The Baby Name Wizard

Reportedly, my sister-in-law, who is an elementary school teacher, encountered a student named "La--a." Pronounced "La'dash'a," which clearly stretches this trend to the limit.

@Rebekah - go ahead and click on the link regarding "Le-a" in Laura's post =]

Thanks, Rachel. :) I did, but only after I posted my comment. (Note to self: Read carefully before responding!) I do believe my SIL, though.

I've legally changed my name to Ry4an in every state I've lived, and it's never been anything but the expected hassle. DMV computers don't accept digits in the name field.

I think there is a equity issue here. Not everyone in the US is Anglo and accents and diacritics are an accepted part of the language - in every language but English! Computers in other countries seem to be able to work, for crying out loud! Whitewashing every Jose, Noel or Cecile because you can't figure out the accent aigu is completely inappropriate.

I married into an Irish O' last name and it is a HUGE pain in the butt. Some systems accept the ' but some don't... I am forever having to have my name looked up multiple ways and filling out online forms more than once because all computer systems handle the punctuation differently. I would never saddle a kid with punctuation in their first name!

I kind of hate how apostrophes are being used these days... a la Brae'dyn or "me and my girl's are going out" etc. I blame Facebook for the sudden profusion of incorrect apostrophes. I'd be ok with stricter rules on the use of apostrophes in names! :)

Incidentally last week at the park met a family with 3 girls, ages about 7, 4, and 11 months: Sadie, Bella, and Penelope. It was the first Penelope I'd ever met IRL, and she was adorable! I think if Eleanor ever gets a little sister we might have to go with Penelope after all!

And, I met a Logynn last week. I feel like she's forever going to be re-spelling her name for people!

I've read these sorts of things before - it's just blaming the user for the systems mistakes. Being an 'expert' in the computer field doesn't give purchase to comment on what is culturally apropriate.

Computers serve us not the other way around. If your computer system can't handle what's out there - upgrade. And toss out your gender biased and racist programmers and data entry people while you are at it.

Some of the problems handling special characters historically arise from keyboards (if you can't enter umlauts, you can't store them) and protection against SQL injection attacks (see e.g., http://xkcd.com/327/). Data storage cost was also a big consideration in the past; limiting the number and type of characters saved expensive storage space.

Newer systems and cheaper storage are better able to handle special characters, but a lowest-common-denominator problem can arise when a new system has to share data with an older system. I recently witnessed a bank flatly incapable of processing a payment to a person with the characters '-bin' in her name. She had to be re-named in the newer system so she could receive money she was owed from an older system at the bank.

The 'Tawanda' problem is, at it's root, a searching problem. When entering data into a system, you first need to determine if the data is for a person who is already in your system, or if it's for a totally new person. The more a name varies from conventional spelling norms, the more likely that an existing record will be missed and a new one created for what really is the same person.

The obvious solution here is to stop pronouncing our names like words, and instead only spell them like "Are-Why-Four-Ay-En", or whatever.

@SarahCV and bored01
I absolutely agree that there seems to be a cultural bias and general ignorance in the U.S. computer systems that should be addressed. But this isn't about what "should" be - it's an awareness of what "is." The question is whether you want to insist that your baby be a crusader for the cause and have to deal with identity problems all his or her life. An adult may choose to tackle this for himself, but is it fair to force it on your baby? Some data entry people are genuinely ignorant and can't reliably copy the name "Bob" correctly - perhaps THEY come from another country? (Haven't we all had some creative name spellings in the mail?) Some facilities truly can't afford to upgrade to more flexible systems. And some of these names are simply not clear without someone standing over you to explain it. Do you propose to "toss out" all these people? And how? It's the same with difficult to pronounce names - you can choose them if you want, but you have to be prepared to educate and correct perfectly innocent people over and over (and over and over)...and the lovely French "Berthe" will have to listen to her name pronounced "Bert" or "Bertha" in an ugly american accent all her life no matter how how often she corrects people. It's just reality. Choose with your eyes open.

I'm not at all convinced that cultural bias is behind the incompatible computer databases. For instance, I'd be astonished if enterprise software in Spanish-speaking countries has always been 100% consistent in its treatment of José and Jose.

