Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle: Book 4’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I don't know if one in English normally refer to Hitler’s book as “My Struggle” or its original German name “Mein Kampf”, but at least in Mr. Knausgårds original Norwegian book name “Min Kamp” the reference is very clear.
Perhaps he is trying to reclaim this pattern of words from its association with Hitler? Or maybe he is being deliberately provocative or perhaps ignorant?
So to answers OPs question. Yes, I find the title strange (it is pretty controversial). But also, the title is descriptive and relevant (my opinion).
Full disclosure: I am huge fan of Knausgård :)
One of his good friend when talking about this, mentioned that it'd be more appropriate for him to title the book then "My Struggle". (Everyday mundane life is a battle field. Inside, we are all more neurotic than we all present to other people? Retreating to a refuge as Peronist regime is more a fantasy when our personal Stalingrad already happened, when what is inevitable and predictable: standing on the Berlin Furtherbunker stage when the curtain falls.)
His editor initially said that it'd be impossible. But after a few weeks, recanted his decision and went ahead with the book title.
While ‘å’ was made an official letter in Norwegian in 1917, it's still common to see “aa” spellings of names, and “aa” and “å” spellings are considered equivalent (fun when sorting, since ‘å’ is the last letter of the Norwegian alphabet).
The first time I was credited in the foreword of a book published in the US my name was spelled with "\x" instead of "ø".
And it could have been worse. I could have been asian or persian. In which case my name would most likely have many westernized representations.
Worry about something of substance.
Firstly, people and places are still named with "aa" rather than "å". They aren't simply spelled alternatively depending on the mood or the keyboard of the writer. So it seems that, since they deliberately choose one over the other, they care whether it is spelled in a certain way.
Secondly, we make a distinction between whether someone is named "Christian" or "Kristian", for example. According to your logic, it wouldn't matter since there is no difference except spelling between these two names. But it does.
Do you have any authoritive source (linguistic, or etiquette) that says that such names can be spelled however the writer feels like?
Usage is authority. Write the way you feel it should be written, read with the intent of comprehension, nothing more. Relax and move on to more worthwhile causes.
Please follow the HN guidelines:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Do you think I have a hard time understanding that the intent in this case is to use "aa" as a substitute for "å"? Let me put your mind at ease: I get, and got, that intent. I am not so inexperienced with reading or writing foreign words that I haven't noticed that one sometimes takes some liberties with spelling words using one's own characters, as long as the meaning is clear. My concern is more about whether it is proper to do that with names. Specifically, Norwegian names.
What I choose to do when I can't input some name because of foreign characters is to copy paste it when I need it. That might be tedious, but at least it doesn't require any sophistication.
Yes. This is common all over the place. Nobody really cares.
Source: I'm Norwegian.
EDIT: >Secondly, we make a distinction between whether someone is named "Christian" or "Kristian", for example. According to your logic, it wouldn't matter since there is no difference except spelling between these two names. But it does.
Well, thats a strawman as i read it. You can't compare "normal" names and names with special letters in them. It does not really make sense. Some systems, that does not use Unicode as an example, would have no problems with "Kristian", but "Knausgård" might bring problems. Thus you write "Knausgaard". This also applies to street names, town and other words.
As i said, this is quite common in Norway. Nobody really minds it at all.
> Source: I'm Norwegian.
As you've probably guessed, as am I. So then we have two apparent Norwegians (me and uer haakon) who cares. So maybe "somebody cares", after all? :)
> Well, thats a strawman as i read it. You can't compare "normal" names and names with special letters in them. It does not really make sense.
Right, normal with scare quotes. What is that supposed to mean? So then, "Ch" is not "special" compared to "å" simply because of some technical limitation? Because "å" is somewhat distinct to the Scandinavian languages? Why is "Christian" and "Kristian" normal, distinct names, while the use of "aa" does not produce distinct names? In fact, as you can see in this thread, some people name their child "Håkon", others name them "Haakon". "aa" is not simply something you throw in as a replacement for "å" in names.
