Sanyam wrote in to ask:  ’Is it true, that we can pronounce proper nouns as we deem fit?’

As far as I understand from my experience at school, this ‘myth’ is more a result of school kids trying to excuse themselves of pronouncing English names correctly by resorting to a bogey rule that you can pronounce a proper noun the way you want. Here’s my personal take on this—

In short, I would say, ‘an individual has the right to assert that a particular sequence of sounds (and its corresponding transcription) is their name’. As such, you can pronounce any goddamn word, proper noun or not, as you deem fit, but you have to ultimately utter something that a community of speakers will understand and connect to. Most proper names derive from known concepts, characters or stories and have some meaning associated with them. So, there is community wide acceptance of what the pronunciation of the word would be. If you choose the same name, it might be silly to insist that people pronounce it in some other manner. Of course, this community-accepted pronunciation can vary with the community. For eg. John in English becomes Giovanni in Italian; Joseph becomes Giuseppe, and Arvind becomes Aurobindo and so on…

As a speaker of Hindi, I know that Sanyam’s name is a reference to the Hindi word for patience. So, I know what the name is and how it is pronounced. He can still assert that he wants his name to be pronounced in a different fashion, but then his name wouldn’t be ‘Sanyam’ as people know/understand it.  He can of course assert that he wants a unique proper name for himself. He can come up with a sequence of sounds and call it his name, and then ask others to call him that. For instance, he could say that his name is Fristinum (some random word). But even this made up name would have some pronunciation and he would want people to use it when calling him. It’s a different matter that, if people aren’t familiar with this word, as they won’t be if you have made it up, they will all probably pronounce it in different ways, out of ignorance/confusion rather than out of an assertion of their alleged right to pronounce proper nouns at will.