And it's not as if punctuation, intercaps etc. are unknown in traditional English names. Consider British Prime Ministers like Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Augustus FitzRoy, Ramsay MacDonald, etc.

I would like to second rossingnol's comment.

bored01 wrote:

"Computers serve us not the other way around. If your computer system can't handle what's out there - upgrade. And toss out your gender biased and racist programmers and data entry people while you are at it."

It may seem that simple at first glance, but upgrading isn't a simple solution -- in fact, it's the source of much of the trouble. When you upgrade from a legacy system that had a limited character set (due to memory or keyboard limitations) to a more open system, you end up with mismatches and multiple entries.

Plus in the modern distributed computing world, you CAN'T necessarily upgrade -- because the limitations reside in the unique system/software configurations of your millions of users. Take this website as an example. Namipedia covers tens of thousands of names from all over the world. Each name page has its own URL, in the form http://www.babynamewizard.com/namipedia/boy/jose
But not all browsers can handle extended character sets in URLs. That means that we simply can't have separate pages for José and Jose. It's not a matter of ignorance or "racist programmers."

A stimulating conversation! In the end though, I just keep coming back to the feeling that it doesn't much matter what name we give our kids--with or without diacritics or English characters. Spell outs, repetition, and errors are absolutely inevitable. My daughter's name is Nina and not ONCE since she was born have I not had to repeat it--"NNNNNina. Yes, N. Not M." Or "'Neena,' not 'Nainah.'"

My name is Julia--multicultural, ancient, and common. I can't count the number of people that call me Julie and how many times I've had to actually spell Julia for people because they honestly weren't sure of its spelling. Not to mention the MANY times I've been called Julian. Don't even get me started on my last name...

So, once we fix all of our computers and get everyone in the US to spell their names as they "should" be spelled, I still don't think we've solved the problem.

This is a really interesting topic. While I agree with Laura that it's unlikely that explicit sexism/ethnocentrism is behind this issue, I do take bored01's point. I work on digital projects in the humanities, and there are times when the brute logic and constraints of a software system simply cannot accommodate the nuance of some piece of linguistic or cultural information.

Too often in our technocentric culture our response is to make it fit, cram it in, and take the limitations of the machine as acceptable constraints. I think this attitude is particularly common among programmers (though there are plenty of notable exceptions to this). Sometimes when programmers and humanities scholars collaborate on projects, a programmer will view any information that is not easily housed in the software as extraneous--the first impulse is to fit the vision to the software and not vice-versa. So on the one hand, the programmer Laura cites is making a valid point: *if* you are worried about these inconveniences with names, there are ways you can minimize them. However, if you have, say, a principled reason for wanting to give your kid a gender-neutral name, I hardly think the difficulties posed by databases should trump those principles. If that's the way we want to operate, we should all go by unique numerical IDs. I think bored01 is right that our first impulse should not be to locate the problem with the names, but with the technology (though it pains me to say that in regard to gratuitous punctuation marks!).

The question I find myself asking is Why. Why do we need to make our children have these types of names in order for them/us to feel special? Why can't we name kids the same old boring names with the same old tired spellings? Why should a child be named La-a, Ledasha, Lahdasha, Le'Dasha, La'Dasha, and L'Dasha instead of just Ladasha? What makes the name Braiden better than Braden? I do understand certain gender substitutions such as Logan being boy and Logynn being girl, but seriously, aren't we getting carried away a bit now?

Interesting topic!
I generally don't like intercaps and apostrophes in names to create 'unique' spellings. However quite a few names on my favourites list traditionally have diacritical marks. I think though if I used such a name I would spell it on the birth certificate without them. My married surname is traditionally spelt with an umlaut over the vowel. However, it has been dropped over the generations and pronunciation is very varied by most people as it's not common spelling/sound in English. I'm fairly relaxed about it, but if we ever move to Europe I'd be tempted to try spelling and pronouncing it 'correctly' as it's just a losing battle here :)

@zoerhenne - I agree. I know this is a well-worn topic here, but those unique spellings/names seem to backfire, don't they? A few days ago I was talking to a friend about an unusual boy's name, and I was saying that the reason I wouldn't name my kid something like that--if this makes sense--is that for people whom he may not get along with, the name would seem to exacerbate the problem. If you don't like a guy named John you just don't like him. If you don't like a woman named Brai'den, her name seems part and parcel to the whole problem. When you meet a kid with a "yooneek" name or spelling, it tends to be something you have to look *past*, not something that introduces that child as a special person as the parents intended.

