On the matter of names, part 1

As someone with a (somewhat unconventional) Chinese name, I’ve seen (and heard) various variations of my name:

• Xage Xin
• Yage Yin
• Y age
• Yage Lin
• Yakult
• Yage (G_my_middle_name_in_brackets_as_if_it’s_a_nickname) Xin
• Yage “G_my_middle_name_in_quotes_as_if_it’s_a_nickname” Xin

Today I would like to tackle some of the common challenges people tend to have when emailing me:

1. My first name starts with an “Y” and my last name starts with an “X”, which happen to be the second and third to last letters in the alphabet and those aren’t common letters to start a name with. This makes it easy to mix up the two letters, especially when the name doesn’t have a somewhat automatic pronunciation when you see it.
2. It might be easy to confuse my last name with other common Chinese last names.
3. My middle name is in English, which makes people think it’s a “nickname” instead of a “real name”, hence putting them in brackets or quotes.

Because of how many of these issues stem from not knowing how my name is pronounced or where the syllables are, I figured it might be helpful to give some explanations regarding the constituents of my name. “Yage” has two parts, /ja/ and /kɤ/, corresponding to two separate characters. (Not “yaydge” /jeɪd͡ʒ/, even though I do use it sometimes for fun.) “Xin” is pronounced as /ɕin/, not /ʒɪn/ or /zɪn/ — the closest alternative that I think works would be /ʃin/ (“sheen”) or /sin/ (“seen”). (I sometimes go by “Valph” too, which stands for Voiceless Alveolar-Palatal Phricative, /ɕ/.) While I understand that my name might be somewhat strange, there’s only 8 (or 7) letters in total, it’s not that hard to spell it right.

Part 2 on names coming soon in the near future, about classrooms and pronouncing a name.