I have a beautiful Rover 45 (which is currently off the road) and I recently started looking at how much it would cost me to insure it. I went on to several websites, filled in all my details, and got my quotations. Two websites, however, didn’t recognise my name- 123.ie and quinn-direct.com, both of which are Irish websites. Apparently, my surname contained “invalid characters”.
I complained to them both promptly. To their credit, both have since emailed me (and apparently tried to contact me by phone) to tell me that they will be fixing this problem. I don’t see why there was ever a problem, though.
If you remove the fada from an Irish word, you change its meaning. Take for example ‘cas’, which means ‘turn’, and ‘cás’, which is a case. ‘Ait’ means ’strange’, while ‘áit’ means ‘place’. ‘Ba’ means ‘is’, ‘bá’ means ‘drown’. I could go on…
I understand that people who don’t speak Irish won’t know that my surname takes a fada, I have no problem with people spelling Gabhann “Gowan”. What gets me is when people have plenty of opportunity to get my name right (i.e. they read it on a form) and still spell it wrong.
It took me a year to get DCU to spell my name properly on their forms. It took me slightly longer to get my name spelled properly on DCU’s moodle site.
I don’t think it’s pretentious to want your name spelled correctly (mine has only been correct in the college newspaper once).
I also don’t think it’s too much to ask that Irish newspapers, published in Ireland for an Irish readership, use fadas where they’re meant to be- Dáil, Gardaí etc. Style guides which prohibit the use of fadas (as the College View’s does) are actively deciding to spell words incorrectly.
No comments:
Post a Comment