One way of looking at it is that it is sort of weird that we expect our names to remain static, frozen, or, if you will, uniquely searchable for our whole lives. Many of us have had the experience of researching our family tree only to find the same woman called Mary in one place, Mary Ann in another place, Marian in the family Bible, and Mary Anne on her gravestone.
Is it really *wrong* for someone to write a note to me and address it to "Chrissie" instead of "Krissy" or "Kristen" instead of "Kristine"? It's all the same name family and in the end, the note is for me.
Finally, the double entry into the database thing is going to happen to many/most women anyway if they get married and take their husband's name. That's what DOB and SS numbers are for.

Jane 6, you're certainly correct that the variety of spellings and poor data entry makes the life of an historian more difficult (and interesting!). The question is whether or not these same misspellings made life more difficult for the people affected by it. In 1800, was it really more difficult to collect an army pension because of an error in the paperwork? Maybe so--I really have no idea.

But it is true that these things are a bureaucratic headache today. One area where it could be especially problematic is in medicine. As medical records are digitized, the possibility for errors increases. Already many Hispanic patients have two or three hospital ID cards because the folks in admitting don't understand how to deal with someone who has two surnames. Most of the time this is a mere annoyance, but for someone who has a complicated medical history, it can be dangerous as medications are prescribed under two different names. This could of course happen to John Smith, who gets improperly entered as Jonh Smith, but the likelihood of error probably increases with unusual names.

All of this technology makes us want to be more distinctive, so our children will stand out in the digital age, when so much seems to be controlled by faceless machines, but it also makes standing out that much more of a headache!

Barnacle-That wasn't really what I was saying. I don't think an unusual name is a negative against the person. However, if I know a Braiden, Braden, and Brayden I must forcibly remember how to spell each one. If they were all spelled Braden they would all still be unique people but they would just happen to have the same spelling of their names.
By the way, Prince's glyph use backfired because no one could use that signature as a spoken word and thus he had to revert back to Prince.

Elizabeth T-Your quote of "All of this technology makes us want to be more distinctive, so our children will stand out in the digital age, when so much seems to be controlled by faceless machines, but it also makes standing out that much more of a headache!" This is more of what I was trying to say. In trying to stand out more by spelling a name with an apostrophe or other punctuation, are we not just creating confusion and hiding our identity more than creating it because we end up with a record the same as another because of misspelling.

I'd like to point out that the reverse problem is also true. If you have a common name, with the common spelling, your records can and do get merged with the wrong person.

I have a common first, middle and last name. I have to be very careful to pick up the correct prescription, get the right records at the doctor's office, etc.

As a teacher, I find multiple spellings of the same name a trap. This year for example, I must remember that Connor is a ninth grader but Conor is a 12th grader. It is very easy to slip! (And believe me, that's just the start of it!)

O', D', Mc, and Mac last names have been quite common in the U.S. long before computers, and hyphenated last names are becoming popular. Really, we need to figure out how to make the system work with the names. If they cannot handle other characters, use another identifying mechanism. After all, no matter how "easy" or "hard" the name, data entry mistakes will happen. Mary Smith and Mayr Smith cannot be assumed to be same person unless there is another way of identifying them in the system.

I will take on Zoerhenne's question of why. I have sympathy with the unusual spellers, having picked a bizarro obscure variant of Julian for my son, rather than "just picking Julian already" (advice I had been given, and I think reasonably so). Why did I ignore the perfectly good advice? I had a lot of reasons, since I was aware that we were saddling our lad with a name that would require consistent perpetual spelling out... and went ahead and put the obscure variant down on the birth certificate anyway.

