a rose by any other name

I was never really particular about how my name was pronounced until I went to work at RSI. Radio people are pedants when it comes to pronunciation. And rightfully so. The spoken word isn't the same as the written one. Semantics aside, the latter is a two dimensional visual construct whose meaning is apparent in itself. It doesn't matter what font a word is rendered in or on what kind of paper it is printed on. The same word conveys the same meaning in whatever form.

The spoken word however, is a rather different creature. The meaning it conveys is not apparent in itself. It is subject to factors not applicable to its ink-and-pulp cousin. Factors such as intonation, cadence, inflection and of course, pronunciation. Just as how clothes maketh the man, these are the aural apparel we dress our words in which determine how they are percieved and interpreted by our listeners. The same word spoken differently can convey different values and conjure different contexts. That is something every radio presenter - well, the good ones at least - learns early on.

So it was a pleasant surprise at RSI, when so many people actually knew to pronounce my name correctly. It was nice but didn't really strike me as a big deal at first. Like I said, I was never really particular about how my name was pronounced. When you grow up with even your family and close friends mispronouncing your name, the error becomes normalized through sheer frequency and accommodated as an accepted alternative. So growing up, I never took issue with the mispronunciation of my name. If anything, it sometimes felt weird when on the rare occasion, someone actually did get my name right.

But like I said, in radio, you cultivate a ear for nuances in speech and begin to appreciate the intangible qualities of the spoken word. You become sensitive not just to words, but to sounds - how certain words just "sound" more pleasing than others. You realize that your reaction to a word - the picture it paints in your mind or the emotion it evokes - does not depend so much on its inherent meaning as it does on how it is spoken - how it "sounds". It really has nothing to do with the intellectual process; rather, it is more of a primal, instinctive reaction. Remove words from the equation and the point is elucidated. Compare heavy metal with classical music and contrast their expected emotional and mental effects on the listener. So how a word sounds is vital to how it is perceived.

Which brings me back to the two versions of my pronounced name. The pronunciation of the first syllable is rather perfunctory. The crux of the problem lies really in the last two letters of my name that form the second syllable. The first version - the incorrect one - vocalizes the syllable according to its literal phonetic spelling. The second - the correct version - interprets its pronunciation according to more conventional Anglicized norms. I guess it could be argued that given its Semitic roots, it is the first version that stays truer to its cultural origins. But the fact is that the vast majority of the words in the English language are xenographically Anglicized terms. And when they become subsumed into another language, these words assimilate the pronunciation norms of that language as well. It is no different with names.

So with this cultivated sensitivity, I became more aware of my own instinctive reaction to how my name was pronounced. The improper version began to feel colloquial and gauche. The proper one, more sophisticated, more "natural"; you notice how much easier it rolls off the tongue - how, instead of two disjointed syllables as in the first version, it almost becomes a single syllable with a subtle deviation at the end. More... atas, you know?

Hence, I have decided that after 23 years of being indifferent to how my name was said, I really like the proper version better. It is not "Jo-el" or "Jo-well" or "Jewel" or "Henry".

It is "Jouhl". Say it out loud now. :)