Tuesday, February 20, 2007

My Name

Hi there!

I'm the guy behind the new vb compiler for Mono and my name is Rolf Bjarne Kvinge.  Yeah, that's right, you're probably not going to be able to pronounce it unless you know some scandinavian language (not even my wife can). And for the record: I have one first name (Rolf), one middle name (Bjarne) and one last name (Kvinge). Especially people from the Spanish-speaking world think I have one first name and two last names (it probably comes from the fact that in Spain everyone gets two last names, one from the father and one from the mother, and if you have only one, it's sort of like you don't know who is your father...).

You have no idea how many ways I've seen my name spelled and pronounced (and even though I really think my first name is really easy to spell), though Raulf Jarve is one of the better ones (you'd think journalists would spend more time on checking these kind of things, but this one obviously didn't - if google returns 2 (two) results for it something should tell you there's something wrong).

When I was living in Brazil they pronounced my name something like "Houlfi", in Argentina/Spain it's like "RRRRRRolf", in English it's with the English "R", it's only the French that is able to pronounce my first name more or less the way I do in Norwegian... and here in Spain I normally have to spell even my first name for them to be able to pronounce it (normally it will be either turn out Raul, Ralph, Rodolfo or Rudolf otherwise), but then they normally get it right.

Regarding my middle name and my last name I've learnt that it's completely useless to try to teach anyone how to pronounce them, so just call me Rolf, ok?

8 comments:

  1. hehehe nobody is able to pronounce my name (Everaldo), including my father and mother :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bah! You think you have it hard? Try going through life as a programmer named Asbjørn Ulsberg! No one outside of Scandinavia is able to pronounce any of them even remotely close to right. Spelling it turns out to make it even less understandable. "Aye - ess - bee - jay - oh - are - enn" -- "Assborn?". I have a bit of luck in that Björn Borg is a rather famous tennis player, but the "As" prefix is lost on most people. It comes out as "Ass" no matter how I present it to them.

    Well. Enough about names, let's get some juicy programming posts from you soon, ok? :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. My name, Lars (a quite normal scandinavian name), when pronounced properly, it means "corpse" in Hindi and related languages, so I normally go for the normal english pronounciation when I speak with people from India etc. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Lars Arge is a danish employee at Duke University..... L.Arge is a good name, and besides, it matches the pronounication of the first name as well.

    Good work, Rolf!

    Salduos de Noruega

    ReplyDelete
  5. Bjarne = Bear.

    So that could just call you Rolf Bear. :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. I can pronounce it, and thanks for making our name more famous!

    ReplyDelete
  7. I can pronounce it, and I thank you for advancing the cause of Kvinge's everywhere!

    Dan Kvinge
    Minneapolis, MN, USA

    ReplyDelete