So, the reasons: some of them were related to namesakes - after characters in a favorite book that was also a favorite book of my grandparents. Some of them were related to better nicknames, and some of them were echoing syllables of family names without repeating. But, a big part of it was that I'm a visual person so to me the name I picked just feels totally and completely different from Julian. Granted, I was also attracted to the different pronunciation (the one vowel swapped out made a world of difference to me), but I would emphatically not have wanted to do a more phonetically straightforward spelling of my son's name (Jolian? Joelian? Joeleon? Best yet, Joe Leon? Eeek.)

So really, I think my reasons for wanting to adhere to the established spelling for the obscure wacky variant even though it is more trouble likely are the same ones that motivate the parents of a Braidyn or a TaWanda. Sometimes, it's not just about the sound but it's about the way it looks and the way it draws attention to particular parts or give particular meaning within the family structure. And I can only support those desires in other people, even though I find the invented spellings not to my personal taste.

It makes me deeply sad that there's a trend away from names with diacritical marks, umlaute, and other "unusual letters" like the ø in Søren, that extends to countries where those "extra" letters are commonly used... precisely because people are aware that these letters won't be supported in an English-speaking world and by computer systems.

I find the names Jose, Zoe, and Soren to be much prettier and much more satisfying and "complete" when they have their more complicated, 26+ letter alphabet spellings.

I should point out that I don't endorse willy-nilly adding diacritical marks where they don't make any phonetic or grammatical SENSE, unless one is naming a heavy metal band. :) Internal capitalizations and hyphens are always fine with me, as they've had a long tradition of use to indicate a double name. Internal apostrophes (rather than accent marks) bug me because they seem symptomatic of larger societal apostrophe abuse, as others have said. (Jame's Restaurant serving Fish and Chip's?)

I don't understand the apostrophe thing. (Not talking about legitimate O'Sullivans and the like)

Apostrophes are supposed to represent a missing letter. Also, in foreign languages, like French, they're used because the French don't like to have two vowel sounds together. So "D'Angelo" would be pronounced "Dan-ge-lo." To me, DeAngelo and D'Angelo should be pronounced differently.

A name like L'Dasha doesn't make sense because there wouldn't be two vowels together (although at least a letter is missing).

And Ta'Wanda? That makes the least sense. There's no reason for the apostrophe at all.

Interesting discussion. As a couple of others stated, part of the problem is people entering data who don't copy exactly what is written on the original form (or the original form being illegible). When I started teaching, I wasn't married, and my name was First Middle Last, with an unusual first and last name, but no accents or punctuation. My name was entered into the computer by the district, the school, my department, and the library separately. I had stuff under 3 variations floating around, which was a total nightmare when it came to getting paid, getting direct deposit, insurance, etc. When I got married and changed my name, I filled out the various forms that my name was now First Maiden Last. Especially with the original variations, this complicated things. It seems not one single person read my forms correctly and changed all three names to be correct. When I quit, I was still battling the district for various things that had been blocked to me because of incompatibilities in the system.

Some of the TaWanda/Tawanda problem could easily be solved by people who just copy forms directly without messing up something that should be easy enough.

Hey, I'm not saying programmers are intentionally racist, but it is only a problem if you're coming from a culture that accepts a 'correct' way of pronouncing words or spellings. Today's Parent in Canada just released their top 100 name list, and take a look at the ones that you would never see in a list of the top names in the USA:

http://www.todaysparent.com/pregnancy/pregnancy/article.jsp?content=2011...

Felix? Florence? Nowhere near the top. But how many of the names on that list make the top because they are bilingual? Felix is probably high because it is a name in both English and French. Even people who do not live in the French part of the country are influenced by these names because they hear them on television, etc. (eg. Felix Potvin used to play for the Maple Leafs). In a country that is used to using accents, it seems the computer systems are made to fit what is out there.

