[sshine]

Every time I see Erdős, I think "Oh great, there's that Hungarian umlaut."

And I pronounce his name [ˈɛrdøːʃ], because I've heard that's how you do it.

But it pains me a little.

It pains me because I like to be correct about spelling and pronunciation; I think it is respectful.

But it is also an effort, people don't hear me right and get self-conscious about their own pronunciation.

And I can't easily type Hungarian accents.

It's the kind of name I'd prefer to copy-paste, if I need to be public, and get wrong if I can get away with it.

I'd let anyone off the hook for not correctly typing or pronouncing Hungarian accents in casual conversation.

[eesmith]

I don't think Erdős would consider it all that disrespectful as his Wikipedia entry quotes 'the "ő," often (even in Erdos's own papers) by mistake or out of typographical necessity replaced by "ö,".'

For example, at https://web.archive.org/web/20051015141515/http://ecp6.jussi... you see he used "Paul Erdös".

The same for his paper at https://web.archive.org/web/20120324221556/http://www.amt.ed... where the mathematics journal's typesetting clearly supports á, ó, and ö.

[foxglacier]

How do you apply that thinking to Chinese names, especially those of people who only lived before romanization, or before pinyin? Using pinyin is no good because you get names like "Yang" instead of "Young" as well as huge dialect differences in pronunciation. Most people won't even be able to recognize the same characters written in two different places. I'd say use the language you're communicating in because communication is the purpose of writing, instead of inserting foreign symbols that nobody has any idea how to pronounce to make a political statement.

Having said that, I always copy-paste names of customers I'm talking to directly when I can't type them.

[sshine]

Incidentally, I try my hardest to pronounce Chinese names correctly, as I study Chinese.

You would write “Yang” and not “Young” (assuming that’s their name and they didn’t change it to “Young” after migrating), and you would leave out the pinyin vowel markers.

Since many Chinese carry a western name for the convenience of having something westerners can pronounce, that can be a safe fallback.

[foxglacier]

What I mean is there's often no way to write Chinese names for people who don't know the language while also being what their owners would used. Yang ends up being pronounced like "bang" instead of "bung" and the between spoken dialects break pinyin even further. Characters are the faithful way but completely unreadable and untypeable to most people. I'd say just use the best way to communicate instead of using confusing symbols out of respect for strangers at the expense of respect for the person you're talking to.

When I see names with strange accents like ő, I just ignore them. Better that than guessing wrong. Of course if it's a real person you have a relationship with, you'd go to a bit of effort to figure it out.