Monday 19 January 2009

It's pronounced.. MY-YAH

When I named Maya it didn't even occur to me that most people would pronounce her name MAY-YAH. Yes I can see how people get the MAY-YAH pronunciation but I am surprised that so many people haven't heard of the Mayans. Doing a quick web search now I found out that the name is commonly mispronounced.

I'm not sure how else you would spell Maya in order for it to be pronounced MY-YAH. Myyah? Myya? Myyuh? Myye? None of those spellings look any good to me. Besides Maya is pronounced MY-YAH!

So now I am constantly correcting people on how to pronounce her name. I also have to correct the same people over and over again because they don't remember. I'm wondering if it's something to do with the English language and our need to read things literally? - Maya obviously has the word May in it with an A on the end.

I still love the name Maya but I wish I'd thought of this before. Poor Maya is going to have to constantly correct people on the pronounciation of her name. And just to top it off she'll also have to constantly correct spelling of her middle and last names!

I can hear her now: "My name is MY-YAH not MAY-YAH. It's Katherine with a K not a C. And my surname has two E's not one."

Sorry darling daughter I didn't think this through before hand!

4 comments:

Zoya said...

That sounds totally ridiculous. I would never think people would come up with a different way to pronounce the name.

Eug said...

Gary Ablett would have been easier! :-)

Tanya said...

hehe.. I don't think I would want to name my daughter Gary!

Hamish said...

Just to confuse things, a web site I just found says to pronounce it May-a..

http://women.evenhealth.com/cgi-bin/showname.cgi?q=Maya

They have some nice meanings for it.