This is a Danish example, but so be it: Many Danish places have gone over to using "aa" instead of "å". So this was a deliberate decision, not simply "we just spell it however we want". They had to make a decision. In constrast, Språkrådet[1] of Norway does apparently not want to do the same for places like "Ålesund", for example. So at least as far as Språkrådet is concerned, the use of "å" or "aa" in names does matter and they consider them to be distinct "characters". Not simply shallow pseudo-typographical conventions.
"Ch" is not really a (compound) character in the Norwegian language, as in Norwegian words (outside of, perhaps, loan words). And yet, we respect people's names enough to call people who are "Christian" as "Christian"; not "Kristian". Did people who named their child "Christian" miss the "k" letter on their keyboard? Most likely not. Yet they chose that spelling, and we respect that.
[1] http://www.nrk.no/norge/_-ikke-stedsnavn-med-aa-i-norge-1.70...
> As i said, this is quite common in Norway. Nobody really minds it at all.
Yes, your idea that your experiences totally overrides and eclipse my own ("nobody really minds at all") was noted the first time.
Um. Yes? Precisely?
Like it or not, ASCII is not gone yet.
With personal names, I've usually gone by what the person themselves does when they write in English. It's quite common for people to use a different spelling in their "English" professional life. Sometimes this is å->aa, other times it is even just å->a. In this case, Knausgård appears to spell his own name as Knausgaard when writing in English, so it doesn't seem disrespectful to me if people writing about him in English spell his name the same way he has it printed on the cover of his own English-edition books.
Or is perhaps the issue that the linguistic side-track is about a non-English language, on an English speaking site, and so is judged to be too off topic? In that case all I can say is that is completely on me if only that initial mention was enough to be too off topic. But it is only partly on me when considering the whole discussion, since discussions take on a life on their own. Especially when they turn out to be somewhat controversial. :)
Also kudos to amazon for handling the query 'Knausgård' solidly - this may be common place but its the first I've needed it. 'http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
Edit: I would add that I'd like to know more about how cases like this would be handled automatically - account lookup would need to find both spellings depending on how it was entered? Are the extended characters allowed in usernames? I've seen forum confusion where accounts were spoofed by slightly off unicode letters, ex. 'Α' (Greek U+0391) and 'A' (Latin, U+0041).
Caveat: "proper" in English is somewhat loose, as writers can and do "properly" break the "rules" of English.
As an English writer I have two problems of politeness to you. One is spelling your name properly. Another is conveying to my readers how to pronounce your name properly. If I use the likes of "Knausgård", my readers haven't got much idea how to pronounce that. If I extend those principles to, say, Bengali or Chinese names, they'll have no idea at all.
Unicode certainly opens new questions. But you won't get very far acting as if the answers are obvious.
> Whether, in the age of Unicode, it _should_ be, is another question.
Characters like this aren't so exotic that the relatively new prolifeteration of the Unicode standards have made them possible to type and render - 8-bit ASCII contains "æøå". Not to mention all the other text encodings that at the least try to incorporate characters from Western European languages (Norwegian in this case being Western European).
Though I guess "disagreement" between text encodings about what is "å" has long been an issue, in a more cross-platform setting.
> As an English writer I have two problems of politeness to you. [...] Another is conveying to my readers how to pronounce your name properly.
I'd say that that is a lost cause in the written medium, across languages. No matter how you choose to write this particular name, American readers are probably going to be confused as to how to pronounce it. And if they think they've got a good idea, they are likely to be wrong. But that doesn't have to detract from the reading experience, since you don't have to "think out loud" words that you read. And I don't think that how the readers think the name is pronounced[1], in their own minds, is a matter of politeness to the owner of the name.
If the pronouncication of the name is important in some context, the writer can always try to write out what the phonetic equivalent would be, using syllables from English words. And then you're again free to write the name in the original, "proper" way throughout the text.
[1] "knaws-goard"? :)
(I guess the difference between a/å in Norwegian is something like path/all in British English? Does either of the transliterations really convey that?)