacritics at random, which are by sod's law guaranteed not to be the one your name needs.

To develop a school information system that could cope with all names, from all written languages, would require (a) unicode and (b) the ability to deal with, as a minimum, left-right and right-left writing. It would also require means to, for example, sort "alphabetically" names in different character sets. None of this is impossible, none of this is even terribly difficult (although unicode will at least double the storage requirements, disk space is very cheap). However, the chances of the typical educational establishment having done it are close to zero.

My children have unusual Irish names we get all sorts how I often joke that I would have called them Bill and Ben if I was that fussed about spelling and correct pronounciation not that big a deal for me.

ZingSweetPea how does your son feel about being called Sam? If he doesn't like it then you're right to pull them up but by year 2 he is old enough to form an opinion about his name and the teacher to form a relationship with him which is for them to work out between themselves.

My daughter is Harriet, we never ever call her Hattie. However, if that's a nickname she ends up with and doesn't object to then it's not my place to comment, it's not my name.

We can't enter non standard letters I.e. accents on our school database. So staff would never see the name written with an accent if they use lists etc from our only ICT system.

I think, once alerted to it, it behoves a school to make the effort. Not respecting other languages is a bit crap if we think Every Child Matters.

Interesting post friday

gwen

I did say it in my post that he doesn't like being called Sam. if he did I wouldn't have bothered.
He actually prefers Sammy.

our oldest hates being called Josh, he politely corrects/asks adults to call him Joshua. they respond and try to remember, but he is loosing the battle with his peers.
it's annoying.

I would never take the liberty to shorten anyones name or nickname them without asking their permission first.

our DD is Elizabeth. so many people asked us " so is she Lizzie or Beth?"
um, neither. her name is Elizabeth. call her that, if that's not too hard for you!

Not respecting other languages is a bit crap if we think Every Child Matters.

Up to a point. Suppose I name my child ??????? (pronounced Amestris), a perfectly reasonable Persian name. It means friend or companion, and was the name of Xerxes wife. That's like IT nightmare bingo: Persian is a right-to-left language, it requires unicode to represent, it requires support for cursive characters in the software and it's unlikely anyone has a Farsi keyboard in the school. To what extent should a school in England accommodate this?

Miss spelling the name completely is out or order. Just missing off the accent, I could forgive them for if I hadn't already brought it up - have you flagged this up with them already? I think you should only have to point it out to the school once.

Even thoug DSs name isn't that popular in the UK, it's apparently popular in Poland (or atleast with Polish people who live in the UK, and send their DC to the same school as my DC!) So, it seems there is one other DC in the school with the Enlglish spelling and several with the non UK spelling. The office staff have made a mistake occationally, but it's never happened on official documents.

friday.

. You are right

Amestris is a lovely name

... that sounded sarcastic. Amestris is a lovely name

what bugs me a lot is when they misspell DS3's name.

it's Michael.
probably 99% of people spell their name that way. yet we get Micheal so often, it is ridiculous!

why would it be Micheal?
-el means "of God, belonging to God"
like many other Biblical names - Daniel, Gabriel, Raphael, Nathaniel, Ezekiel and so on.
yes, maybe people don't know this, but how hard is it to remember the correct spelling of a proper, traditional, well-known name that really only is used with only one common spelling?

(and isn't in the Stephen/Steven, Catherine/Katherine category)

unless you are dyslexic (or some other learning difficulty) it just makes you look thick and lazy.
and if you are a teacher doing this, that is really bad. I wouldn't trust you can teach spelling....

You do realise this is going to happen the whole rest of his life living in English speaking countries, right? Are you ready for that battle? At least until he grows up and decides to be plain Peter instead of Péter....

I never spell cafe with an accent. I would feel like such a prat to write it that way. If people mispronounced my name I would assume they had bad hearing; I'm much too polite to correct them (and too naive to realise they might be having a go).

Meh. My boys are John, Mike & Tom (not really, but for the story's sake, pretend it's in that order...). They look a lot alike & Tom's teacher (who taught the others) always calls him Mike; the whole class corrects her in unison. We think it's hilarious. I have had art pieces that Mike made with John's name written on the back by staff. No biggie.

I don't know how to do an accent, and I don't know how to do one in Outlook or the internet either. It isn't obvious.

Miss spelling the name completely is out or order.