Spelling a name with an accent doesn't make it a 'different' name, it simply acknowledges a cultural heritage and provides a guide to pronunciation, as in my example of Noel (male name, as in Noel Coward) and Noel (female name, pronounced No-well)

Lucubratrix-I accept your explanation as a possible answer to my questions above. Liking the way a name looks written down and having a family connection to a name makes sense. Also as I stated before to signify a specific gender I understand spelling changes. But the bigger question still looms, are you any less you because your name is spelled Jennifer (yes even if you have to use your last initial to distinguish) as opposed to Jennyfur? My dd's mn is Renee but there is no accent mark because I didn't include it on the BC. I still pronounce it like Ren-ay not ren-ee or ree-nee or whatever. My screen name above is Zoe Rhenne. This has caused some confusion a while back when we discussed the topic. I had some people not know where to split it and do Zoer Henne. Yes, I did choose a variant spelling because I liked the way it looked. But even if I had been "forced" to use the traditional spelling of the name. It would still be me.

I'd be interested in learning more about other nations' name records, especially in languages that heavily involve accent marks. Spanish accent marks change pronunciation. While studying in Spain, I lived with an elderly couple named Argentina and Jose. Not José (emphasis on the e) but Jose (emphasis on the o). The difference in these two names for them was like the difference between my name, Julia, and a common mistake, Julie. Do you suppose other nations are more careful with, or are more equipped to deal with symbols in their systems?

I think people need to accept that the use of apostrophes (at least in US naming practices) has evolved beyond replacing a missing letter to become a substitute for a diacritical mark. It generally expresses that a particular syllable of a name should be accented. Ta'Wanda tells us (perhaps) that the name should be pronounced TUH-wahn-duh rather than tuh-WAHN-duh.

I realize this is not the traditional use of an apostrophe, but I'd say it's a legitimate evolution based on widespread practices. Since English doesn't regularly use diacritical accents, why not develop a vernacular means of expressing stress or emphasis in names?

To me this is a totally different issue than the random apostrophes my students stick into plural nouns, verbs, and names that end in "-s." [As in, "LeBron Jame's has a jump shot that rank's highest among NBA player's."]

Special characters is a problem with my current name search. One of our favorite girl names is Breña - pronounced Bren-YA. However, I am very hesitant to use it because of the ñ. Without the tilde, it's just "Brena" - a completely different name! I've considered spelling it "Brenya" but I don't care for the letter y (just a personal thing) and it loses the appeal for me! Guess it's back to the drawing board...sigh.

constantstar: I find Breña very pretty! I agree that Brena and Brenya are very different though. I would consider Brenia--with the -ia sound matching that in Georgia.

I am having fun looking at the Canada list: new names I have not notices yet:
Noémie/Noemie/Noemi (a refreshing version of Naomi)
Coralie
and is Ayla the same as Isla or is it A-la?

Just looked at the BNW page for Ayla-- it is A-la, and I guess that is a common question! :)

Just tried to search the SSA database using ñ and I got an error "Use alphabetic characters only!".

RB and constantstar-Your point is well taken. In foreign names the diacritical marks are necessary. I like knp's suggestion of Brenia. I also though of a variation Breniah but I suppose my spelling may be pronounced Bren-eye-uh and knp's may be mispronounced and Bren-ee-uh. Sigh.

I agree with RB. I'm not always sure how to pronounce/read the apostrophe in names, no matter the origin. I guess this is partially because I never studied the language(s) (Italian?) that use them and maybe didn't grow up with a lot of people who had these surnames. With African American names (at least I think they are mostly African American? I'm not sure), I'm beginning to understand how to pronounce the apostrophe. D' at the beginning, for example, seems to usually be pronounced di (e.g. D'Andre=Diandre). I'm less sure about what to do with something like Ta'Wanda, but I see no reason the pronunciation of the apostrophe in these names should be required to follow Italian rules or whatever other language uses apostrophes in names.

Well, I don't at all care if my nickname is spelled Jenny or Jennie. I use the former, but Jennie is just as correct and equally "me" because it's also a consistent logical diminutive and it's a nickname, which is by definition informal and therefore not as subject to correct/incorrect.

But to answer your question, to me Jennyfur and Jennifer have very different feels. I have a lot of students with variant spellings and I always call out Sara's name without realizing that it sounds the same as the other homonym (Sarah, Cerrah, whatever). I only remember they sound alike when both SAY-ruhs show up to collect their exam.

