Print this PostThe other day I received a package that my parents had sent to me for Christmas. I wasn’t home when the mailman made the first attempt to deliver the package; so, he left me a “notice of arrival” on the door of my apartment. Shortly after looking at the notice that the mailman had left, I realized that he had spelled my name incorrectly. Instead of writing “Christopher” on the notice, he had written “Kristofer.”
Until coming to Spain for the first time several years ago, I never realized quite how challenging it was to spell “Christopher.” Soon after arriving to the country, however, the “complexity” of my name became quite clear to me. In fact, after living in Spain for several years, I think I’ve seen probably just about every spelling of the word “Christopher” imaginable on all types of things ranging from official governmental documents to hotel reservations and pizza delivery orders.
Still, I must say that “Kristofer” isn’t really that far off considering some of the other spellings I have seen. In fact, one time a Spaniard wrote me an email that began with the salutation “Hola Christ.” Obviously, I was flattered that the person writing to me considered me to be the Son of God… until I realized that he was simply trying to abbreviate my name and that “Christ” was just the best abbreviation he could come up with.
I suppose that my name is hard to spell for Spaniards because in Spanish things are spelled phonetically — Spanish people are simply not used to silent letters and ‘ph’ combinations that sound like the letter ‘f.’ It’s probably a cultural thing as well: if my name were something with more “Hispanic Flair” — like Juan or Julio — I’m sure they’d be able to spell it correctly.
Here’s a question for the comments section of this post. If you’re a foreigner in Spain, has your name ever been spelled incorrectly by Spaniards? If you’re a Spaniard, have you ever had your name spelled incorrectly by a foreigner? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Hasta luego,
–Chris
http://abroadinspain.com
hahahah That’s strange because I’m sure most of people in Spain must have heard the name… I mean, it’s not that strange or uncommon… I have a problem with that because my surname has a ñ in it… So when I travel my tickets, hotel reservations etc… never match my DNI… hahahah And another funny thing that happens to spaniards when abroad is that we have 2 surnames and when we fill a form we have to use only one or join both of them with a “-” because if not they tend to think the first one is a second name and they would refer to us as Mr. SecondSurname… and that’s weird…
@Victor – That’s an interesting point about the surname thing. Now that you mention it, the exact opposite happens to me in Spain. I have one surname but a first and middle name… so, here in Spain my middle name is often used as my first surname and my real surname is used as my second surname. So, people here refer to me as Señor MIDDLE NAME instead of referring to me as Señor LAST NAME.
hahahahah See… we all have problems with our names!!! We need a Standard for Names… hahahahha
Just stumbled upon this and have to say that although my name was never butchered during my time in Spain, my roommate’s was (Heather). We all know how the H is supposed to be silent! It sounded like they were calling her “ether.” And we also had a Japanese boy come to live with us and study and his name was Tatsuya. The Starbuck’s people had NO idea what he said when they asked his name and made absolutely no attempt to even write it. Instead, they simply wrote, “Este muchacho” which was quite funny to us! Poor Tatsuya had no clue what was going on as he had just arrived and didn’t speak more than a few phrases of Spanish. :/