Sometimes, of course, people make spelling mistakes, on occasions even two in a short sentence. Yes, they should pay more attention to spelling your child's name. But even for common names spelt the standard way, people make mistakes, misunderstand, screw up. Commenting on other people's spelling on MN is a sure way to get responses like "they might be dyslexic", or if Masha Bell is in range "English is illogical", or more simply "don't be rude". It's the same with names. If your child's given name is uncommon, or is an uncommon spelling of a common name, or is the common spelling but there are lots of other spellings in circulation (for example, you're called Catherine) people are going to make more mistakes with it. If your surname is uncommon, people are going to make mistakes. Getting involved in an escalating war of words over it, as though they're doing it deliberately, seems an over-reaction.

My given name has two common spellings, and it's 50/50 which one I get, even when I say. My surname, bizarrely, even though it's the obvious near-phonetic spelling of a noun in common use, is almost always misspelt, in at least four common ways. I can almost count on one hand the number of occasions over nearly fifty years both have been spelt correctly without my needing to spell one or both of them out, and even then sometimes my given name goes wrong. Shit happens. People make mistakes. English spelling is (whisper it, in case Masha's around) not straightforward. Spelling of names from other cultures is even harder. Don't take it personally.

If it were me I'd expect them to spell/pronouce it correctly but wouldn't be bothered about the accent so much.

This is one reason I gave the girls English names with their standard spelling. 99% of the time other people spell them correctly.

vole

he hates Mike, Mikey etc.

we call him Miki Moki Monster though but that's a family thing, so different kettle of fish.

School computer systems are likely to be a factor. I have a common name, but it always comes up underlined in red, and as a mere teacher, I don't have the authority to add it in. Data systems are rubbish, and the teachers aren't able to update it.

My DCs have foreign names from DH's culture. Knowing that spelling and pronounciation could be issues we used them as middle names. One DC has the accent omitted as anyone spelling it in this country won't understand the effect of the accent anyway. DH's familyand anyone else from the culture is welcome to add it in, but it seemed simpler to formally leave it out as it will happen at some point anyway.

ooh, this took off a bit while I was away!

Auldalliance ^In French, accents totally change the sound of an 'e', so Mélanie is pronounced almost like "Mey-la-nie" while Melanie would be Meuh-la-nie.
It does make a difference to the child if one vowel sound is mispronounced.
I've spelt my DS's name a non-French way, and while I expect the school to spell it right I don't expect them to pronounce it the British way. It's hard to shove an English sound into a French sentence, so I fully understand that they pronounce it as you would the French equivalent, which is spelt differently.^

^^ exactly this. I'm not going to say the name but it is the exact same as the melanie example, same letter and accent on a different and male name. likewise I don't mind if the English pronounce the name in the English manner but DS1 actually notices this and has said that his teachers don't say his name correctly.

to clarify - I don't mind the odd thing from someone who hardly knows him/has only heard the name not seen it written etc. my issue is with his key worker and the office admin woman who send out all the paperwork and the fact that I have brought it to their attention before.

to those that have mentioned Chinese and Persian - Chinese certainly can be written with pinyin (actually cant remember the accents for this right now, sorry!) so names can be written in 'Chinese phonetics' for want of a better phrase. not sure about Persian and other character bases languages - do they have a similar system?

woo this is not an unheard of accent - we use it all the time in the words English has 'borrowed' from other languages such as café, soufflé etc. English is a melting pot of many languages (due to our history of being invaded a fair bit!) so I don't feel it is completely comparable with a character based language whose words we do not use.

Friday that is an interesting post, and if they had said 'the system wont let us' I would accept that to a point but that is not the reason given. the admin woman laughed and said 'oh I don't know how to do that!'.

Stupidly we thought a similar/recognisable foreign name with an accent would be easier for him and others in england than a very foreign looking and sounding name we considered with no accent.

My dd is yr 5 and ALWAYS has her name spelled incorrectly.

Her first name is in the Bible...So hardly new.
Our surname is a town in southern England...

It was even wrong on her spellings book....and when I asked them to change it the teacher said... But I've written it so beautifully !

Next time the bookcase home I got my sharpie out and fixed it!

I'm sure she wouldn't accept that excuse from a student!

Sorry I missed that you already said he didn't like Sam.

Mis-spelling a name is okay occasionally, but not every time. I would guess that the office has got the class list wrong.

It's not acceptable it's just lazy.

YANBU.

swishy

@ but I've written it so beautifully
that's bonkers.

Kelsingra would you mind telling what the name is? I really am so curious now!

(and whoever quoted Peter with a Hungarian spelling - yay!)