This probably comes of me reading too much. :)

I like lucubratrix's observations. I'm not wild about creative spellings, especially when they violate grammatical common sense, but the diatribes against unusual spellings always seem to cite African American names most often. I remember someone explaining a while back that the seemingly random diacritical marks in some African American names actually had to do with a legacy of the French colonies like Louisana. But I suspect that if you were a white person explaining that your kid's name is LaKasha'a because that's what her African American birth mom named her, you'd get stronger negative reactions than if you said you picked the name Sulalita for your white baby because you and your partner had gone trekking in Nepal and it means "most pleasing." And there's something kind of wrong with that.

In other words, my conservative take on all this is leave other cultures' naming practices alone.

PS: Nepalese names are really beautiful, though.

I grew up a with a guy whose given first "name" was H. (just H.) He goes by his middle name. Legend had it that his father really wanted to name him a single initial to get back at the army. Apparently, the dad, who had always gone by his middle name, was forced by army record-keepers to use his first name. He decided to name his son in a way that would make those record-keepers' lives difficult. That was in 1965. Maybe this isn't as modern a problem as we think!

My mother works at a library and often encounters unique names and spellings when she has to make library cards. She was frustrated at first, because sometimes people got very upset with her if she didn't pronounce a name "correctly" if she was given the spelling first or didn't add apostrophes or internal capitals automatically if she was given the pronuncition first, as if she should have known or something. Now, she doesn't even try until she gets both the pronunciation and the spelling. She will always ask if there are any capitals or punctuation marks too. She's learned her lesson!

RB, I like your explanation of the new use of internal apostrophes, and I think that I am now much more appreciative of why Ta'Wanda should have an apostrophe there. Given that I sort of ridiculously love accents I would prefer if there could be an a-acute instead to denote the stress, but I understand that an apostrophe is easier to manage on most keyboards than á, so I understand why parents would opt for that. Thanks for substantially shifting my perception of the internal apostrophe names!

I think the most logical transliteration of Breña that would get you the tilde-n pronunciation is Brenya. I would personally probably just use it with the tilde in, since it's a beautiful name as is... and the 'ny' transition to me looks a bit awkward. If you don't think you want to pass that logistical hassle on to a child, I would just Breña in the middle name spot, since the full middle name gets used rarely and wouldn't create as much of a hassle for id cards, etc.

But I am livid for you that there isn't the computer support to let you use this beautiful name in its original form. And I would hope that as the Latino population in the US goes from a minority to a majority, that eventually computer systems will be able to handle the ñ better than they do at present.

Maybe I'm the only one who likes these kind of names (not that I would use one myself). I think name creativity as part of the African-American cultural traditions is great! Many names are SO out of the box, with cool new sound combos, and really stretching the limits of the language. In a way, it's a bit subversive to use names that don't conform to the "rules" of mainstream English. I wonder if that's why people have such strong reactions against these types of names. THEY are supposed to aspire to be more like US, right?! It's maybe a bit uncomfortable to the white elite mainstream to see that, well, no, perhaps not...

What an ironic, timely subject. Just had a conversation with a friend today who says that she knows someone who knows someone who knows an elementary school child named Ta-a (Tadasha, of course). I explained that this is an urban legend, and she swore up and down that it's true. If it is, I would imagine that the child was named because of the Le-a legend - but I am still skeptical.

Thanks for all the spelling suggestions! I still love Breña in it's original form. If we use it, we'll stay as is. Why give in to other's ignorance? :)

@lucubratrix: We will probably use Breña for a middle name if we have a girl (we find out Wednesday!!). :)

Well it's always someone who knows someone who knows a kid named Ta-a or some such thing. Nobody can ever point to a roster or a medical record or the SSA list or whatever.

In my twenties, I knew a Genyphyr (Jennifer)who was the same age as I was. It seemed very 6th grade to me, like when everyone was changing their name "Tracy" to "Traci" or "Michelle" to "Myeshelle." There was nothing I could do with "Beth" so perhaps I've held a grudge all these years against little white girls with creatively spelled names!

Goodness, a very timely entry in last week's local paper....
A Happy Birthday to Da'Liyah. In this case I would read the apostrophe as emphasis on the first syllable but wouldn't the capital for the L be unnecessary? And how do people actually pronounce the name, and the flower in the first place? I think I call it Day-le-a.

