I’ve been teaching in Oxford for a couple of weeks, and have had a number of Chinese among my students. Their names, of course, are impossible to pronounce or remember – but to make Westerners comfortable, they have all taken English forenames as children. So I spend much of my time discoursing with Geoffrey and Clement, Marcus and Gervase (poshly pronounced Jarvis). No sign of a St John yet, but it can only be a matter of time.
How charming and old-fashioned. How courteous. And how lucky we are in the UK that the world’s future first power prefers British English and culture to the American versions. Thanks God we gave them back Hong Kong, I say, for I suspect that the peninsula’s native plutocrats have set the fashion for this pleasing trend on the mainland.
Now, I think, we Brits should return the compliment – out of both politeness and pragmatism. Think how gratified this century’s Number One People will be if we start adopting Chinese names – and of course, learn to pronounce them. I would ask my students for help, but two problems present themselves.
First, Chinese is a tonal language. So - even if I learned the words - without constant practise and checking, I might well muff the pronunciation with disastrous consequences. Second, although my students often laugh, they can also hide their humour behind the proverbial inscrutability. I’m worried they may teach me to introduce myself as ‘Pile of Poo’ or something similar, Then again, if I pronounce that wrong, it may still come out as ‘Son of Heaven’.