All of this sounds all too familiar ... I named my daughter Esmé and we ran into issues from day 1, when we reviewed her birth certificate and submitted the Social Security paperwork.

Neither system accepted the é that serves the important purpose of indicating the proper pronunciation of the name. Both instead replaced it with a standard e, which leaves confusion as to whether the name is pronounced as EHZ-may or EHZ-me.

That said, I wouldn't change her name. My husband and I named her for Salinger's Esmé and while I know she'll be simply Esme in paperwork, records and other places, she's still Esmé inside and to us. And I hope she doesn't mind helping people when they ask how to pronounce it, since they surely will.

But as our cultural awareness becomes more global, I hope we see more and more special characters where applicable.

Re: Breña, I feel you but suggest you stick with it! A friend from college had an ñ and while it was an issue, she loved her name. Watching her handle issues with grace might have actually been what convinced me to go with Esmé and not something safer, in fact. :)

Both DAHL-yuh (first syllable like the Indian lentil dish) and DAL-yuh (first syllable rhymes with "Al") are American dictionary listed pronunciations for the flower. It is named after a Swedish Botanist surname of Dahl, and I believe that's DAHL, so I've always said DAHL-yuh (and then gotten in the mood for a curry). I think the main Brit pronunciation is something more like DAYL-yuh, but I could be wrong about that.

Da'Liyah I would pronounce DAH-lee-ya instead - the "iyah" ending suggests to me that there are three syllables intended and not just the usual two, based on the pattern set by Aliyah. An apostrophe-less DaLiyah would have been pronounced by me as a Dah-LEE-ya (like Aliyah but with a D in front of it). I think in this case the emphasis-adding apostrophe and unusual spelling are helpful in distinguishing it from the traditional Daliah pronunciation(s).

Isn't it standard for an internal apostrophe to be followed by a capital letter? It is in surnames like O'Sullivan or D'Angelo, and it has also been the case for first names I've real-life encountered with the internal apostrophes.

I think Breña sounds pretty. The problem I foresee is that a native Spanish speaker may Anglicize her name to "Brain ya" since that is how the 'e' is pronounced in Spanish. It wouldn't be intuitive for a Spanish speaker to flatten out the 'e' to get Brenya. Breña in Spanish sounds nice, but Brain-ya, not so much.

Hmm... I'm having some trouble with the apostrophe-indicates-pronunciation theory—not the theory itself, but the issue of *which* syllable the apostrophe modifies. Da'Liyah, for example, I would read as dah-LEE-ah, and Ta'Wanda as tah-WAN-dah. I'm basing this assumption on 1) the fact that names like D'Angelo are pronounced dee-ANN-jeh-loh, and not DEE-un-jeh-loh, and 2) that most names in this style stress the second syllable (e.g. NY Jets player LaDainian Tomlinson = luh-DAY-nee-in, or soccer player DaMarcus Beasley = duh-MAR-kus). If anything, an apostrophe followed by a capital suggests to me that the first syllable is de-emphasized.

However, if someone can cite a source or some examples for this first-syllable-stressed theory, I could be convinced.

Regarding the mutability of spellings, my husband has a colleague with a very German last name that contains an umlaut—something like Müller. Sometimes she spells it that way, but I've also seen in spelled Mueller—in fact, on her own web page it is spelled both ways on different parts of the page. (The extra e is often used when umlauts can't be used to indicate the pronunciation—it is closer to MYOO-ler, not MULL-er). It is interesting to me that both Müller and Mueller are correct spellings, but Muller would be wrong.

My own personal feelings on using accent marks in names is that, in the U.S. at least, it's too much of a hassle to insist on them in official documents, but there's no reason why you can't use them on a day-to-day basis. You can be Noelle Genevieve legally but still write Noëlle Geneviève on your homework assignments, resume, wedding invitations, whatever—much like you can legally change your surname upon marriage, but continue to use your maiden name professionally. I think it's much less stressful to deal with if you scrap the idea that you can only have one version of your name that you use for everything, rather than using different names as the situation calls for it. As long as you keep straight which name is the legal version, you'll be fine.